Towards a Network of Practices: Identifying Central Elements to Inform Design

Abstract

For over a decade researchers from the HCI community are taking social practices as a unit of design. While the first generation focused on social practice in isolation, more recent work argues for the interrelatedness of mutually influencing practices as the primary unit of analysis. We discuss these current approaches to motivate the notion of a network of practices. We argue that network theory presents a promising method to create more detailed and sophisticated models of social practices, that raise awareness about central elements and their connecting characteristics. Further on, our work identifies open questions that should be addressed in future work, to increase the benefits of the method.