Coordinated note-taking? Making (individual) notes in a social environment

In this paper we study the nature of participants’ orientations to others’ actions in relation to their own. We base our analysis on an activity that may be regarded as somewhat individual: the writing of individual post-it notes while watching a video in a design activity. The paper’s point of departure is the observation that participants frequently write or refrain from writing at the same times. However, the participants’ explicit orientation to one another is quite rare, and more often than not co-occurring writing emerges without any public and visual displays. Assuming ‘order at all points’ we investigate the participants’ practices for managing the cooccurrence of writing and of non-writing, rather than submerse these phenomena as mere coincidence. We argue that participants are perceptually aware of one another and the actions that they each are performing through their peripheral field of vision, and that this constitutes a secondary focus of attention according to which one’s own writing may be arranged. Furthermore, we discuss the extent to which the actions of the participants are sequentially ordered and thus can be thought of as contingent on each other. The paper adds to a discussion of how action formation is accomplished by drawing on various materials in the participants’ perceptual environment.