–2–
Object Formulation in the Operating Room:
Pointing Out the Cystic Artery
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in communication studies in the
methods whereby mundane objects acquire meaning within interaction. Various researchers
have documented how the significance of a thing as humorous, problematic, etc. can be
accomplished through particular communicative practices. Streeck (1996), for example,
demonstrated how a particular collection of objects, several boxes of cookies, took on symbolic
significance through the course of a brief segment of interaction among two businessmen. He
proposed that the processes of symbolization occur on a continuum from words to gesture to
physical things, a view that undercuts the traditional semiotic distinction between sign and
signified. In related work, Goodwin (1996) showed how the contents of one video monitor in a
wall-mounted array came to be marked as a ’problem’ in the eyes of a roomful of workers in an
airport control room through an ensemble of interactive talk and work. Similarly, Hutchins and
Palen (1997) described how a flight crew working in a simulator came to attend to and make
sense of the "fuel instrumentation panel," a complex representational artifact comprised of
switches, gauges, and interconnecting graphics. Heath and Hindmarsh (2000) investigated how
workers in a control room for the London Underground were able to bring objects in the
environment to the attention of co-workers. As they observed:
Although the participants confront the scene as a physical reality, which constrains where
and how they look, their actions and interaction constitute that physical reality in a particular
way. The object that forms the focus of the search, and which is discovered and mutually
recognized, is produced and rendered intelligible within the interaction. (p. 88–89)
Heath and Hindmarsh postulated that the relation between the features of the world that
are made transiently intelligible through interaction and the interactional practices by which this
is accomplished are inherently reflexive, a principle they described as the "reflexivity between
Convention