Eliciting artefacts: How participants co-construct artefacts as relevant in the social and semiotic organisation of activity

In this paper we focus on artefacts as they are actually mobilised and co-constructed by participants in interaction. By tackling a video-recorded empirical case1 we show how young children make artefacts relevant in the social and semiotic organisation of a baking activity. Our previously designed methodological tool Joint Screen2 allows us to grasp and to visualise the emergent and/or continuous co-constructed relevance of the artefacts in its phenomenological depth in time and space.
In the observed processes the children mobilise various artefacts to realise a task. In our analyses we focus on an illustrated recipe and on the continuously transforming dough as eliciting artefacts. We could observe how the children’s "prior knowledge" about doing using artefacts is situatedly displayed through the mobilisation and transformation of the artefacts.
Analysing the children’s negotiated responsive comprehension of the literacy artefact in its materialization allows us to point out how the artefacts and the children’s multimodal embodied orientations to ‘what is next to do’ are intertwined.
Thus this paper provides an opportunity to present and to discuss the complex mutually co-constructed interrelationship between artefacts and participants in its deepened around view visualisation by Joint Screen.