Using Social Practice Theory to investigate the practice of reading literary fiction, with a view to finding spaces for innovation.
The challenge
A London based innovation strategy consultancy challenged us to use Social Practice Theory as a framework to investigate the practice of reading. Social Practice Theory (SPT) is used to analyze practices by categorizing elements of the practice into “tools/stuff”, “skills/ behaviours” and “stories/images”, highlighting the relationships between them.
Project story
We initially surveyed the vast practice of “reading” to find a focus for our research. We chose to focus on “literary fiction” because it is an established reading practice with a deep history, and as such, may act well as a lens on the parent practice.
First we sent out an email questionnaire, and used the responses to fine-tune the interview protocol for in-person interviews, and an evening with a local reading group. In addition, we sent out two dScout missions to our participants; one about what they were reading, and one about what they felt about what they were reading.
Talking to people: We specifically designed interview questions that spoke to each SPT category, e.g: Tools / stuff - Do you have any preference for physical books or e-books? Where do you store your readings? Skills / behaviors - How do you normally find good reads? Stories / images - Do have any feelings about the importance of “high culture” in our society?
Making sense of the data: Interviews and email responses were collated into hot reports from which we drew themes and metaphors. The themes and metaphors led us to determine a number of sub-practices (sharing, finding, storing…) allowing us to categorize our stories.
Applying Social Practice Theory: Stories were plotted onto a matrix - private / social (behavior/space) v.s digital / physical (tools/books) - which helped to reveal the innovation space. Our aim then was to illuminate the issues surrounding each sub-practice in it’s innovation space (e.g Sharing in Social / Digital) by applying SPT to the stories within it.
On completing the same analysis of all sharing stories in the social / digital space, we found similar frustration; tools that do not fully allow readers to do what they want with books, and an image of sharing books and literature that is based in the past. With more time, recommendations and ideas for design would have been explored.
Physical vs digital observations
Looking for themes and metaphors
Plotting readers stories on a matrix
Applying Social Practice Theory (click to enlarge)
Skills & learnings
Key learnings
- After many confusions (is searching for books on your own in front of your computer “private”, or is it “social” because you are searching good reads.com?) we managed to get Social Practice Theory to work, but still have questions... (how to account for time?).
- We were introduced to The Pyramid Principle at the end, and found it to be almost another sense-making process that would have been valuable to do if planned for from the outset.
My contribution
All three of us took part in project planning, desk research, recruiting, protocol writing and interviewing. Using SPT as an analysis tool happened through lively debate. I created our final report structure and written content.
