ICT-based or ICT-centric? Embodiment and Cognition in a Service Recovery of a Web Service Encounter

Through a logbook-based self-observation of an ICT-based service journey, the failure and the co-created recovery of the ICT-based service encounter is analysed. The analysis shows the limitations of both traditional affordances-based analyses of user interaction, as well as Dourish’s (2001) ‘embodied interaction’ framework. Two new categories of service encounters are subsequently suggested: 1) ‘cognitively dominated service encounters’ that characterizes types of service encounters where the customer’s reasoning plays a central part in the service encounter, and 2) ‘ICT-centric’ service encounters that are determined by the inner structure of the ICT ‘material’ to the extent that the customer must adapt to logic of the ICT-system.