In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of fal-sificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (howwe come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’(how we test them). However, when studying human interac-tion, separating these contexts can lead to theories with lowecological validity that do not generalize well to life outsidethe lab. We propose borrowing research practices from for-mal inductive methodologies during the process of discover-ing new regularities and analyzing natural data without beingled by theory. From the perspective of experimental psychol-ogy, this approach may appear similar to the ‘questionable re-search practice’ of HARKing (Hypothesizing After The Re-sults are Known). We argue that a carefully constructed formof HARKing can be used systematically and transparently dur-ing exploratory research and can lead to more robust and eco-logically valid theories.

This workshop is aimed at giving human interaction re-searchers the conceptual and practical apparatus to balancetheir representations of data (mixes of drawings and pho-tographs in the most part), so as to “maximally incite, but alsoconstrain” their representations, just as artists sometimes suc-ceed in doing (Streeck, Grothues, & Villanueva, 2009, p.28).Why—as Streeck points out—are the drawings and visuali-sations of interaction researchers so halting and timid, com-pared to the ways artists have responded to the same kinds ofrepresentational problems? Are these heavily segmented andsparsely constructed representations of interaction the resultof a prevailing positivistic outlook with regard to representingshared space, where interaction is presented as staggered anddiscrete physical events with apparently little to connect them.The workshop seeks to redress this situation by examining thesolutions that artists have arrived at when representing humaninteraction, and asking participants to engage in a series of ac-tivities and discussions which will re-frame their approachesto this issue.