ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of ongoing research into hearing. It offers a characterization of skilled practitioners from an ethnomethodological (EM) perspective. The skilled practitioner in question is a generic hard of hearing person. The ambition is that such a characterization, both in its making and its final state, an intrinsic part of design practices concerning the development of hearing aids. The data consists mainly of self-reflective observations of, mostly, my own practices as a mundane hard of hearing person. Breaching experiments are thus one ethnomethodological technique for making observable the fine ordering of everyday practices. The chapter proposes that the situation of living and communicating in a household, or more generally sharing a space with someone, is easily recognizable as a mundane bit of everyday life. The principles for space negotiation (PSN) concern the negotiation of space between sound source and designated hearer, a negotiation that, when successful, supplies sound loud and clear enough to make sense of.
