Moving into interaction—Social practices for initiating encounters at a help desk

•Unacquainted persons deploy a range of resources to enter into focused encounters.•Openings are accomplished through a range of sequentially organised embodied moves.•The convergent trajectories of prospective co-participants are delicately negotiated.•The body, space and material objects are drawn on to engender an institutional focus.•Participants co-ordinate entry into an F-formation out of which an encounter unfolds.

Opening an interaction is a crucial step in establishing and maintaining social relationships. In this paper we describe how participants in an institutional setting, a help desk counter for exchange students at an international university, literally move into interaction. This is accomplished through a range of publicly available and sequentially organised movements in space. These steps are highly systematic and are open to participants’ ongoing negotiation of the situation at hand. Secondly, the paper describes how participants in and through their bodily movements, the use of space and the manipulation of material objects ‘embody the institution’. The paper adds to the growing field of multimodal conversation analytic work on space, mobility and objects in interaction as resources for participants’ ongoing sense-making practices.