Plans and Situated Actions
From Jsarmi
Lucy Suchman, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987
Contents |
Introduction
This book is about
Interactive Artifacts
What is interaction
Plans
And the "planning model"
Situated Actions
Communicative Resources
Case and methods
Human-machine communication
Conclusion
Follow-up: Reading and Writing (Journal of the Learning Sciences)
Follow-up: Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Citation
Preface
Suchman presents a series of vignettes as a sort of "extended epigraph" in order to "frame" the book and introduce its themes:
- The irreducibility of lived practice, embodied and enacted
- The value of empirical investigation over categorical debate
- The displacement of reason from a position of supremacy to one among many ways of knowing in acting
- The heterogeneous sociomateriality and real-time contingency of performance
- The new agencies and accountabilities effected through reconfigured relations of human and machine
(p. xii)
Introduction
The question for this book shifts from one of whether humans and machines are the same or different to how and when the categories of human or machine become relevant, how relations of sameness and difference between them are enacted on particular ocassions, and with what discursive material consequences. (p. 2)
Almost two decades after the publication of the original text, and across a plethora of subsequent projects in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the questions that animated my argument are as compelling, and I believe as relevant, as ever. My starting point in this volume is a critical reflection on my previous position in the debate, in light of what has happened since. (p. 2)
