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)
Second Edition: Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2007
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)
- The turn to so-called situated computing notwithstanding, the basic problems identified previously -briefly, the ways in which prescriptive representations presuppose contingent forms of action that they cannot fully specify, and the implications of that for the design of intelligent, interactive interfaces - continue to haunt contemporary projects in the design of the "smart" machine. (p.3)
Readings and Responses
- I took as my focus the question of interactivity and assumptions about human conversation within the field of AI, working those against the findings that were emerging in sociological studies of face-to-face human conversation. The main observation of the latter was that human conversation does not follow the kind of message-passing or exchange model that formal, mathematical theories of communication posit. Rather, humans dynamically coconstruct the mutual intellegibility of a conversation through an extraordinarily rich set of embodied interactional competencies, strongly situated in the circumstances at hand (the bounds and relevance of which are, in turn, being constituted through that same interaction). (p. 10)
- Suchman noticed that when observing users she, herself, as a competent interactant could often identify their troubles with the machine. She then asked herself how could it be so, and discovered that "the machine could only perceive that small subset of the users' actions that actually changed its state... it was as if the machine were tracking the user's actions through a very small keyhole and them mapping what it saw back onto a prespecified template of possible interpretations (p. 11)
- The results of this analysis was a renewed appreciation for some important differences - more particularly asymmetries - between humans and machines as interactional partners and for the profound difficulty of the problem of interactive interface design. (...) My analysis, in sum, located the problem of human-machine communication in continued and deep asymmetries between person and machine. (p.11)
- The expert help system offered to solved the user's troubles with the machine seemed to have worked, Suchman notes, but for very peculiar reasons: "it exploits certain characteristics of human conversation in ways that encourage attributions of interactivity to machines by their human interlocutors. At the same time, those attributions belie the profoundly different relations of person and machine to the unfolding situation and their associated capacities to interact within and through it. So the machine's users will read instructions offered by an expert help system as comments on the activity underway that should be intelligible, a strategy that proves extremely powerful for moving things along. (p. 12)
- Human interaction succeeds to the extent that it does, however, due not simply to the abilities of any one participant to construct meaningfulness but also to the possibility of mutually constituting intelligibility, in and through the interaction. This includes, crucially, the detection and repair of miss- (or different) understandings. And the latter in particular, I argued, requires the kind of presence to the unfolding situation of interaction not available to the machine. (p. 12)
- NOTE SUCHMAN'S QUOTTING OF SCHEGLOFF ON INTERACTIVITY IN "READING AND WRITING"
- My observation continues to be that although the language of interactivity and the dynamics of computational artifacts obscure enduring asymmetries of person and machine, people inevitably rediscover those differences in practice (p.13)
