Human-Machine Reconfigurations

Plans and Situated Actions

Lucy Suchman• Professor of Anthropology of

Science and Technology at Lancaster University

• Xerox PARC for 22 years investigating and describing relations between human action and system design

• Selected Areas of Significance – Computer-Supported Cooperative Work– Participatory Design of Computer Systems– Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Themes

• Irreducibility of lived practice, embodied and enacted• The value of empirical evaluation 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.

Questions for Exploration

• Not whether humans and machines are the same or different

• How and when the categories of human and machine become relevant?

• How relations of sameness or difference between them are enacted on different occasions?

• What are the material and discursive consequences of these similarities and differences?

Problems Identified are Still There

• Prescriptive representations presuppose contingent forms of action that they cannot fully specify

• Implications for the design of intelligent, interactive interfaces

• Human-machine communication is only through the set of actions that actually change computer’s state

• Radical asymmetries in relative access of user and machine to contingencies of situation limit possibilities for interactivity

Readings and Responses

• The story:– Feature-rich copier is hard to use. – Problem is not due to user characteristics. Making

sense of a new artifact in inherently problematic. – No matter how good design is, there is still the

need for active sense-making. – New supportive design still challenged technically-

savy users.

Misinterpretations of Situated

• Nonrepresentational – Rodney Brooks used this to argue against symbolic representations– But situatedness is the use of knowledge of the

current, unanticipated context to aid in the selection of action.

– There is no presumption about which data models (the representation) or reasoning techniques are used as part of that process. They can be based on pattern recognition and machine learning or they can be based on Simon’s symbol systems.

Misinterpretations of Situated

• Predetermined – Vera compares the ant to the navigator and decides ant is truly situated as it acts purely based on its present situation– This argument is similar to Simon’s description of

humans as simple as long as we do not include long-term memory

– But situatedness is describing how humans opportunistically recognize and act on features of their environment based on their knowledge, including their knowledge of culturally and historically constituted resources.

Misinterpretations of Situated

• Spontaneous/improvisational – action without plans (this is echoed by Vera and Simon)– Closely related to last interpretation– But plans are resources for situated action, just

not the sole determination of action– Plans and situated actions are not independent

when discussing human action– Donald Schoen’s “reflection in action”• Unselfconscious action interleaved with reflective

thought

Vera/Simon vs. Suchman• Central claim of “hard” situated action

– Vera and Simon interpretation:• “that behavior can only be understood

in the context of complex real-world situations”

– Suchman’s meaning:• “that behavior can only be understood in its relations with real-world

situations”

• Point is that the meaning behind an action relies on the context and the effect of the action on that context– Behavior is done “in reflexive relation to circumstances that are

themselves in the process of being generated, through the same actions that they in turn work to make comprehensible”

Communication about Action

• Book is less about how an action is chosen than how parties communicate about and understand action– “there is (still) no evidence for the achievement of

conversation between humans and machines in the strong sense that we know it to go on between humans.”

• Interaction is about communication– Thus, this is a problem for Computer-Human

Interaction generally

Preface to 1st Edition

• European and Trukese navigators– Caricatures of plans and situated action

• Interpretations– Cultural differences in purposeful action– Nature of activity and level of expertise– However planned, purposeful actions are inevitably situated

actions• Talk vs. walk, plans are also explanations of action generated for

communication

• The caricature of western navigation is “reified in the design of intelligent machines”