What do you think?
Rate this book
Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions
This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.
328 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2006
29 people are currently reading
258 people want to read
About the author
Lucy A. Suchman
3 books9 followersLucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.
Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary war fighting, including problems of ‘situational awareness’ in military training and simulation, and in the design and deployment of automated weapon systems. At the center of this research is the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world. Suchman is a member of International Committee for Robot Arms Control[3] and the author of the blog dedicated to the problems of ethical robotics and 'technocultures of humanlike machines'.
Before coming to Lancaster, she worked for 22 years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, where she held the positions of Principal Scientist and Manager of the Work Practice and Technology research group. While at PARC, she conducted an influential ethnographic study, using video, of office workers struggling to use a copy machine, today often referred to as one of the first instances of corporate ethnography.
Suchman is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining her BA in 1972, MA in 1977, and Doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 1984. While at Berkeley, she wrote her dissertation on the work practices of accountants. She studied procedural office work to understand how it was similar to and different from a program, assumptions around the work, and how the work informed the design of these systems.
Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary war fighting, including problems of ‘situational awareness’ in military training and simulation, and in the design and deployment of automated weapon systems. At the center of this research is the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world. Suchman is a member of International Committee for Robot Arms Control[3] and the author of the blog dedicated to the problems of ethical robotics and 'technocultures of humanlike machines'.
Before coming to Lancaster, she worked for 22 years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, where she held the positions of Principal Scientist and Manager of the Work Practice and Technology research group. While at PARC, she conducted an influential ethnographic study, using video, of office workers struggling to use a copy machine, today often referred to as one of the first instances of corporate ethnography.
Suchman is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining her BA in 1972, MA in 1977, and Doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 1984. While at Berkeley, she wrote her dissertation on the work practices of accountants. She studied procedural office work to understand how it was similar to and different from a program, assumptions around the work, and how the work informed the design of these systems.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
Read
February 19, 2023I saw Lucy Suchman present at 4S on a panel with a fellow student in my program, and this is really silly, but it made me really happy to see it. Suchman’s paper was really good, and she mentioned the Zapatistas too, which is an easy way to seduce me intellectually into liking your work.
This book was fairly different from what Suchman presented at 4S, though her critical remarks on someone presenting on robot butler competitions was fairly relevant, and she finds those types of engineering projects ridiculous.
I feel like this book would be of interest to engineers and UI/UX people, though some of it feels dated. Many of the issues she discusses in the book are very relevant to problems I worked on while working in engineering (especially when designing various HMI systems), things like “sensitivity to the user’s expectations regarding acknowledgment of input; systems that resolve ambiguity in English input from the user through questions.” These sorts of concerns plagued my projects (because there seems to be so much variation in the way people do interact with these systems). However, all this was not work I personally enjoyed and so this was not among my favourites from my comps lists that I’m working through at the moment.
Suchman’s focus seems to largely be computers, and I am more interested in human interactions with 19th century industrial machinery. Questions like whether it is a useful goal to have a “gracefully interacting system” communicate in a manner as human-like as possible seem like a question that is no longer as meaningful to ask anymore, as it seems designers have already made up their mind with respect to that (though whether ChatGPT or Siri are actually human-like in practice is still an open question? Definitely have found interacting through Siri or a self-checkout machine frustrating, in a way I very rarely if at all feel when interacting with humans).
A lot of the problems that emerge between human-machine interactions are of a psychological or semantic nature. Throughout the book, Suchman has these tables with users on the left and the machine on the right, and under each of these actors are columns asking what is available to the machine or user and what is not available to the machine or user. Again something that’s actually quite useful for an engineer or systems designer, though not as intriguing for me as a reader with the research preoccupations I have now. There is also some stuff on AI development and MIT’s AI lab. Suchman’s approach is largely anthropological, and she situates her work and her disciplinary and methodological interests in this way:
“The original text perhaps shows some peculiarities understandable only in light of my location at the time of its writing. In particular, I was engaged in doctoral research for a Ph.D. in anthropology, albeit with a supervisory committee carefully chosen for their expansive and nonprogrammatic relations to disciplinary boundaries. Although the field of American anthropology in the 1980s was well into the period of “studying up,” or investigation of institutions at “home” in the United States, my dissertation project (with the photocopier as its object, however enhanced by the projects of computing and cognitive science) stretched the bounds of disciplinary orthodoxy. Nonetheless, I was deeply committed to my identification as an anthropologist, as well as to satisfying the requirements of a dissertation in the field.”
Perhaps my favourite section was when Suchman wanders into a little section on theory and discusses subjects and objects through the work of Sara Ahmed, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Mauss, and others:
“It is at this point that recent critical writings on subjects, objects, and relations between them become relevant for rethinking interactions between humans and machines. In Strange Encounters, for example, Sara Ahmed develops a critique of the figure of “the stranger” by extending Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism (as the substitution of an enigmatic object for the social relations of labor) to include fantasy as well as materiality or a “fetishism of figures” (2000: 4). Among other moves, Ahmed argues, this form of fetishism involves cutting off a figure from the histories of its determination through particular, embodied encounters. The figure is treated as “having a nature,” as being something that is and that has effects, rather than as an effect in itself. Ahmed’s interest is not only in how such figures are produced but also in how they are put to work in particular times and places, including the labor that the fetishized figure conceals. In an argument from a very different domain, but with strong resonances to Ahmed’s, Gell (1998) has explored the “enchantment” of objects brought about through the masking of labors of production. Like Taussig, Gell starts from Walter Benjamin’s proposal that mimetic practices, resulting in a plethora of images and simulacra, are based in a compulsion to imitate the world as a means of gaining access to it (see Gell 1998: 100; Taussig 1993: 20). Rejecting the idea of mimesis as a “primitive faculty” inherited from the past, Gell and Taussig adopt the category of mimesis as the more particular production of figures whose salient property is their resemblance to an original. They then use the concept to analyze a range of practices of magic and sorcery and their associated artifacts. Gell traces the history of this form of object enchantment back to Tylor, who, in Primitive Culture (1875), defined primitivism in terms of animism or the attribution of life and sensibility to inanimate things, as well as to Frazer (1900), Malinowski (1935), and Mauss (1902, 1954) in their studies of magic and the efficacy of objects in relations of exchange. Mauss’s theories of exchange, in particular, consider how gifts act as extensions of persons and inspire Gell’s theory of the agencies of art and of artifacts more generally. Artifacts are, by definition, Gell proposes, those objects taken to be instruments or outcomes of social agency. A found object like a stone, placed on a mantelpiece, becomes an art object and an artifact, indexing the agency of its finding and placement. At the same time, the enchanted object’s effects are crucially tied to the indecipherability of prior social action in the resulting artifact.”
“Taussig (1993) takes as his focus what he characterizes as “the two- layered notion of mimesis that is involved [in Benjamin’s analysis] – a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (1993: 21). From this he develops a critique of Frazer’s typology of sympathetic magic into the two categories of “imitation” and “contact, ” arguing that the two are always intertwined in practice. These observations call out the importance of the particular materialities of objects to their efficacy, however much the latter is also based in ephemeral and intangible imaginings. Indeed, by this analysis the two aspects – embodied, sensuous contact and magical efficacy – are inextricably intertwined. Developed with respect to fetish figures made of wood, this analysis is richly suggestive for thinking about the computationally powered artifacts of contemporary AI and robotics. A more general characteristic of object fetishism in an age of commodity capitalism, the entanglement of sensuous corporeality and apprehension of the liveliness concealed within things has particular resonance in the case of humanlike machines.”
There’s other theoretically engaged writing that I know most people would find irritating, but I enjoy this sort of stuff:
“From his consideration of new media art, Chesher proposes the concept of avocation to describe the arrangements and affordances through which persons are hailed to enter into a particular technological assemblage to become incorporated as integral actants in an associated form of sociomaterial agency. These include not only instrumental possibilities but also multiple and uncertain ways in which “new media art distracts and summons its users.” Invocation involves those actions that define the terms of engagement written into the design script or discovered by the participating user, the calling up of events that effect changes to the assemblage. And finally, evocation describes the affective and effective material changes that result; transformations that in turn comprise the conditions of possibility for subsequent avocations. Together these terms articulate the distinctive dynamics of computing and the modes of engagement that it makes possible. The latter are characterized by what Chesher names a form of “managed indeterminacy,” effected not only by databases and central processing units but crucially by “the peripherals that are in contact with materiality” that opens out from the boundaries of the machine narrowly construed. Offered in part as replacements for the more familiar terms input, processing, and output, these new “primitive technocultural formations” expand the space of interaction from the interface narrowly defined to the ambient environments and transformed and transformative subject– object relations that comprise the lived experience of technological practice.”
Another excerpt that discusses nonhuman agency in terms of machines (drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work again on ‘difference’), and asking to what extent machines and humans are distinct (which I know irritates Marxists like Stuart Newman, and can be obfuscating, but makes up so much of what STS is about):
“Casper proposes that discussions of nonhuman agency need to be reframed from categorical debates to empirical investigations of the concrete practices through which categories of human and nonhuman are mobilized and become salient within particular fields of action. And in thinking through relations of sameness and difference more broadly, [Sara] Ahmed (1998) proposes a shift from a concern with these questions as something to be settled once and for all to the occasioned inquiry of “which differences matter, here?” (ibid.: 4). In that spirit, 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 or difference between them are enacted on particular occasions, and with what discursive and material consequences.”
Anyway, I have so many more comps books to finish, I am getting worried!
This book was fairly different from what Suchman presented at 4S, though her critical remarks on someone presenting on robot butler competitions was fairly relevant, and she finds those types of engineering projects ridiculous.
I feel like this book would be of interest to engineers and UI/UX people, though some of it feels dated. Many of the issues she discusses in the book are very relevant to problems I worked on while working in engineering (especially when designing various HMI systems), things like “sensitivity to the user’s expectations regarding acknowledgment of input; systems that resolve ambiguity in English input from the user through questions.” These sorts of concerns plagued my projects (because there seems to be so much variation in the way people do interact with these systems). However, all this was not work I personally enjoyed and so this was not among my favourites from my comps lists that I’m working through at the moment.
Suchman’s focus seems to largely be computers, and I am more interested in human interactions with 19th century industrial machinery. Questions like whether it is a useful goal to have a “gracefully interacting system” communicate in a manner as human-like as possible seem like a question that is no longer as meaningful to ask anymore, as it seems designers have already made up their mind with respect to that (though whether ChatGPT or Siri are actually human-like in practice is still an open question? Definitely have found interacting through Siri or a self-checkout machine frustrating, in a way I very rarely if at all feel when interacting with humans).
A lot of the problems that emerge between human-machine interactions are of a psychological or semantic nature. Throughout the book, Suchman has these tables with users on the left and the machine on the right, and under each of these actors are columns asking what is available to the machine or user and what is not available to the machine or user. Again something that’s actually quite useful for an engineer or systems designer, though not as intriguing for me as a reader with the research preoccupations I have now. There is also some stuff on AI development and MIT’s AI lab. Suchman’s approach is largely anthropological, and she situates her work and her disciplinary and methodological interests in this way:
“The original text perhaps shows some peculiarities understandable only in light of my location at the time of its writing. In particular, I was engaged in doctoral research for a Ph.D. in anthropology, albeit with a supervisory committee carefully chosen for their expansive and nonprogrammatic relations to disciplinary boundaries. Although the field of American anthropology in the 1980s was well into the period of “studying up,” or investigation of institutions at “home” in the United States, my dissertation project (with the photocopier as its object, however enhanced by the projects of computing and cognitive science) stretched the bounds of disciplinary orthodoxy. Nonetheless, I was deeply committed to my identification as an anthropologist, as well as to satisfying the requirements of a dissertation in the field.”
Perhaps my favourite section was when Suchman wanders into a little section on theory and discusses subjects and objects through the work of Sara Ahmed, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Mauss, and others:
“It is at this point that recent critical writings on subjects, objects, and relations between them become relevant for rethinking interactions between humans and machines. In Strange Encounters, for example, Sara Ahmed develops a critique of the figure of “the stranger” by extending Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism (as the substitution of an enigmatic object for the social relations of labor) to include fantasy as well as materiality or a “fetishism of figures” (2000: 4). Among other moves, Ahmed argues, this form of fetishism involves cutting off a figure from the histories of its determination through particular, embodied encounters. The figure is treated as “having a nature,” as being something that is and that has effects, rather than as an effect in itself. Ahmed’s interest is not only in how such figures are produced but also in how they are put to work in particular times and places, including the labor that the fetishized figure conceals. In an argument from a very different domain, but with strong resonances to Ahmed’s, Gell (1998) has explored the “enchantment” of objects brought about through the masking of labors of production. Like Taussig, Gell starts from Walter Benjamin’s proposal that mimetic practices, resulting in a plethora of images and simulacra, are based in a compulsion to imitate the world as a means of gaining access to it (see Gell 1998: 100; Taussig 1993: 20). Rejecting the idea of mimesis as a “primitive faculty” inherited from the past, Gell and Taussig adopt the category of mimesis as the more particular production of figures whose salient property is their resemblance to an original. They then use the concept to analyze a range of practices of magic and sorcery and their associated artifacts. Gell traces the history of this form of object enchantment back to Tylor, who, in Primitive Culture (1875), defined primitivism in terms of animism or the attribution of life and sensibility to inanimate things, as well as to Frazer (1900), Malinowski (1935), and Mauss (1902, 1954) in their studies of magic and the efficacy of objects in relations of exchange. Mauss’s theories of exchange, in particular, consider how gifts act as extensions of persons and inspire Gell’s theory of the agencies of art and of artifacts more generally. Artifacts are, by definition, Gell proposes, those objects taken to be instruments or outcomes of social agency. A found object like a stone, placed on a mantelpiece, becomes an art object and an artifact, indexing the agency of its finding and placement. At the same time, the enchanted object’s effects are crucially tied to the indecipherability of prior social action in the resulting artifact.”
“Taussig (1993) takes as his focus what he characterizes as “the two- layered notion of mimesis that is involved [in Benjamin’s analysis] – a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (1993: 21). From this he develops a critique of Frazer’s typology of sympathetic magic into the two categories of “imitation” and “contact, ” arguing that the two are always intertwined in practice. These observations call out the importance of the particular materialities of objects to their efficacy, however much the latter is also based in ephemeral and intangible imaginings. Indeed, by this analysis the two aspects – embodied, sensuous contact and magical efficacy – are inextricably intertwined. Developed with respect to fetish figures made of wood, this analysis is richly suggestive for thinking about the computationally powered artifacts of contemporary AI and robotics. A more general characteristic of object fetishism in an age of commodity capitalism, the entanglement of sensuous corporeality and apprehension of the liveliness concealed within things has particular resonance in the case of humanlike machines.”
There’s other theoretically engaged writing that I know most people would find irritating, but I enjoy this sort of stuff:
“From his consideration of new media art, Chesher proposes the concept of avocation to describe the arrangements and affordances through which persons are hailed to enter into a particular technological assemblage to become incorporated as integral actants in an associated form of sociomaterial agency. These include not only instrumental possibilities but also multiple and uncertain ways in which “new media art distracts and summons its users.” Invocation involves those actions that define the terms of engagement written into the design script or discovered by the participating user, the calling up of events that effect changes to the assemblage. And finally, evocation describes the affective and effective material changes that result; transformations that in turn comprise the conditions of possibility for subsequent avocations. Together these terms articulate the distinctive dynamics of computing and the modes of engagement that it makes possible. The latter are characterized by what Chesher names a form of “managed indeterminacy,” effected not only by databases and central processing units but crucially by “the peripherals that are in contact with materiality” that opens out from the boundaries of the machine narrowly construed. Offered in part as replacements for the more familiar terms input, processing, and output, these new “primitive technocultural formations” expand the space of interaction from the interface narrowly defined to the ambient environments and transformed and transformative subject– object relations that comprise the lived experience of technological practice.”
Another excerpt that discusses nonhuman agency in terms of machines (drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work again on ‘difference’), and asking to what extent machines and humans are distinct (which I know irritates Marxists like Stuart Newman, and can be obfuscating, but makes up so much of what STS is about):
“Casper proposes that discussions of nonhuman agency need to be reframed from categorical debates to empirical investigations of the concrete practices through which categories of human and nonhuman are mobilized and become salient within particular fields of action. And in thinking through relations of sameness and difference more broadly, [Sara] Ahmed (1998) proposes a shift from a concern with these questions as something to be settled once and for all to the occasioned inquiry of “which differences matter, here?” (ibid.: 4). In that spirit, 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 or difference between them are enacted on particular occasions, and with what discursive and material consequences.”
Anyway, I have so many more comps books to finish, I am getting worried!
August 27, 2024
From the outset, let me say that I did not read this book in complete detail. I was more interested in getting a sense of its general arguments and insights as this is seen as a groundbreaking contribution in the academic field of science and technology studies.
The introduction begins quite forcefully: "My aim in this book is to rethink the intricate, and increasingly intimate, configurations of the human and the machine" (p. 1). One of Suchman's central interests is how human-machine configurations are enacted: "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 or difference between them are enacted on particular occasions, and with what discursive and material consequences." (p. 2). This, at least, is the book's introduction in the 2007 edition.
The introduction to the 1987 edition, on the other hand, stays closer to the empirical study which Suchman then devised: "In this book I examine an artifact built on a planning model of human action. The model treats a plan as something located in the actor's head, which directs his/her behavior. In contrast, I argue that artifacts built on the planning model confuse plans with situated actions and recommend instead a view of plans as formulations of antecedent conditions and consequences of action that account for action in a plausible way" (p. 31). These two sentences, in my reading, constitute the main insight provided in this book: in moments of interaction between humans and machines, humans may come with pre-conceived plans about how to interact with any given machine, but these plans in no way determine the ensuing action. Instead, plans always only serve as partial resources that may orient an action, but are never executed in a perfect fashion. Instead, humans engage in what Suchman calls "situated actions", which I would loosely describe as a way of acting that is cognizant of the contingencies/circumstances of a given activity - and hence leads humans to either drop or modify the plans with which they have come to this activity. This contrast between plans and situated actions leads to fundamental issues in human-computer interaction insofar as the design of machines - at least at the time of writing, 1987 - is completely dominated by and based upon a planning model of human behavior. This leads to breakdown and failure in the communication between humans and machines. And this is the entire point of the book: an empirical analysis, grounded in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, of how humans interact with a printing machine at a larger organization, that lays bare such breakdowns in human-machine communication.
Chapter four provides a brief genealogy of interactive artifacts; more precisely, of the emergence of conceptualizing the relation between humans and machines as one of 'interaction'.
Chapter 5 explains how most researchers in AI locate "the organization and significance of human action in underlying plans" (p. 51). This also entails an elucidation of cognitive science approaches. The issue with this way of approaching plans is the following: "plans are a constituent of practical action, but they are constituent as an artifact of our reasoning about action, not as the generative mechanism of action" (p. 60). In other words, when actually acting, we often don't have any explicitly formulated plans; plans are rather constructed as-needed (ad-hoc) and often post-hoc.
Chapter 6 elucidates situated actions "which underscores the view that every course of action depends in essential ways on its material and social circumstances" (p. 70). This chapter also contains an interesting coverage of ethnomethodological theory: "ethnomethodology grants commonsense sociological reasoning a fundamentally different status"; "Rather than being resources for social science to improve on, the 'all things being equal' typifications of commonsense reasoning are to be taken as social science's topic" (p. 76). Thus, the question for ethnomethodology is: How is it that the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world is achieved? "Ethnomethodology locates that achievement in our everyday situated actions, such that our common sense of the social world is not the precondition for our interaction but its product." (p. 77).
Chapter 7 provides an analysis of human face-to-face communication; essentially highlighting its complexity and situatedness. For example, silences are part of human communication rather than absences of it. Context is crucial to understanding human face-to-face communication; conversation is moreover seen as "ensemble work" (p. 87). Moreover, the remedying of trouble and continual repair are essential to human communication. That is, once a misunderstanding occurs, all parties to a conversation will immediately do their best to remedy this.
While chapter 8 recounts the case and methods, chapter 9 gets to the actual empirical analysis, whose cental insights I already outlined above. Quite telling is also the quote Suchman uses to start the chapter with: "Interaction is always a tentative process, a process of continuously testing the conception one has of...the other" (Turner, 1962). This is a tedious and difficult chapter. Essentially, its analysis boils down to the observation that there occur communicational troubles between human and machine that cannot be solved easily because there exists a crucial difference between human-machine and human-human interaction. One such difference, for example, is the computer's inability to respond to situated action to the same extent that the human can.
The conclusion ties together these insights, containing a nice sentence: "For situated action, however, the vagueness of plans is ideally suited to the fact that the detail of intent and action must be contingent on the circumstantial and interactional particulars of actual situations. Given this view of plans, namely as resources for action rather than as controlling structures, the outstanding problem is not to improve on them but to understand what kind of resouce they are. [...]plans are representations or abstractions over action" (p. 183).
In addition, chapter 15 on "Reconfigurations" contains an interesting analysis that will be relevant for all those interested in STS. Essentially, Suchman urges STS scholars to remain attentive to the ways in which agencies are sociomaterially enacted AND to the ways in which boundaries between humans and machines are delinated. Haraway, Barad, and Butler serve as crucial tools. "Butler's argument that sexed and gendered bodies are materialized over time through the reiteration of norms is suggestive for a view of technology construction as a process of materialization through a reiteration of forms" (p. 272). I will quote a little more from the chapter's final passages: "First, it demands attention to the question of frames, of the boundary work through which a given entity is delineated as such" (p. 283); "and it requires locating it as well within an always more extended network of relations, arbitrarily - however purposefully - cut through practical, analytical, and/or political acts of boudary making" (p. 284); Barad: "We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping" (p. 285). In closing: "Responsibility on this view is met neither through control nor abdication but in ongoing practical, critical, and generative acts of engagement." (p. 286).
Before turning to some criticisms, I should highlight that perhaps - almost 40 years after the book's initial publication - I am simply unable to see its grandeur for what it was at the time. What I understand as the book's central insight - that there occur breakdowns in the interaction between humans and machines because humans act according to situated actions rather than plans - seems so intuitive in this day and age. So, at some level, I was a little disappointed by the banality of this insight. What is more, I simply find ethnomethodological analyses to be somewhat frustrating with regard to their insistence on empirical and conversational analysis. Why even report on these findings instead of simply upload the video of the empirical analysis? Lastly, I feel like the book's writing would have greatly benefited from a bit more argumentative front-loading; that is, from a more concrete exposition of its central task and insight.
I recommend this book if you are interested in better understanding the genealogy of science and technology studies, ethnomethodology, or human-computer interaction (HCI). Moreover, I particularly enjoyed its refreshing thoughts on the contingencies of how human-machine boundaries are enacted. I do not recommend this book if you are looking for groundbreaking insights into human-machine interaction.
The introduction begins quite forcefully: "My aim in this book is to rethink the intricate, and increasingly intimate, configurations of the human and the machine" (p. 1). One of Suchman's central interests is how human-machine configurations are enacted: "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 or difference between them are enacted on particular occasions, and with what discursive and material consequences." (p. 2). This, at least, is the book's introduction in the 2007 edition.
The introduction to the 1987 edition, on the other hand, stays closer to the empirical study which Suchman then devised: "In this book I examine an artifact built on a planning model of human action. The model treats a plan as something located in the actor's head, which directs his/her behavior. In contrast, I argue that artifacts built on the planning model confuse plans with situated actions and recommend instead a view of plans as formulations of antecedent conditions and consequences of action that account for action in a plausible way" (p. 31). These two sentences, in my reading, constitute the main insight provided in this book: in moments of interaction between humans and machines, humans may come with pre-conceived plans about how to interact with any given machine, but these plans in no way determine the ensuing action. Instead, plans always only serve as partial resources that may orient an action, but are never executed in a perfect fashion. Instead, humans engage in what Suchman calls "situated actions", which I would loosely describe as a way of acting that is cognizant of the contingencies/circumstances of a given activity - and hence leads humans to either drop or modify the plans with which they have come to this activity. This contrast between plans and situated actions leads to fundamental issues in human-computer interaction insofar as the design of machines - at least at the time of writing, 1987 - is completely dominated by and based upon a planning model of human behavior. This leads to breakdown and failure in the communication between humans and machines. And this is the entire point of the book: an empirical analysis, grounded in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, of how humans interact with a printing machine at a larger organization, that lays bare such breakdowns in human-machine communication.
Chapter four provides a brief genealogy of interactive artifacts; more precisely, of the emergence of conceptualizing the relation between humans and machines as one of 'interaction'.
Chapter 5 explains how most researchers in AI locate "the organization and significance of human action in underlying plans" (p. 51). This also entails an elucidation of cognitive science approaches. The issue with this way of approaching plans is the following: "plans are a constituent of practical action, but they are constituent as an artifact of our reasoning about action, not as the generative mechanism of action" (p. 60). In other words, when actually acting, we often don't have any explicitly formulated plans; plans are rather constructed as-needed (ad-hoc) and often post-hoc.
Chapter 6 elucidates situated actions "which underscores the view that every course of action depends in essential ways on its material and social circumstances" (p. 70). This chapter also contains an interesting coverage of ethnomethodological theory: "ethnomethodology grants commonsense sociological reasoning a fundamentally different status"; "Rather than being resources for social science to improve on, the 'all things being equal' typifications of commonsense reasoning are to be taken as social science's topic" (p. 76). Thus, the question for ethnomethodology is: How is it that the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world is achieved? "Ethnomethodology locates that achievement in our everyday situated actions, such that our common sense of the social world is not the precondition for our interaction but its product." (p. 77).
Chapter 7 provides an analysis of human face-to-face communication; essentially highlighting its complexity and situatedness. For example, silences are part of human communication rather than absences of it. Context is crucial to understanding human face-to-face communication; conversation is moreover seen as "ensemble work" (p. 87). Moreover, the remedying of trouble and continual repair are essential to human communication. That is, once a misunderstanding occurs, all parties to a conversation will immediately do their best to remedy this.
While chapter 8 recounts the case and methods, chapter 9 gets to the actual empirical analysis, whose cental insights I already outlined above. Quite telling is also the quote Suchman uses to start the chapter with: "Interaction is always a tentative process, a process of continuously testing the conception one has of...the other" (Turner, 1962). This is a tedious and difficult chapter. Essentially, its analysis boils down to the observation that there occur communicational troubles between human and machine that cannot be solved easily because there exists a crucial difference between human-machine and human-human interaction. One such difference, for example, is the computer's inability to respond to situated action to the same extent that the human can.
The conclusion ties together these insights, containing a nice sentence: "For situated action, however, the vagueness of plans is ideally suited to the fact that the detail of intent and action must be contingent on the circumstantial and interactional particulars of actual situations. Given this view of plans, namely as resources for action rather than as controlling structures, the outstanding problem is not to improve on them but to understand what kind of resouce they are. [...]plans are representations or abstractions over action" (p. 183).
In addition, chapter 15 on "Reconfigurations" contains an interesting analysis that will be relevant for all those interested in STS. Essentially, Suchman urges STS scholars to remain attentive to the ways in which agencies are sociomaterially enacted AND to the ways in which boundaries between humans and machines are delinated. Haraway, Barad, and Butler serve as crucial tools. "Butler's argument that sexed and gendered bodies are materialized over time through the reiteration of norms is suggestive for a view of technology construction as a process of materialization through a reiteration of forms" (p. 272). I will quote a little more from the chapter's final passages: "First, it demands attention to the question of frames, of the boundary work through which a given entity is delineated as such" (p. 283); "and it requires locating it as well within an always more extended network of relations, arbitrarily - however purposefully - cut through practical, analytical, and/or political acts of boudary making" (p. 284); Barad: "We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping" (p. 285). In closing: "Responsibility on this view is met neither through control nor abdication but in ongoing practical, critical, and generative acts of engagement." (p. 286).
Before turning to some criticisms, I should highlight that perhaps - almost 40 years after the book's initial publication - I am simply unable to see its grandeur for what it was at the time. What I understand as the book's central insight - that there occur breakdowns in the interaction between humans and machines because humans act according to situated actions rather than plans - seems so intuitive in this day and age. So, at some level, I was a little disappointed by the banality of this insight. What is more, I simply find ethnomethodological analyses to be somewhat frustrating with regard to their insistence on empirical and conversational analysis. Why even report on these findings instead of simply upload the video of the empirical analysis? Lastly, I feel like the book's writing would have greatly benefited from a bit more argumentative front-loading; that is, from a more concrete exposition of its central task and insight.
I recommend this book if you are interested in better understanding the genealogy of science and technology studies, ethnomethodology, or human-computer interaction (HCI). Moreover, I particularly enjoyed its refreshing thoughts on the contingencies of how human-machine boundaries are enacted. I do not recommend this book if you are looking for groundbreaking insights into human-machine interaction.
May 23, 2023
The planned character of our actions is not, in this sense, inherent but is demonstrably achieved. It is a reflexive feature of our (inter-)actions insofar as we are able, on an ongoing basis, to indicate (to others and/ or to ourselves) what we are aiming to do and to account for our actions as close enough for all practical purposes to what we had intended.
based anthropologist with cool work on hci in the xerox days.
based anthropologist with cool work on hci in the xerox days.
April 1, 2018
It was part of our coursework in Masters at Goldsmiths. Certainly, it is one of THE books on the HMI and how the technological discourse projects the politics of everyday life into the vision of the future. The book certainly brings some criticism to dichotomic worldview that creates the boundaries between the human and the machine.
May 22, 2017
I got distracted by reading the numerous prefaces and introductions, which made me frustrated by the time I got to the text. But the chapters I did get to were interesting.
January 28, 2020
Oh boy, has it been a long week. There's some good stuff in here, but you have to dig a little (and make it past the photocopier scenarios. Yes, I'm serious.).
Read
January 28, 2021This was the worst book I read in grad school. Totally incomprehensible to me. I just had a terrible flashback seeing it on my purchase history.
May 23, 2024
Gets five stars because I was challenged by the writing but I also had fun! #learningrocks
October 7, 2011
This book was a demanding read, but highly worthwhile. The theory that Suchman lays out in the opening chapters is useful and excellently presented; the empirical section was fascinating and helped me to concretely apply some of the design principles that I had gleaned from The Design of Everyday Things. The intersection of very different disciplines featured here was challenging and productive. And in terms of structure, I wish that all second editions were like this: the introduction and footnotes that clarify ambiguities or express changes in the author's views, the original book still present in recognizable form, the following chapters that bring the book up to date.
As a few other reviewers have pointed out, the real gem here is the original book, which I think is greatly improved by the introduction and notes. One gets the impression that between its publication and the creation of the additional chapters, Suchman forgot how to write. (Or perhaps more fairly, she became accustomed to writing for academic specialists rather than professional generalists.) I don't have much of a background in science and technology studies, so the later chapters seemed to bring up some interesting ideas but were frequently incomprehensible to me. In addition to being thick with jargon, they seemed rather unfocused: they mostly consisted of literature reviews, with some informal observations thrown in that failed to substitute for structured research. It was nice to see Suchman's ideas applied to more contemporary developments, but I don't think readers would suffer a huge loss in sticking to the original edition of the book.
As a few other reviewers have pointed out, the real gem here is the original book, which I think is greatly improved by the introduction and notes. One gets the impression that between its publication and the creation of the additional chapters, Suchman forgot how to write. (Or perhaps more fairly, she became accustomed to writing for academic specialists rather than professional generalists.) I don't have much of a background in science and technology studies, so the later chapters seemed to bring up some interesting ideas but were frequently incomprehensible to me. In addition to being thick with jargon, they seemed rather unfocused: they mostly consisted of literature reviews, with some informal observations thrown in that failed to substitute for structured research. It was nice to see Suchman's ideas applied to more contemporary developments, but I don't think readers would suffer a huge loss in sticking to the original edition of the book.
August 15, 2015
The original text can be a bit dense, and there could be a lot of research and catching up if one is not already familiar with the philosophical concepts and examples the text references. That said, this book represents Shuman's argument well in the way that its content, concepts, philosophy as well as the examples and the documentations of Schman own participatory observation are drawn from many fields and diciplines, which, I think, is considered to be what Suchman calls socialmaterials. Also note that this is supposedly the text that inspired many discussions around situated action, which can provide insights into HCI and UX methodologies. My favorite discourse was in the last chapters where Suchman discuss the differences between her beliefs in "human-machine reconfiguration" and Donna Harawa's re-imagination of such by way of her Cyborgian goddess.
Read
January 14, 2014Weaker than expected.
Suchman's original observation was clever, but lacks good support. The additions in this new version do nothing to strengthen the original results, which is a real pity.
The book left me with the feeling that Suchman got lucky, was in the right place at the right time, and then did not really take the idea and run with it properly. This is more of a "catch the ball then get rid of it as soon as possible" book. Suchman got a clever idea, observed it (seemingly without good observation protocols or follow-up analyses), published it, and went and did something completely different.
Suchman's original observation was clever, but lacks good support. The additions in this new version do nothing to strengthen the original results, which is a real pity.
The book left me with the feeling that Suchman got lucky, was in the right place at the right time, and then did not really take the idea and run with it properly. This is more of a "catch the ball then get rid of it as soon as possible" book. Suchman got a clever idea, observed it (seemingly without good observation protocols or follow-up analyses), published it, and went and did something completely different.
March 16, 2014
Yeah, I'm really going to have to give this book two stars. The original text (her dissertation project, if I remember correctly) was interesting, though perhaps more aptly titled "People Struggling with Copiers." The additions had some interesting discussions but seemed pretty disjoint from the original text, so I would almost have preferred two separate books, one reprint of the original perhaps with the footnotes added and one about cyborg feminism and the interface. I'm being a bit unfair, I suppose, because there was value in this book, and I came away with productive questions.
November 25, 2010
One of the densest texts I've ever encountered. I have an entirely new understanding of how humans engage with each other and machines in the world, however. Synthesizing my ideas about Suchman's book for a paper for Dr. Doty's "Understanding and Serving Users" these next two weeks is going to be migraine-inducing work. Eeeep!!
November 26, 2008
Ugh, her style! But the portion of the book from the original edition is worthwhile.
January 27, 2018
This is the most useful book that I read in preparation for my T-Systems speaking gig. The whole section on human-machine communication also inspired part of my recent conversation on The Well. From interactive artifacts to automata and agency, this book is well structured and does a good job in framing the issues of future human-machine collaboration, interchange and respective references of agency. It is a good read for the human-machine interface designer as well as those looking to understand the broader opportunities for application, both in terms of hardware and software, as well as the workplace, social and ethical implications of advanced thinking machines. I caused a ruffle at the end of my T-Systems presentation by saying that until now we have seen our planet purely from the human perspective and its relevance to human progress and well-being and that from now on as a shared space and narrative, we will need to consider decisions from both the human's and thinking machine's perspective, where they have a shared responsibility. Self-powered, self-generating, self-conscious thinking machines will likely develop their own means of dealing with this issue.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews