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The contribution of the
language-action perspective
to a new foundation for
design
Giorgio De Michelis
University of Milano - Bicocca , Milano, ITALY
Understanding Computers and Cognition appeared in 1986, the same year
as the first Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
However, drafts of the book had circulated in the research community some years
before. At the same time, the first CSCW conference was in preparation and laid
the ground for the emergence of CSCW as a research field. Terry Winograd was
both co-author of the book and among the early promoters of the conference,
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where he presented a paper on the same theme as the book (Winograd, 1986): it
was natural for the CSCW community, therefore, to recognize Understanding
Computers and Cognition as a reference point and to discuss it passionately.
The debate began immediately: the Journal Artificial Intelligence published a
review of it by Lucy Suchman (Suchman, 1987b), who strongly argued against
the book's effort to create abstract models of human conversation. The critique
was corroborated by her book, Plans and Situated Actions (Suchman, 1987a),
containing a revised version of her PhD thesis. Plans and Situated Actions also
had a very deep influence on the emerging field of CSCW and, beyond that, it
influenced the larger Human Computer Interaction community.
Many scholars read the two books as champions of two opposing
perspectives: Language-Action, characterizing human conversations from the
action viewpoint and proposing a new type of computer-based system, the
Coordinator, to support the network of commitments the latter creates.; and
Situated Action, bringing forth the irreducibility of human actions and
interactions to any formalized model and arguing against the intrinsic
authoritarian objective of building computer-based systems based on those formal
models.
Other scholars saw the two books as complementary as if they, together,
indicated a new perspective to be criticized or discussed and further developed.
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Let me recall, on this side, the paper by Vera and Simon (1993), discussing both
of them in a radical critique of the Situated Action and cognition perspective.
The debate was re-opened by Lucy Suchman in 1993, at the European
Conference on CSCW in Milano, where she presented her re-consideration of the
Language-Action perspective (Suchman, 1993). Suchman argued that human
action is intrinsically situated, and that producing models of it leads to undue
discipline when it is applied in practice. Her paper has been re-published in the
CSCW Journal, together with a reply by Terry Winograd (Winograd, 1994) ,
where he clarifies the difference between formal comprehensive models of
behavior and formal structures used in communication and recording, and recalls
that speech act theory, like any explicit accounting procedures, enforces a kind of
uniformity that is necessary in any routinized communication. Later, The CSCW
Journal hosted a debate where several scholars commented the debate, liberating
it from being a personal controversy.
My personal research trajectory has been deeply influenced by
Understanding Computers and Cognition and in these twenty years I had several
occasions to return to it and to the work of its authors (e.g.: De Cindio et al.,
1986; De Michelis, 1994; De Michelis, Grasso, 1994) , so it’s for me a pleasure
and a challenge to review it, again.
Twenty years is enough time to look back at a book with new eyes,
discriminating what is no longer of interest from that which remains relevant.
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There are a few ideas whose time has passed. The speech acts
classification, proposed by John R. Searle as a way to characterize the pragmatic
dimension of the language experience (Searle, 1969), has shown its
ineffectiveness in classifying human utterances. Listening to what a person says,
we can recognize in it an illocutionary point – but, if we go back to an utterance
we have heard, we can attribute to it a different illocutionary point. That is,
illocutionary points arise from the interpretation process by the listener and can’t
be considered as an attribute of the utterance we have heard. If we attribute the
illocutionary point to the utterance itself, on the one hand, we reify human
communication, loosing the possibility to really understand the role of the listener
in it, and on the other, we are forced to lose the richness of human communication
where every utterance is opening new possibilities. Even if some studies in
Artificial Intelligence still make use of it, and the scholars participating in the
Language-Action conferences don’t see this point, I think that this part of the
critique of Flores and Winograd’s work has been largely accepted.
The Coordinator, as a system supporting cooperative work, as well as its
successor, Action Workflow, have been interesting prototypes. But while they
allow us to understand the dynamics of human interaction within work processes,
they have neither become best selling systems nor widely diffused standards in
the larger Information Systems domain. The Coordinator’s structuring of human
communication assuming that utterances have a unique unambiguous
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illocutionary point just doesn’t produce more effective communication. And in
the case of Action Workflow, while making commitments explicit helps to deal
with breakdowns, it appears unnecessary when the action flows as expected. The
discussion about their features has not resulted in new ideas becoming part of the
core knowledge of CSCW and HCI. Most of the younger scholars in those fields
probably had no occasion to see and study these systems.
Despite the fact that some key aspects of Understanding Computers and
Cognition had ephemeral or minor impact on the field, there are many things that
still remain important. Let us consider a few of them.
Winograd and Flores dedicate one chapter of their book to hermeneutics,
in particular to the contributions given to it by Martin Heidegger and Georg
Gadamer. They bring the reader to a new understanding of human experience and
of the role of computers in it. It’s a radical shift from the dominant naïve
acceptance of a rationalistic and realistic approach to knowledge of modern
science. Contrary to the common perception of the work, they suggest that the
design of computer-based applications must embody the relational and pragmatic
understanding of human condition that developed in European philosophy of the
twentieth century. In no other scientific disciplines, even when naïve realism was
discussed, had anyone proposed such a radical shift. In computer science the
widely diffused common understanding was, and still is, that science couldn’t
take anything from phenomenology and anti-rationalistic philosophies: Edward
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Feigenbaum, to cite just one example, once defined phenomenology as “cotton
candy” [quoted in Mc Corduck, 1979, p. 197]. After Understanding Computers
and Cognition, a growing number of researchers and designers in areas like
CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing, and Interaction Design, study and discuss
philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean Luc Nancy. In this work, it is clear that grounding
the design of usable applications on a deep understanding of the human condition
is not a superficial and transitory fashion.
The Language-Action perspective, characterizing the interplay between
conversing and acting in human experience, opened a new horizon for the study
of computer-based systems. If our experience gets its sense from the coupling
between actions and conversations, then we must assume that all information is
communication (Winograd, 2006, 72). The ideas of Austin (1962), retain – I
think – their validity. Despite the weakness of the classification built on them by
John Searle, Austin has shown that the illocutionary point of any utterance links it
with (future, present and past) actions. People’s conversations create the social
space of their lives: human beings are immersed in a network of commitments
that define their agenda. Even the Situated Action perspective must look,
therefore, beyond the spatial context of human experience, to its pragmatic
dimension: the network of commitments of a person is, in fact, the logical space
where her future takes its sense.
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Another important idea in the book is that conversations, instead of
messages or speech acts, are the atomic elements of communication. What a
person says in a conversation, in fact, makes reference to what it has been said
before and is not understandable out of its conversational context. Systems
supporting human communication should, therefore, link all the messages within
a conversation, so that users can easily situate any message or speech act within
its context.
Finally Understanding Computers and Cognition proposes a critique of
Artificial Intelligence that goes beyond moralistic caveats and ill-founded
prejudices about technology and offers new research terrains. It’s not the
inadequacy of computers that condemns the most ambitious (and sometimes
arrogant) artificial intelligence programs to failure; rather it’s the irreducibility of
human behaviour to any model. We can’t develop a realistic simulation of human
intelligence that isn’t embodied in a “living system”, but we can dedicate our
efforts to create “intelligent” applications for systems that support situatedness.
The discussion about Understanding Computers and Cognition declined
after the mid nineties, but its influence has continued as shown by two different
books – Paul Dourish’s Where the Action is (Dourish, 2001), and Claudio
Ciborra’s The Labyrinths of Information (Ciborra, 2002). Dourish proposes a
phenomenological foundation for embodied interaction, offering new insights into
the interplay between language and action. The book not only begins its
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presentation of embodied interaction by drawing on the contribution of
Understanding Computers and Cognition, but continues in line with the
theoretical style of their book, grounding its discourse on analysis and design of
computer-based technologies on a careful reading of some texts of the
phenomenological/hermeneutical school of European philosophy.
Claudio Ciborra uses the customer – performer cycle, proposed for the
first time in Understanding Computers and Cognition and later developed in
Action Workflow, to explain the Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
strategy at IBM (where Flores and Winograd’s ideas were taken into account). He
also pays tribute to them for inspiring him to carefully read Heidegger’s
philosophy.
In conclusion, we can say that the biggest contribution that Terry
Winograd and Fernando Flores have given to CSCW, HCI and Interaction Design
is proposing a new research style, bringing new insights on human relationships
and on the role of technologies. It combines direct observation of human
behaviour, avoiding any pre-understanding and prejudice on it, with a careful
reading of phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy, providing a wellfounded theoretical framework for understanding the relational nature of human
experience.
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References
J. L. Austin. How to do Things with Words. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1962.
C. Ciborra. The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.
F. De Cindio, G. De Michelis, C. Simone, R. Vassallo, A. M. Zanaboni. CHAOS
as a coordination technology. In: Proceedings of the First Conference on
CSCW, MCC Austin, 1986.
G. De Michelis. Categories, Debates and Religion Wars. Computer Supported
Cooperative Work: an International Journal, 3.1, 1994, 69-72.
G. De Michelis, M. A. Grasso. Situating conversations within the language/action
perspective: the Milan conversation Model. In: Proceedings of the 5th
Conference on CSCW. ACM New York, 1994, 89-100.
P. Dourish. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001.
P. McCorduck. Machines who think. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, CA, 1979.
J. R. Searle. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.
L. Suchman. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press, New York,
NY, 1987.
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L. Suchman. Review of "Understanding computer and Cognition" by T.
Winograd & F. Flores. Artificial Intelligence. 31, 1987, 227-232.
L. Suchman. Do Categories Have Politics? The language/action perspective
reconsidered. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: an International
Journal, 2.3, 1994, 177-190; a preliminary version of it has been published
in (De Michelis et al., 1993), pp 1-14.
A. H. Vera, H. A. Simon, Situated action: A symbolic interpretation, Cognitive
Science 17, 1993, pp. 7-48.
T. Winograd, A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work,
In: Proceedings of the First Conference on CSCW, MCC Austin, 1986,
203-220.
T. Winograd. Categories, disciplines and social coordination. Computer
Supported Cooperative Work: an International Journal, 2.3, 1994, 191197.
T. Winograd, Designing a new Foundation for Design, Communications of the
ACM, 49/5, 2006, 71-73.
T. Winograd, F. Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, Ablex,
Norwood, 1986.