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 technicallysavy 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”