Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Plans and Situated Actions

This 2007 book is about how human actions and technological artifacts are intertwined.

Lucy Suchman (Author)

9780521858915, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 December 2006

328 pages, 15 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.645 kg

'… a wide ranging and ambitious book,and makes an important contribution to studies of technology, action and agency. … the text remains readable and informative and makes a valuable and important intervention in the field.' British Journal of Sociology

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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Readings and responses
2. Preface to the 1st edition
3. Introduction to the 1st edition
4. Interactive artifacts
5. Plans
6. Situated actions
7. Communicative resources
8. Case and methods
9. Human-machine communication
10. Conclusion to the 1st edition
11. Plans, scripts and other ordering devices
12. Agencies at the interface
13. Figuring the human in AI and robotics
14. Demystifications and re-enchantments of the human-like machine
15. Reconfigurations
Notes
References.

Subject Areas: Human-computer interaction [UYZ], Ergonomics [TBDG], Sociology [JHB]