Customer Reviews

Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design

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Acting with Technology is a great book that introduces Activity Theory to the field of human computer interaction and interaction design. This is a great expansion on "Context and Consciousness"--an earlier book edited by Bonnie Nardi (one of the authors). This new book strengthens two important aspects that were not elaborated on previously. First, the authors talked about Activity Theory not only in a sense of what it is but also "why" it is. As a reader, I benefited by knowing the history and evolution of the theory. In particular, the authors made a great effort to clarify those difficult, elusive concepts such as activities and objects. Second, the book illustrates a collection of design examples that were designed based on or informed by Activity Theory. These examples demonstrated how Activity Theory can be applied in practice to a good extent. As a ubicomp researcher, I see the great value of the theory being able to articulate interaction design for less structural, contextual everyday activities. This top-down, human-need driven approach provides good ingredients to existing ubicomp research. I believe more compelling design examples will emerge as the theory is grasped and employed by researchers and practitioners. To this end, this new book certainly makes a great contribution to explaining this valuable theory to the field. The book is very well written and easy to understand. It should be appealing to many HCI/ubicomp researchers.

As an instructional designer with a starting familiarity with activity theory, I most enjoyed the chapters comparing CHAT with other "post-cognitive" theories - distributed cognition, actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, etc. These sections helped me better understand this theoretical terrain, which I think is hugely important for understanding human activity. Great implications for education, interaction design, and other human studies.

Activity theory differs from distributed cognition and actor-network theory in placing human agency above artifacts and tools - the authors call this an "asymmetry" between human and artificial actors. Activity theory differs from ethnomethodology in its greater use of theory and models and abstractions - something the ethno-methods folks try to avoid.

This is the best intro to activity theory (for theorists) that I'm aware of.