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Book Reviews

Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction,Bonnie A. Nardi (ed.), MIT Press 1995, ISBN 0-262-14058-6,Review by Antonio Rizzo and Marco Palmonari.

Activity Theory is the evolution of the cultural-historical approach to psychologydeveloped by Vygotsky at the beginning of this century. Vygotsky’s approach isone of the few psychological theories that try to provide an account of humancognition in evolutionary terms.

Given the relevance of the theory of evolution in almost all the natural sciences,it is surprising how cognitive studies have paid so little attention to the theory ofevolution. Indeed many cognitive theories are scarcely plausible from the point ofview of evolution theory. Nor do they explain why and in what manner humancognition is different from the cognition of non-human primates (Donald, 1991).

Vygotsky not only adopted an evolutionary point of view, but tried to extendthe theory of evolution to account for psychological phenomena. One of the centraltenets of Vygotsky’s position was that every conscious activity is always medi-ated by external tools. So, higher mental processes can be understood only if weunderstand the tools that mediate them. Vygotsky named the process of mediationas the principle of extra cortical organisation of complex mental function. Thedevelopment and the use of tools extend cognitive processing beyond the biolog-ical dimension of the nervous system, giving a crucial role to artificial stimuli inpsychological activity. Such stimuli may be of a cultural or external nature or pro-duced by human subjects themselves. The embodiment of external representationsin psychological activity permits completely new and unpredictable behaviouralpatterns.

For Vygotsky, the creation and use of tools establish a turning point in the phy-logenetic development of the human species. Mediation offers a self-organisingprinciple by which individuals and groups can modify their representations (recur-sively), their own behaviours, and their relationships to one another within groups.Mediating tools allow social processes to become historical, thus greatly alter-ing the very nature of the social processes themselves. Social processes are ofcourse also present in many other species, including primates, but there they lacka historical dimension because of a virtually complete lack of mediating tools.

Some of the strongest evidence for the role of external tools in the evolution ofhigher cognitive functions and the development of social organisation is providedby writing (Ong, 1982). Of the several thousands of spoken languages produced

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in human history, only about 106 have developed an adequate written form soas to produce a literacy. And only the populations with a written language havedeveloped complex social organisations and complex technology.

It is worthwhile to remember that Plato in the Phaedrus maintains, throughSocrates’ voice, that writing is in-human, since it pretends to create outside of themind what in reality can exist only inside the mind. According to this view, writingis a thing, an artifact, that destroys human memory: who uses it will cease toremember, and will have to rely on external resources when internal ones diminish.Writing weakens the mind (so claims Plato). Some thousands of years later wehave people who mistrust tools, e.g., politicians who want to prevent children fromusing calculators in primary school so as not to destroy manual computation. Inthese positions tools are kept apart from human cognition. Their design and useare understood only as interacting or even interfering with human cognition.

Vygotsky and Activity Theory (AT) offer instead quite a different view, a viewin which cognition and artifact are two side of the same coin. Indeed, AT hasalways studied human behaviour starting from the activity and tools used in a givenpractice instead of looking inside the head. Thus AT is in a special position foroffering an integrated framework for studying human interaction with computers.And this is just what the book edited by Bonnie Nardi offers to readers: AT asa unitary framework for HCI for the dissemination of a common vocabulary fordescribing activity that all HCI researchers would share (Nardi, Chapter 1).

As stressed by Nardi in the introduction and by Kutti (Chapter 4), there isan increasing demand for an approach that would allow us to account for levelsof human-computer interaction that are outside the range of traditional cognitivescience (e.g. Card, Moran and Newell, 1983), and that include the contexts in whichinteraction occur, the practices that evolve with use, and the situations specified bysociotechnical conditions. Often to face such issues ad hoc solutions are proposedthat do not allow us to attain a cumulative development of knowledge because, inthe absence of a shared vocabulary, every study is forced to reinvent and redefineprinciples and concepts.

According to the authors of this book, AT has the breadth and strength to supportthe development of a long-lasting integrated framework. It can provide an inter-esting non-reductionist theoretical and methodological framework for developinga more comprehensive unit of analysis in HCI studies. AT helps structure analy-sis without totally prescribing what to look for; it means that we are constantlyreminded in the analysis of the context and the history of the actions and the opera-tions that we are looking at. We are thus prevented from viewing ‘human-machine’interaction in isolation: the object of analysis is the subject’s activity mediated bythe artifacts in a context of use.

To show that this effort is worthwhile, the book is organised in three sections:Part One, where the basics of AT are presented, Part Two, where practical applica-tions of AT are reported, and Part Three, where potential developments within ATare proposed.

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In Part One (Chapters 1–5) the historical development and theoretical princi-ples of AT are presented, using examples from HCI. The treatments by differentauthors yield some different points of view. Two issues are particularly relevant forunderstanding the basic concepts AT promulgates: the model of the structure ofthe activity discussed by Kutti (Chapter 2), and the comparison (Chapter 4) of ATwith two other approaches that differ from cognitive science-oriented HCI, namelysituated action models and distributed cognition.

An extension to the model of the activity developed by Cole and Engestromand frequently mentioned in the book, represents in a simple and direct way themediating relationships among the individual, artifacts and organisation partici-pating in the activity. The originality of the model lies in the attempt to explainhuman activity taking into account factors such as cultural rules and the division oflabour related to the community as well as the culture in which the subject operates.Although these factors are ‘external’ from the unit of analysis traditionally consid-ered, i.e., the human-machine system, they strongly affect the subject’s behaviourand objects.

The benefits resulting from the study of the context in which users work are thestarting point of Chapter 4 by Nardi. If the individual is no longer central, what isthe correct unit of analysis to focus on in system design? And what is context? Thechapter presents an interesting comparison between three approaches to the studyof the context: AT, situated action models and distributed cognition. As the authorpoints out, the centrality of the concept of consciousness, which belong only tohumans, allows AT to deal with the problem of the definition of context. Context isnot an external state, an ‘out-there’ phenomenon; rather, it is created by the subject’sdesire and object; furthermore, AT provides a vocabulary for talking about humanactivity in meaningful subjective terms, giving the necessary attention to what thesubject brings to the situation. Victor Kaptelinin presents six interrelated principlesthat constitutes the basics of AT (Chapter 5). He shows how AT goes beyond simplehuman interaction with a computer to include (i) the context of the activity, (ii) thedevelopment of knowledge while performing an activity, (iii) the individual/socialdimension of an activity (Chapter 3).

Chapters (6–10) in the second part of the book show practical ways to apply ATin HCI. Susanne Bodker (Chapter 7) for instance, presents a study, carried out at theDanish National Labour Inspection Service, on the use of a system that connectsto a central company database. The analysis of the system’s specific use situationswas carried out in two phases. During the first part of the project, interviews andobservations (including videotaping of three different activities) were conductedwith the aim of situating the application in use historically and with respect to theweb of activities where the application was used. The second phase was dedicated tothe analysis of specific use situations following Engestrom’s method of mapping theactivity according to focus shifts and the breakdowns that provide good pointers forunderstanding how the application mediates (or not) the work activity. The methodemployed outlines once more the centrality of consciousness for AT: an artifact

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works well when it allows the user to focus on the real object of his activity andbadly if it does not. The analysis of the breakdowns and the focus shifts carried outin the project have been useful for spotting various kinds of problematic situationsof the artifact’s use.

Rachel Bellamy (Chapter 6) reports on the application of principles derived fromthe work of Vygotsky and from Cole and Engestrom in the design of educationaltechnology for K-12 education. Bellamy’s chapter is particularly interesting fortwo reasons: (i) it represents a case in which the AT approach is used in the wholedesign process of two products (Media Fusion and Dinosaur canyon); (ii) it showshow the design process suggested by AT goes beyond the development of a givenisolated artifact but involves the whole environment where the activity is carriedout.

The other three chapters of these sections present further evidence of the appli-cation of AT in analysing human activity. Ellen Christiansen (Chapter 8) reports ona study of computer use in the Danish criminal investigation division. Arne Raei-thel and Boris Velichkovsky (Chapter 9) describe new methods for investigatingcooperative activity through a small study on e-mail. Bonnie Nardi (Chapter 10)illustrates how the application of AT methods could have facilitated and orientedher previous study on slide production for presentations.

The Chapters of the third part (11–13) explore in depth basic notions andtheoretical extensions of AT. V. Zinchenko (Chapter 12), treats two concepts:functional organs and the relation of internal and external forms (the latter are alsocurrently present in some of conceptual frameworks such as distributed cognition.)Zinchenko explores the topics through an original point of view drawing on awide variety of poetic, artistic, philosophical and scientific sources of Russian andEuropean culture.

Dorothy Holland and James Reeves (Chapter 11), starting from their ethno-graphic study on student programmers, try to provide a social account of the conceptof perspective without arguing that perspective cannot be attributed to individuals.Yrjo Engestrom and Virginia Escalante present in Chapter 13 the story of a designfailure, the U.S. Post Office kiosk ‘Postal Buddy’. Their account of the PostalBuddy story and their own investigation is an attempt to overcome some limita-tions of Bruno Latour’s Action-Network theory by employing principles of AT.This last section of the book is the more difficult and challenging for the readersince it faces the difficult task of extending AT.

The book addresses issues of interest to every practitioner or student dealingwith HCI because, as argued by Nardi in the epilogue, AT weaves together ina single theoretical framework theoretical constructs (dynamic level of activity,intentionally, mediation etc.) that are crucial to an understanding of human activity.Other theoretical frameworks treat these constructs individually or in less rich form;only AT represents a unified approach for handling such a complex phenomenonas human activity mediated by artifacts. However, so far the AT approach seemsto be very useful in problem setting and in the definition of the requirements for

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interactive systems in a specific context (which, by the way, is half the way todesign properly!). Yet the approach does not directly support the translation of therequirements in to the artifact design. It is in this direction in which we wouldlike to see the development of Activity Theory as already stressed by some of theauthors of the book.

References

Card, S. K., T. P. Moran and A. Newell: 1983,The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction.Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.

Donald, M.: 1991,Origins of Modern Mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Ong, W. J.: 1982,Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Authors’ Vitae

Prof. Antonio Rizzoteaches Human-Computer Interaction at the CommunicationScience Department of the University of Siena. He worked at the Human FactorsUnit of the National Research Council – Institute of Psychology in Rome, beforejoining the University of Siena in 1992. He has been involved in research oncognitive ergonomics since mid-eighties by working in several European projectsand as consultant of national industries. His current interests are in the field ofMultimedia Design and Distributed Cognition. In particular, he is concerned withthe design of a Multimedia System for supporting disabled people involved intourism activity; and with the development of an integrated approach for designingsafety-critical applications.

Dr. Marco Palmonariis a cognitive psychologist and currently a PhD student inCommunication Sciences at the Communication Department of the University ofSiena. His current interests include Distributed Cognition and the role of externalrepresentations in human activities. He is specifically concerned with the design ofthe interface of a Multimedia Application for air traffic control.

Case Based Reasoning, by Janet Kolodner and Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1-55860-237-2, 1993, 668 pages, Review by M. Sasikumar.

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is emerging as a significant tool in the developmentof practical applications in many areas. A comprehensive book on the subjectis indeed very welcome at this juncture. The author’s efforts in this respect arecommendable - the book covers almost all aspects of CBR in good detail. And thefact that it is a single-author integrated book, and not an edited collection of papers,lends a welcome coherence, continuity and consistency to the presentation.

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