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Human-Machine Reconfigurations Lucy Suchman

Human-Machine Reconfigurations By Lucy Suchman

Human-Machine Reconfigurations by Lucy Suchman


Summary

This 2007 book provides a way of understanding how human actions and technological artifacts are intertwined. The author shows how leading edge technologies can rest on very old-fashioned assumptions, while more modest initiatives suggest innovative approaches to technology design and use.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations Summary

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman

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.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations Reviews

' 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

About Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. She is also the Co-Director of Lancaster's Centre for Science Studies. Before her post at Lancaster University, she spent 20 years as a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Her research focused on the social and material practices that make up technical systems, which was explored through critical studies and experimental and participatory projects in new technology design. In 2002, she received the Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research in Science, Technology and Medicine.

Table of Contents

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.

Additional information

NPB9780521675888
9780521675888
052167588X
Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman
New
Paperback
Cambridge University Press
2006-12-04
328
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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