Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design |  | Authors: Victor Kaptelinin, Bonnie A. Nardi
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Media: Paperback
Pages: 345
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0262513315
Dewey Decimal Number: 004
EAN: 9780262513319
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Product Description
Activity theory holds that the human mind is the product of our interaction with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity. Acting with Technology makes the case for activity theory as a basis for understanding our relationship with technology. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi describe activity theory's principles, history, relationship to other theoretical approaches, and application to the analysis and design of technologies. The book provides the first systematic entry-level introduction to the major principles of activity theory. It describes the accumulating body of work in interaction design informed by activity theory, drawing on work from an international community of scholars and designers. Kaptelinin and Nardi examine the notion of the object of activity, describe its use in an empirical study, and discuss key debates in the development of activity theory. Finally, they outline current and future issues in activity theory, providing a comparative analysis of the theory and its leading theoretical competitors within interaction design: distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and phenomenologically inspired approaches.
Acting with Technology series
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| Customer Reviews:
A Fantastic Book for Activity Theory January 24, 2008
Yang Li (Seattle, WA)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
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