Bannon and Bodker

Another brilliant discussion about the limitations of the cognitive psychology approach to HCI.

"...It seems like we have to take the use process, and not the artefact, as the central object of our study. The way cognition is viewed in human activity theory is socially and historically situated, and it is tied to the physical conditions in which it takes place. Whatever action a human being makes in the world, this action is mediated by artefacts. In this view, the study of mediation becomes central to HCI".

Engerström (1987) look at change processes in organizational settings says that “the reason for someone to want a change is a contradiction between this person’s activity and the surrounding activities” (:244). He suggests studying contradictions between tools currently in use and the object created and the norms of the praxis and the division of work. He gives the example of a secretary who wants to do a better layout for a document and ends up using paper and glue, for the non existence or her lack of access to advanced designing tools.

These contradictions, he claims, may explain why the artefact may not work, which we wouldn’t have found out just by analysing the steps in the actual process (by doing a task analysis, for example). If we had just looked at the use of the word processor, nothing would have come up as “wrong”, because the processor would have been used anyway. What the AT framework provides is a wider look into the system. Engerström argues that “artefacts are used differently from original intentions, and that is why the need for new artefacts arise”: