Activity Theory and Information Systems
The application of activity theory to information systems derives from the work of Bonnie Nardi and Kari Kuutti. Kuutti's work is addressed below. Nardi's approach is, briefly, as follows: Nardi saw activity theory as "...a powerful and clarifying descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity... Activity theorists argue that consciousness is not a set of discrete disembodied cognitive acts (decision making, classification, remembering), and certainly it is not the brain; rather, consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do."{Nardi, 1996} Nardi also argued that "activity theory proposes a strong notion of mediation—all human experience is shaped by the tools and sign systems we use." Furthermore, she identifies "some of the main concerns of activity theory: consciousness, the asymmetrical relation between people and things, and the role of artefacts in everyday life."{Nardi, 1996} She explained that "a basic tenet of activity theory is that a notion of consciousness is central to a depiction of activity. Vygotsky described consciousness as a phenomenon that unifies attention, intention, memory, reasoning, and speech..."{Nardi, 1996} and "Activity theory, with its emphasis on the importance of motive and consciousness—which belongs only to humans—sees people and things as fundamentally different. People are not reduced to 'nodes' or 'agents' in a system; 'information processing' is not seen as something to be modelled in the same way for people and machines."{Nardi, 1996}
Nardi argued that the field of Human-Computer Interaction has "largely ignored the study of artefacts, insisting on mental representations as the proper focus of study" and activity theory is seen as a way of addressing this deficit.
In a later work, Nardi et al. in comparing activity theory with cognitive science, argue that "activity theory is above all a social theory of consciousness" and therefore "... activity theory wants to define consciousness, that is, all the mental functioning including remembering, deciding, classifying, generalising, abstracting and so forth, as a product of our social interactions with other people and of our use of tools." For Activity Theorists "consciousness" seems to refer to any mental functioning, whereas most other approaches to psychology distinguish conscious from unconscious functions.
Read more about this topic: Activity Theory
Famous quotes containing the words activity, theory, information and/or systems:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Osteopath—One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found in the heads of those who believe it.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.”
—Marilyn Butler (b. 1937)
“Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)