Task 9 - New Interactive Environments

Put out a post summarising your understanding of activity theory and its potential for describing activity systems.

The concept of activity theory is in my opinion very wide and complicated. As one of my fellow students put it, explaining activity theory is like explaining nature. Activity theory, rooted from the work of a Russian psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, who studied cultural-historical psychology, then developed by his colleague Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev has been developed in many fields of studies.

Leont'ev pointed out that people engage in "actions" that do not in themselves satisfy a need, but contribute towards the eventual satisfaction of a need. Often, these actions only make sense in a social context of a shared work activity. This lead him to a distinction between activities, which satisfy a need, and the actions that constitute the activities.(Wikipedia)

Activity theory has made a great impact on the studies of human-computer interaction as well as in the field of interactive design. I guess these are the fields which would fit in the concept of this course - New Interactive Environments.

Kari Kuuti illustrated the process of activity theory like this:

There is an activity, which leads to the primary goal. In the first case it is building a house. The primary goal is then to have a house. But in order to do the activity, there are different actions involved. In this case fixing the roofing, transport of bricks etc. In order to do the actions, one needs to operate in a ceratin way - hammering etc. The same goes for every activity. Therefore Leont'evs suggestion fits here - people do certain actions which do not achieve a goal, but

contribute towards the actual satisfaction of the need or goal.

Uden, Valderas and Pastor concluded their article by saying "Activity Theory constitutes a valuable tool for analysing software requirements. Furthermore, the use of a task-based Activity Theory model provides Web application developers with a model that allows them to properly specify navigational and organizational requirements." Activity theory helps to understand the human behaviour and therefore helps the software developers, designers and HCI specialists to understand, which operations and actions do people do in order to reach their goal. Activity can be broken down into actions, which are further subdivided into operations. In a design context, using these categories can provide the designer with an understanding of the steps necessary for a user to carry out a task (Nardi, Bonnie A. (1996)).

There have also been some criticism towards this theory. According to Engeström, Aaro Toomela (2000) brought out five main faults in activity theory:

1. It relies on unidirectional instead of a dialectical view of cultureindividual
relationships.
2. It focuses on analyses of activities without taking into account the
individual involved in the activity at the same time.
3. It underestimates the role of signs and the importance of focusing on
sign meaning.
4. It approaches mind fragmentally, without understanding the holistic
nature of mind.
5. It is fundamentally adevelopmental and therefore not appropriate
for understanding emerging phenomena, including mind.

Relying on these faults Toomela also said that activity theory is a dead end for cultural-historical psychology. Engeström overruled his statement and proved him to be wrong, as since the year 2000, the researchers interest in cultural-historical activity theory has risen. Ten years later we are also studying the concept of activity theory, therefore Engeström should be right about that.