#ACTIVITY THEORY HOW TO#
How to distinguish activities from non-activities? Can activities be broken down into smaller units? What role does technology play in human activity? To answer these and other similar questions HCI needs a more elaborated concept of activity. In addition, they may be not specific enough. Is there any need for a theory here?Ī problem with intuitive, commonsense notions of activity is that they can be different for different people. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what activities are. Virtually all significant recent developments in interactive technologies - think about, for instance, social media, smartphones, and bookreaders - owe their success to helping us live fuller lives rather than merely supporting new types of tasks. Understanding and designing technology in the context of purposeful, meaningful activities is now a central concern of HCI research and practice. However, with interactive technology becoming a part of our everyday environments the focus on tasks proved to be insufficient. The issues of why a person carries out a task and what the task means to the person were typically outside the scope of analysis, evaluation, and design. Early HCI was predominantly concerned with understanding and supporting tasks, which people do to achieve clear predetermined goals (such as making certain changes in a document). The question can be answered in two steps.Īctivity is currently one of the most fundamental concepts in HCI research (Moran, 2006). Then why does the Encyclopaedia of Human-Computer Interaction feature a chapter on the theory? In other words, Why activity theory? Some of the basic ideas of the theory were formulated before the word "computer" was ever invented.
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This chapter is about a theory that was developed decades ago.