Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication [Paperback]

Summary:
Keep in mind that the title of the book is Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication. The majority of the book is the 'plans and situated actions' part.

The basic idea of the book is that humans don't really function using plans. Plans, as the author defines them, are something akin to diagrams for behavior, explicating specific activities. Instead, the author argues that humans behave based on 'situated actions'. Situated actions are, "the view that every course of action depends in essential ways upon its material and social circumstances. Rather than attempting to abstract action away from its circumstances and represent it as a rational plan, the approach is to study how people use their circumstances to achieve intelligent action." (p. 50).

In other words, people have a goal in mind. To achieve their goal, people may or may not set up a plan (the author discusses how this could be culturally relative, but I think this is a weak point in her argument because she doesn't really do a good job of distinguishing one type of plan from another), but what is important is that in trying to achieve their goal they are placed in situations that determine their actions. This could also be said: people behave in specific situations based upon the factors that affect the situation.

Let me give an example... Let's say your goal is to get to the dentist. You set up a 'plan' for getting to the dentist prior to leaving. Your plan would include a calculation of the time and the route and your mode of transportation. The situated action approach would say that you can only understand the individual's behavior in terms of their actions in specific situations. So you get in your car and on the way to the dentist's office you run into a detour due to construction. If you had to follow your plan, you couldn't make it to the dentist. But when you leave the road and find an alternate route, this behavior is only understood in terms of situated action. Does that explain it? Wow, and it only took me a few paragraphs.

The author discusses plans and situated actions in terms of conversations, cognitive science, ethnomethodology, and a whole bunch of other theoretical perspectives and technical jargon. In the end she finally gets to the human and machine communication. This is also where the book begins to get interesting. She studied how people interacted with copy machines that were trying to give people instructions. Her studies, undoubtedly helped the people at Xerox figure out ways to improve their copy machines and instructions for them. Like I said above, the last chapter and the conclusion are the most interesting parts of the book. Skip the rest and read them.

My Comments:
For someone so concerned with understanding how people communicate this book is horribly written and nearly unintelligible. The first six chapters are theory and examples of the theory that are completely unrelated to machines. The book finally gets to human and machine interaction after nearly one hundred pages of inchoate theory. And the human and machine interaction stuff isn't really all that interesting - especially since it predates the 1990s, is talking about interaction with copying machines, and has nothing to do with computers.

The author should have chosen a specific approach and then stuck to it. Perhaps she could have tripled the length of the book and gave clear and understandable explanations of the theories (though I am pretty much convinced after having read the book that this would be impossible because of the author's writing style) and used examples that applied only to human and machine interaction. Or she could have just jumped into her findings that dealt with human and machine interaction. The first approach could have been 'dumbed down' to make the book readable by the general public. The second approach could have served a more academic market.

The book reads something like a doctoral dissertation (it very well may be one, I don't know) in that she gives some information on each theory, but not really enough to give someone a good understanding of it - something like a literature review - and cites examples of research that are completely unrelated to the topic of the book to illustrate the theories . The she presents her methods, results, and conclusion.

I guess my problem is that I was expecting a book that would actually be enjoyable to read, interesting, and would focus on human and machine communication. If that is what you are looking for, look somewhere else. This book is nearly impossible to understand. I read the book for a graduate level course in Ethnomethodology and I didn't really understand it very well. By no means am I an expert in Ethnomethodology, but I'm pretty sure I know more about it than probably 95% of the world's population (keep in mind I don't know very much at all), so I'm pretty confident most people would find this book nearly impossible to decipher.

. Absolute certainty is impossible and the quest for it is costly and futile. Instead of trying to overcome the uncertainty that is in the world, the system designer should embrace it and use it as a tool to solve the problems that it creates.

This is a book that should be read by anyone who has set the task for themselves of developing any system that must function in an uncertain environment. In short this is a book that should be read by anyone who is developing a system that will have to function within the real world