Acting with technology: Activity theory and interaction design

By Victor Kaptelinin, Bonnie A. Nardi. First Monday, 2006

1,422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Activity theory holds that the human mind is the product of our interaction with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity. Acting with Technology makes the case for activity theory as a basis for understanding our relationship with technology. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi describe activity theory's principles, history, relationship to other theoretical approaches, and application to the analysis and design of technologies. The book provides the first systematic entry-level introduction to the major principles of activity theory. It describes the accumulating body of work in interaction design informed by activity theory, drawing on work from an international community of scholars and designers. Kaptelinin and Nardi examine the notion of the object of activity, describe its use in an empirical study, and discuss key debates in the development of activity theory. Finally, they outline current and future issues in activity theory, providing a comparative analysis of the theory and its leading theoretical competitors within interaction design: distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and phenomenologically inspired approaches. Acting with Technology series

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d408ceadf2d019fe3b88d555b12ddfc4c6c4051

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Citations in the corpus

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Exploring a Theory to Inform Practice and Research (2014, background): “…care (Sundet, 2010), strategizing and managing organizational processes (Blackler, Crump, & McDonald, 1999, 2000), designing digital technologies (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006), tracing the computerization of architectural design (Groleau, Demers, Lalancette, & Barros, 2012), developing public…”
Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming (2009, methodology): “Drawing from cultural historical activity theory (e.g., Engeström, 1987; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Nardi, 1996), Thorne (2003, 2005, 2009) applied a variation of this argument to processes of Internet tool socialization and have described research illustrating that technologies mediate…”
Improving the learning of newly qualified teachers in the induction year (2011, background): “The focus is on activity that is enacted to bring about systemic rather than simply individual change - though internalised individual change may be one consequence (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006).”
Digital Innovation (2018, background): “Practices are carried out by humans who skillfully and purposefully conduct activities using their brains, bodies, and material objects to satisfy their needs and intentions (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2009).”
Why hasn't technology disrupted academics' teaching practices Understanding resistance to change through the lens of activity theory (2008, methodology): “…what Kaptelinin and Nardi call metafunctional competencies , which ‘‘enable [the subject’s] understanding of how to use functional organs (such as knowing tricks and work-around), recognizing their limitations, and knowing how to maintain and troubleshoot them’’ (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, p. 218).”
Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (2012, background): “A third way of explaining cross-disciplinary collaboration through objects is offered by Cultural Historical Activity Theory, a tradition stemming from the work of Vygotsky and Leont’ev (Engeström 1987; Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006; Leont’ev 1978).”
When Does Technology Use Enable Network Change in Organizations? A Comparative Study of Feature Use and Shared Affordances (2013, background): “A growing number of studies have shown that one technology can support multiple affordances, and, consequently, that each member of the same social group can enact a different afford-ance or set of affordances when using the same technology (Davern et al. 2012; Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006).”
Work System Theory: Overview of Core Concepts, Extensions, and Challenges for the Future (2013, background): “…as it is expressed in the use of technology", It is based on the following tenets: an emphasis on human intentionality, the asymmetry of people and things, the importance of human development, and the idea of culture and society as shaping human activity (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, pp. 9-10).”
Strategy and PowerPoint: An Inquiry into the Epistemic Culture and Machinery of Strategy Making (2011, methodology): “Instead, it is worth examining how people act with technology, where the relationship between people and artifacts is one of mediation (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006; Orlikowski 2007).”
An activity theory-based model for serious games analysis and conceptual design (2015, background): “Typically, the activity is realized by a sequence of actions, each of which may not be directly related to the motive (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006; Devane and Squire, 2012).”