Plans and Situated Actions

What Hacker News says

1. EdwardCoffinAug 2024
   This passage particularly struck me: He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported. “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”

   On a related note, I'd like to highly recommend Lucy Suchman's work, mentioned in this article as Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, but the updated version now called Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. The new version has several extra chapters and some other revisions. I've read it several times, and had my mind blown each time.

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2. humanistbotApr 2021
   Reminds me of Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions" --- an anthropological study of plans and planning, which also has a lot of implications for AI. Resonances to that famous Eisenhower quote "Plans are nothing, planning is everything"

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342380.Plans_and_Situate...

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3. cdentFeb 2013
   I have to say I disagree with the author's value assertion. It may true that people do treat computer interfaces in a social way, but whether this is useful (for many difference definitions of useful) is clearly open to debate. I wrote a paper about this a few years ago that pins the popularity of the idea of the computer as interactive artifact on Lucy Suchman and her work Plans and Situated Actions. The relevant paragraph is here: http://peermore.com/astool.html#nid21T (take off the fragment for the whole paper).

   If we're actually having some kind of debate about how to signifiy in an interface I'd probably choose "profile" and forego "my" and "your" as they imply a relationship that does not exist and a facility in the interface that is not possible.

   Given that most people aren't actually concerned about that and just want their stuff to be "nice" or "friendly" I'd pick one of "your" or "my", whichever fit in the grammar of the rest of the system, and be consistent.

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