Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design
ISBN:9780262513319 read summary

Acting with Technology is a great book that introduces Activity Theory to the field of human computer interaction and interaction design. This is a great expansion on "Context and Consciousness"--an earlier book edited by Bonnie Nardi (one of the authors). This new book strengthens two important aspects that were not elaborated on previously. First, the authors talked about Activity Theory not only in a sense of what it is but also "why" it is. As a reader, I benefited by knowing the history and evolution of the theory. In particular, the authors made a great effort to clarify those difficult, elusive concepts such as activities and objects. Second, the book illustrates a collection of design examples that were designed based on or informed by Activity Theory. These examples demonstrated how Activity Theory can be applied in practice to a good extent. As a ubicomp researcher, I see the great value of the theory being able to articulate interaction design for less structural, contextual everyday activities. This top-down, human-need driven approach provides good ingredients to existing ubicomp research. I believe more compelling design examples will emerge as the theory is grasped and employed by researchers and practitioners. To this end, this new book certainly makes a great contribution to explaining this valuable theory to the field. The book is very well written and easy to understand. It should be appealing to many HCI/ubicomp researchers.