Thanks for caring to make this clarification Kari. Your distinction about
ANT as Latour's strong return to the material is a good reminder that it's
quite an incomplete "theory" with respect to the functional requirements of
designing. While some sociologists have developed insightful accounts of
practice that may lead to new design thinking, design outcomes were rarely
the intent in work developed from ANT.

Whereas activity theory employs a strong orientation from the (human)
subject in an activity context, and it reinstates the necessity of
consciousness in the social and in the instrumental use of the functional
organs we are often designing. Activity "explains" distributed cognition by
scaling subject and consciousness and object and outcome to their roles in
an activity. 

In my view - as a designer and researcher - the activity system as unit of
analysis helps the designer envision the larger units of activity (and
actions) beyond the single user context. It accounts for the shared objects
(activities) of a social context. The social in and of itself is an unwieldy
level of analysis. 

Could we consider AT a theory "for designing" if not "of design?" In its
many cases in software and services, it seems we have sufficient basis for
making a claim for an activity theory for design activity. In essence, I
employ it this way - as an embedded theory of designing - without having to
specify it as such to "design clients." (Consider the complexity of
information services in healthcare - it's all activity oriented, not user
oriented). As a theory "disappears" from the foreground of application, and
becomes ready to hand, perhaps then it's truly valuable as a designing
perspective? 

Peter Jones
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
OCAD University





-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kari
Kuutti
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 4:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Activity Theory and ANT and computers are capable of design?

Terry wrote in his message dated on 14th Aug:

 This may lead to a non-anthropometric view of design - similar to that
intrinsically implied by design theories such as Activity Theory and ANT in
which computers are capable of design activity and other forms of tool use
alongside humans, other primates, elephants, bears, dingoes, dolphins,
octopi, wrass (fish), ants, and birds, especially of the  Corvus family
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals
).

I must comment upon that. It is true that actor network theory  (ANT) grants
agency to all kind of non-human things. One must remember, however, that ANT
is also and maybe first of all a gauntlet that Bruno Latour as a renegade
sociologist has thrown to the face of his more traditionally oriented
colleagues,  who have abstracted materiality out from sociology and believe
that "social" can be understood  by studying only texts distilled from
social interactions between people. ANT shouts: "material world is there and
it must be taken into account!"  but it is not necessarily an attempt to
model the world in a balanced way, so to say. Inspirational  it is in its
exaggregation, but care is needed before using it as a foundation --  for a
design theory, for example.

On the contrary, Activity Theory (AT) is an attempt to model (small parts
of) world in a "balanced way". It is not  a design theory either (yet -- we
are working on it...:-)). And it is true that it is not anthropocentric in
the individualistic, de-contextualized way, but it is still anthropocentric
in an "activity-oriented" way: humans exercise agency, but they do that in
social activities shaped by historically emerged cultural and material
contexts, which have to be taken in the account, if we want to study the
phenomenon.

One of the Latour examples is a speed bump, which has agency of its own
according to ANT. For AT, a speed bump is the long hand of a traffic
regulation activity: a human has made a decision to reduce speed at a point,
and the activity has created an organ for that.

Computer programs are rather universal organs, crystallizations of human
ideas and experience. Within activities, they are used by humans for the
purposes of those activities. Human practices and use of various artifacts
in them and development of new artifacts is what is interesting in design.

I agree with Terry that computers will find many more uses and both
automatize  routines and help to do things that otherwise would be
impossible; what we see now is just a beginning. But that process may have
its twists and turns...

best regards,
--Kari Kuutti
Univ Oulu, Finland