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Dear Kari, Thank you for the clarification. Please read my comment below. On 14.8.2012, at 10.59, Kari Kuutti wrote: 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. I agree that it is anthropocentric: for the most part humans create and act within the material contexts of the activity. As it unfolds through time this becomes history. 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. A human acting within the constraints of communally defined/constrained behavior (traffic standards?). In a sense the speed bump can be interpreted as instrumental in that it mediates human behavior. Nevertheless, it is humans who decide the placement of the bump on the road. 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. Here I diverge in that as an intensively human capability, design is very interesting by itself. 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… The process will have its twists and turns. A critical design practice that makes use of knowledge frameworks like Activity Theory can make a contribution. best regards, --Kari Kuutti Univ Oulu, Finland BR. Lily Prof. Lily Diaz-Kommonen Head of Research Media Lab Helsinki Department of Media Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture + 358 9 470 555 (FAX) <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>