Acting with Technology

Activity Theory and Interaction Design

MIT Press

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kaptelinin, Victor

Nardi, Bonnie A.

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Informatik Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion

Über Autor(innen)

Kaptelinin, Victor
Victor Kaptelinin is Professor in the Department of Informatics at Umeå
University, Sweden, and Professor in the Department of Information Science and Media
Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is coeditor of Beyond the
Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments (MIT
Press, 2007).

Nardi, Bonnie A.
Bonnie Nardi is Professor in the Department of Informatics in the School of
Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.