Lucy Suchman Inaugural Lecture

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Lucy Suchman inaugural lecture Septemper 28 at the ITU, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 København S, in Auditorium 2 at 13:15 Program: 13.15- 13.25 Welcome by Provost Jørgen Staunstrup 13.25- 15.00 Inaugural lecture: "Human-Machine Reconfigurations: expanding frames and accountable cuts" by Professor Lucy Suchman 15.00-15.45 Reception "Human-Machine Reconfigurations: expanding frames and accountable cuts" Summary: Human activity involves dynamic interactions among people and between people and the material worlds that they inhabit together. The form of everyday practices can seem method or madness, order or chaos, depending upon our relationship to them. In this talk I'’ll elaborate the premise that practices are in fact ordered, but through orderings of a very particular kind. The implications of this premise for design are illustrated through examples drawn from interdisciplinary research at Xerox PARC beginning in the 1980s, in a series of projects that joined ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use with design interventions. Our approach developed through an early research project within a particular workplace which led, among other things, to a reconceptualization of what makes up an ‘information system’ that informed all of our subsequent efforts. The latter turned increasingly to interventions aimed at developing what I characterise in this talk as a program of practice-based design, combining elements of workplace ethnography and cooperative prototyping in an expanding repertoire of generative iterations across system design and use. Closing with more recent examples from scholarship in anthropology, science and technology studies, and media arts and design, I argue for research aimed at expanding our unit of analysis, while taking responsibility for the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made. Bios: Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and Co-Director of Lancaster’s Centre for Science Studies. Before taking up her present position she spent twenty years as a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she was a founding member and Manager of the Work Practice and Technology area. Her research included ethnographic studies of everyday practices of technology design and use, as well as interdisciplinary and participatory interventions in new technology design. Her book titled Human-Machine Reconfigurations (Cambridge University Press 2007) includes an annotated version of the text of her earlier Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication. The sequel adds five new chapters looking at relevant developments since the mid 1980s both in computing and in social studies of technology. She served as Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer- Supported Cooperative Work in 1988, and for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems in 1990. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/31/.

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Symposium: Heuristics of Discovery Sociologica. V.12 N.1 (2018) https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8351 ISSN 1971-8853 Openings Lucy Suchman Published: July 26, 2018 Lucy Suchman: Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University (United Kingdom) [email protected]; http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/Lucy-Suchman Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Before taking up her present post, she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she spent twenty years as a researcher. Her research is focused on technological imaginaries and material practices of technology design, particularly developments at the interface of bodies and machines. Copyright © 2018 Lucy Suchman 61 The text in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Openings Sociologica. V.12 N.1 (2018) A research project for me occurs at the conjoining of what I could characterize as three intersecting fields. These are (in no particular order, insofar as each is equally important): – A concern; that is, something in the world that I would like to support and/or in which I hope to intervene; – A body of scholarship; that is, ways of theorizing the world that feel illuminating, and comprise an ongoing process of thinking together to which I’d like to contribute; – A location; that is, a place (in multiple senses of that term) from which I’m able and willing to act. These are fields of thought and action that I am both actively engaged in generating, and that simulta- neously capture and compel me in particular (indeterminate) directions at any given time.
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Volume 20, No. 2, Art. 1 May 2019 "If You Want to Understand the Big Issues, You Need to Understand the Everyday Practices That Constitute Them" Lucy Suchman in Conversation With Dominik Gerst & Hannes Krämer Key words: Abstract: With her book "Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine ethnomethodology; Communication," Lucy SUCHMAN (1987) not only opened up a whole new domain of scientific Garfinkel; human- interest but also showed how the scope of ethnomethodological inquiry can be widened in a fruitful machine way. Since then she is best known for her extensive contributions to the field of science and interaction; technology studies. In this interview, SUCHMAN gives insights into how she brought science and ethnomethodological sensibilities to new research fields, including human-machine interaction and technology feminist scholarship. She shares personal anecdotes of her meetings with Harold GARFINKEL and studies; feminism; reflects upon key ethnomethodological elements such as the analysis of mundane practices and mundane the fundamental sociality of mutual intelligibility. Discussing the relevance for material studies and practices; mutual how ethnomethodology can contribute to a politically engaged social science, SUCHMAN strikingly intelligibility; demonstrates the actuality of ethnomethodology's program. documentary method; Table of Contents intervening social science 1. "Rather a Long Story About How I First Met Him" 2. Human-Machine Interaction and Mutual Intelligibility 3. The Documentary Method, Ethnomethodology and Feminism 4. What It Means to Do Ethnomethodology 5. "Ethnomethodology Is a Way of Theorizing the World" 6. "The Strangeness of GARFINKEL's Writing Practice" 7. "The Things That Stand Behind What We Are Seeing" 8.
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