Technology in Action
Technology in Action
Looking for an examination copy?
This title is not currently available for examination. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an examination copy. To register your interest please contact collegesales@cambridge.org providing details of the course you are teaching.
Despite extraordinary advances in digital and communication technology over recent years, we know very little about the way these complex systems affect everyday work and interaction. This book seeks to explore these issues through a series of video-based field studies that look at the introduction of basic information systems in general medical practice, news production, the control rooms of the London Underground and computer aided design in architectural practice. It focuses in particular on social interaction and the way video-based field studies can inform the design, development and implementation of new technology.
- Explores how people use new technologies in their work, particularly how those technologies inform their communication and collaboration
- Examines work and technology in a range of settings including the control rooms of the London Underground, architectural practices, primary health care and newsrooms
- Uses video-based field studies to examine the details of action and interaction, and suggests ways in which such studies can inform the design, development and deployment of new technologies
Reviews & endorsements
"This excellent book does much to address the relationship between humans and technology in a truly encompassing way, by situating technology and its use in the broader human cognitive and social context, not just the context of the more typical computer-user dyad. In the absence of an understanding of what Lucy Suchman calls "Situated Ation," we shall remain doomed to violate human productivity and digrity with technologies which impose rather than invite; dominate rather than serve. Christian Heath and Paul Luff have given us a series of well-argued case studies which compellingly illustrate how a failure to take a broader view produces interior technologies and also how the broader view can lead to truly productive technologies which empower rather than impverish the human work experience. John Mitterer, Brock University
Product details
January 2005Adobe eBook Reader
9780511038198
0 pages
0kg
14 b/w illus.
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 1. Technology and social action: computers and situated conduct
- 2. Documents and professional practice: 'bad' organisational reasons for 'good' clinical records
- 3. Animating texts: the collaborative production of news stories
- 4. Team work: collaboration and control in London Underground line control rooms
- 5. The collaborative production of computer commands
- 6. 'Interaction' with computers in architecture.
