Lucy Suchman is a professor of anthropology at Lancaster University, who worked as the principal scientist and manager at the Palo Alto Research Center. Her university education was completed at UC Berkeley, receiving her Ph.D in Social/Cultural Anthropology in 1984. Cambridge University Press published her dissertation, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication in 1987, which proposed an anthropological perspective to the development and designs of machines (Suchman). She has made distinguished contributions to understanding the relationship between humans and machine, both in their connection and differences (ICRAC). In particular, she pioneered the field of corporate ethnography, merging the worlds of commercial enterprise and anthropology. Ethnography allows researchers to study not only what participants say they do, but the real actions that they perform (PARC).
She is known as the social scientist who helped create the green button featured on copy machines, but the legend has proven to be less than true by PARC. While she was one of the first anthropologists to be brought on by a technology company, she conducted an ethnographic study in a team of other social scientists. The team studied participants utilizing a copy machine that already featured the green buttons, revealing the pain points of the current design. By filming a video of the study, Suchman and her team revealed that the user actions understood by the machine is not equivalent to the actions actually being performed by the user. Thus, this friction between human and machine wherein the human attempts to understand the feedback provided by the machine, rather than the machine understanding the behavior performed by the user (PARC).
Her current work revolves around the role of artificial intelligence and robotics within healthcare and warfare. According to her researcher profile on Lancaster University’s Research Directory, her current interests include “reconstructing technologies from singular objects located at the center of a surrounding social world, to heterogeneous assemblages of social and material practices” (Suchman) highlighting the theory of situated cognition, which emphasizes the importance of the meshing of social, cultural, and physical contexts in the cognitive processes.
Works Cited
ICRAC. “Lucy Suchman.” ICRAC, www.icrac.net/members/lucy-suchman/.
PARC. “Mythbusting: Corporate Ethnography and the Giant Green Button.” PARC, 3 Dec. 2013, www.parc.com/blog/mythbusting-corporate-ethnography-and-the-giant-green-button/.
Suchman, Lucy. “Lancaster University.” Research.lancs.ac.uk, 2016, www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/lucy-suchman(76cb50d0-56e3-42b7-a0b1-691437d851a5).html.
Thank you for sharing! An amazing lady！