Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary war fighting, including problems of ‘situational awareness’ in military training and simulation, and in the design and deployment of automated weapon systems. At the center of this research is the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world. Suchman is a member of

International Committee for Robot Arms Control The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) is a "not-for-profit association committed to the peaceful use of robotics in the service of humanity and the regulation of robot weapons." It is concerned about the dangers that autonomous ...

and the author of the blog dedicated to the problems of ethical robotics and 'technocultures of humanlike machines' Before coming to Lancaster, she worked for 22 years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, where she held the positions of principal scientist and manager of the Work Practice and Technology research group. While at PARC, she conducted an influential ethnographic study, using video, of office workers struggling to use a copy machine, today often referred to as one of the first instances of corporate ethnography. Suchman is a graduate of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, obtaining her BA in 1972, MA in 1977, and Doctorate in Social and Cultural

Anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

in 1984. While at Berkeley, she wrote her dissertation on the work practices of accountants. She studied procedural office work to understand how it was similar to and different from a program, assumptions around the work, and how the work informed the design of these systems.

Research

Suchman's early research was heavily influenced by

ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction.Garfinkel, H. (1974) 'The origins of the term ethnomethodology', in R.Turner (Ed.) Ethnomethodology, Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 15–18. I ...

, a subfield of sociology that argued that people create meaningful action by improvising based on their social and environmental resources. Suchman's book, ''Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication'' (1987), provided intellectual foundations for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). She challenged common assumptions behind the design of interactive systems with a cogent anthropological argument that human action is constantly constructed and reconstructed from dynamic interactions with the material and social worlds. The theory of

situated cognition Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift ...

emphasises the importance of the environment as an integral part of the cognitive process. She has made fundamental contributions to ethnographic analysis, conversational analysis and Participatory Design techniques for the development of interactive computer systems. An updated version of the book was published in 2007. This second edition, called ''Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action'', included five new chapters exploring developments in the field of computing and social studies technology since the mid-1980s. Specifically, Suchman addressed the relationship and interactions between humans and machines with a focus on the idea of human-like machines. Her later research is dedicated to problems of autonomy and control in human-technology interaction with emphasis on autonomous weapon systems.

Professional affiliations

In 1988, Suchman served as the program chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. She also served as the Program Chair for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems. Between 1982 and 1990, Suchman was on the board of directors of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group she helped to form. Suchman is currently a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. In addition, she serves as a Collaborating Editor for ''Social Studies of Science''. Suchman is also affiliated with numerous academic institutions. She served as president of the Society for Social Studies of Science from 2016-2017. She has served as a visiting senior research fellow with King's College London's Work, Interaction and Technology Research Group and as an adjunct professor for the Interaction Design and Work Practice Laboratory at Sydney's University of Technology. Suchman currently serves as an adjunct professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Publications

*Suchman, L. (1987) ''Plans and situated actions : The Problem of Human-Machine Communication.'' Cambridge University Press, New York. *Suchman, L. (1993) ''Response to Vera and Simon's Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation.'' Cognitive Science, 17:71—75, 1993. *Suchman, L. (1995) Making Work Visible. Communications of the ACM, 38 (9). pp. 56–61+. *Suchman, L. (1995) Representations of Work (Special Report). Communications of the ACM, 38 (9). pp. 33–68. *Suchman, L. and Blomberg, J. and Orr, J. E. (1999) Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice. The American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3). pp. 392–408. *Suchman, L. (2000) Embodied Practices of Engineering Work. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7 (1&2). pp. 4–18. *Suchman, L. (2000) Making a case: knowledge and routine work in document production. In: Workplace studies : recovering work practice and informing system design. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 29–45. *Suchman, L. (2000) Organising alignment : a case of bridge-building. Organization, 7 (2). pp. 311–327. *Suchman, L. and Bishop, L. (2000) Problematizing 'Innovation' as a Critical Project. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 12 (3). pp. 327–333. *Suchman, L. (2002) Practice-based design of information systems : notes from the hyperdeveloped world. The Information Society, 18 (2). pp. 139–144. *Suchman, L. A. and Blomberg, J. and Trigg, R. (2002) Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the prototype. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2). pp. 163–179. *Suchman, L. (2003) Figuring service in discourses of ICT: the case of software agent. In: Global and Organizational Discourses about Information Technology. International Federation for Information Processing . Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 15–32. *Suchman, L. (2003) Organising alignment. In: Knowing in organisations: a practice-based approach. M. E. Sharpe, London, pp. 187–203. *Suchman, L. (2004) Decentring the manager/designer. In: Managing as designing. Stanford Business Books, Stanford, pp. 169–73. *Suchman, L. (2004) Methods and madness. In: First person : new media as story, performance, and game. MIT Press, London, pp. 95–98. *Suchman, L. (2004) Talking things. In: First person : new media as story, performance, and game. MIT Press, London, pp. 262–265. *Suchman, L. (2005) Affiliative Objects. Organization, 12 (3). pp. 379–399. *Suchman, L. (2006) "Wajcman confronts cyberfeminism." Social Studies of Science. *Suchman, L. (2007) Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial. In: New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press. *Suchman, L. (2007) ''Human-Machine Reconfigurations.'' Cambridge University Press, New York. *Suchman, L. (2011) Practice and its overflows: Reflections on order and mess. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2(1):21–30. *Suchman, L. (2011) Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 1–18. *Suchman, L. (2011) Subject Objects. Feminist Theory, 12 (2): 119–145. *Suchman, L. (2013) Consuming Anthropology. A. Barry & G. Borrn (Eds.), Interdisciplinary: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, (pp. 141–160). London: Routledge. *Suchman, L. (2015). Situational Awareness: Deadly bioconvergence at the boundaries of bodies and machines Media Tropes, V(1), 1-24. *Suchman, L. (2016). Configuring the Other: Sensing War through Immersive Simulation. Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(1). *Suchman, L., & Weber, J. (2016). Human-Machine Autonomies. In N. Bhuta, S. Beck, R. Geis, H.-Y. Liu, & C. Kreis (Eds.), Autonomous Weapons Systems (pp. 75–102). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Awards

*1988 Xerox Corporate Research Group's Excellence in Science and Technology Award * 2002 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Scienc

*2005 Outstanding Contribution to Research Award from the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the

American Sociological Association The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fif ...

*2010 Lifetime Research Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction *2011 Honorary Doctorate at Malmö University. *2014 John Desmond Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. *2018 Honorary Doctorate at Maastricht University.http://www.maastrichtsts.nl/events-surrounding-honorary-doctorate-for-lucy-suchman/ Events surrounding honorary doctorate for Lucy Suchman

References

External links