Writing and Reading: A Response to Comments on Plans and Situated Actions

The occasion to respond publicly to a set of articulate commentaries on one's writing is an extraordinary opportunity. Over a decade after the publication of Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (P&SA), and across a prodigious range of new developments in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the questions that animated my earlier project are as compelling and, I believe, as relevant as ever. I am deeply grateful for the testimonials that these commentaries offer to the book's effects at the time of its publication and since. And, as I am currently preparing a second edition of the book, the critiques and provocations that my interlocutors put forward are just as welcome. My primary concern in P&SA was to suggest a shift in the status of plans from mental control structures that universally precede and determine actions, to discursive resources produced and used within the course of certain forms of human activity. Having re-opened the question of what plans are and how they work, I then suggested that we locate the answer to that question in what Garfinkel and Sacks (1970, p. 342) called the 'observable-reportable' accountability of practical reasoning and practical action. I further suggested that we characterize the limits of that accountability for machines as the limits on their access to relevant social and material resources, and identified the resulting asymmetry as the central problem for the project of HCI. The commentaries collected in this issue of "Book and Ideas" traverse some of