Instructional artifacts

This paper addresses the question of attribution of agency to artifacts. Taking an activity-theoretical perspective, I argue that artifacts are used to guide actions. In other words, I claim that artifacts have instructional impact. The introductory part of the paper is an account of how three kinds of artifacts - physical artifacts, linguistic representations, and graphic representations -- are instructionally used in coronary diagnostic work. The main part of the paper is an empirical exploration of how a forth kind of artifact, organization of work, is instructionally used. The empirical case analyzed involves clinical diagnostic work conducted as a video-mediated conference between two collaborating diagnostic subteams, one of which had made the coronary investigation by means of coronary angiography, while the other was to take actions in the form of by-pass surgery or balloon dilatation. In the concluding sections, I discuss in what way it makes sense to say that organization of work and other artifacts have instructional properties.