Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the activity and its environment may have
co-evolved.
Second, an agent may
learn
an
activity by seeing the effect of actions in specific situations. In this case, trial and error
is used to find the action rules that best exploit the structures in the environment, but
also environments might be chosen because of their particular affordances for action.
Third, and this is the approach we propose for information systems, a system can be
designed
so that actions in response to situations have desired effects. Depending on
constraints, either or both the action rules and the environment structures will be delib-
erately designed to ensure the reliability of an activity. It is for this purpose that we
propose our methodology, and it is a distinctive feature that 'environmental engineering'
is part of it. We assume that some level of iteration may be needed.
When an agent is confronted with an unknown situation, or when an existing activity
is not reliable in an environment, there are at least three ways for the agent to respond.
The most extreme response is to deliberate from first principles, much like the deliber-
ative theory of agency. According to Heidegger, in his analysis of 'breakdown' (Dreyfus,
1991), an agent will resort to an ascending hierarchy of situated practices of repair before
resorting to pure deliberation. For instance, an agent might first engage in another
activity that is closely related to the failed routine activity but suited to a slightly differ-
ent environment. An example of this would be using a different maze-solving routine.
Alternatively, the agent could reason about the activities themselves without necessarily
building a complete external world-model, which would amount to invoking a routine
of problem solving.
We have used the situational theory of agency, as it is discussed in robotics and other
disciplines, to determine the concepts central to an agent-centred situational system.
Whereas the deliberative theory suggests information systems design should emphasise
modelling the world using objects, properties, relations and states, and deduction upon
these models to determine action (such as decision support and planning), the situational
theory would make central the notions of an activity, situations that comprise activities,
actions that are a reaction to situations, and aspects that allow situations to be detected.
Also the situational theory would emphasise the importance of proper structuring of
environments of action, which is largely ignored in the deliberative approach. Thus, a
methodology for designing situational systems must:
1.
Identify the multiple agents and their specific environments that constitute the total
situational system
. Situational systems of any complexity will consist of multiple
interacting agents (human and technical) each situated in their own unique envir-
onment.
2.
Identify the activities that need to be undertaken by the situational systems in pursuit
of specific goals
.
3.
Analyse activities of agents into the situations, their aspects, and actions constituting
each activity
. Activities can only work if an agent is able to notice when it is in a
particular situation and is able to act routinely.
4.
Analyse environmental structures which afford goal attainment for each activity
.
Identification of environmental structures is important because they enable an
agent to achieve a goal using largely reactive situated actions. Thus, situated systems
design is partly 'environmental engineering'.
5.
Check analytically whether the environmental structure identified or engineered, inter-
acting with the situation-action pairs identified for a particular activity, will result in
reliable goal achievement.
If not, repeat and refine Steps 3 and 4 until activities
within suitably structured environments are found that require a minimum number
of deliberative choices on the part of the agents.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search