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In his dissertation, “The Dynamic Structure of Everyday Life,” (1988)
AI researcher Philip Agre argues that real people do not live their lives
this way; that is, goals and plans do not explain most of human behavior.
His observations lead him to posit that people are primarily involved in
improvising what to do next, in a moment-by-moment way, and that ev-
eryday life is “always almost wholly routine.” But everyday life is differ-
ent from drama. And highly goal-oriented “real” behavior, as in the case
of constructing a building or some other specifi c task (the kind of thing
we often do with computers), can be seen to involve a greater propor-
tion of planning activity than “everyday life” as well. Agre's understand-
ing of everyday activity has enabled him to arrive at AI architectures that
may do a remarkable job of emulating real life, and his ideas may lead
to an entirely new paradigm for representing and orchestrating human-
computer interaction.
Nevertheless, I employ the notions of goals and plans in this topic for
several reasons. One is the desire to see human-computer interactions as
“wholes” with coherent structures. Constructing them as dramatic wholes
allows us to take advantage of deeply ingrained conventions about under-
standing representations of action. These conventions are in fact the ways
in which drama is not like life: elimination of the extraneous and gratu-
itous, clear causal relations among things that happen, and the notions of
beginnings, middles, and ends. Agre wanted artifi cial reality to be lifelike,
but there are good reasons why, at least in some situations and for some
purposes, artifi cial reality should be—well, artifi cial .
Related to Agre's thesis is the work of Lucy Suchman. In her excellent
book Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communica-
tion (1987), Suchman contends that “purposeful” (or goal-directed) behav-
ior is best understood, not as the execution of plans, but rather as situated
actions : “actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances.”
Plans are fundamentally ineffective because “the circumstances of our ac-
tions are never fully anticipated and are continuously changing around us.”
Suchman's observations lead her to conclude that plans are best viewed
as “a weak resource for what is primarily ad hoc activity.” Suchman does
not deny the existence or use of plans, but implies that deciding what to
do next in the pursuit of some goal is a far more dynamic and context-
dependent activity than the traditional notion of planning might suggest.
A dramatic view of human-computer interaction is amenable to the notion
of situated actions in that it attempts to dynamically represent changing
situational elements and to incorporate knowledge of them into both the
 
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