Lucy Suchman

British sociologist

Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s. 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. 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 and research scientists struggling to use a copy machine. Suchman is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining her BA in 1972, MA in 1977, and Doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 1984. 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. Her later research is dedicated to problems of autonomy and control in human technology interaction with emphasis on autonomous weapon systems.

In 1988, Suchman served as the program chair for the Second Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 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.

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.