To better my understanding of acitivity theory and its implementation and usage in activity systems I read the article "An activity-theory-based model to analyse Web application requirements" by L.Uden & P.Valderas (2008).
There they describe and theoretizese over the possibility of using activity theory to better create a website - actually the correct notion should be how to create web-based applications, that meet the needs of both the consumer and producer, with the maximum satisfaction possible.
This subject is currently quite important to me as I am a head of a web-application project, where my ideas and beliefs are co-existing with the needs and wishes of the customer (these are elaborated by myself), and I do feel that traditional technical ways to lead this project (more precicly the creation of the action-plan) might be un-effective, as I fail to describe both my visions and the needs of the customer thouroughly - I can introduce examples and I can defend these ideas, but saying "menu X should be like variant Y" is not thorough enough for me. This is elaborately described by Uden & Valderas, who state that "Most established requirements engineering techniques however, do not adequately address the critical organizational and ‘softer', people-related issues of software systems."
In such situation the usage of the model introduced by Uden & Valderas could be very useful. To my belief this usefulness comes from the statement made by the authors where "Using the activity system as its unit of analysis, activity theory avoids simple causal explanation". In modern times thorough explanations are always needed.
So what is activity theory itself to my? First of all the article I read, offered a wonderful scheme of the theory:
As the theory itself states, its about activity. This means that the core subject - activity - firstly needs to be described. Uden & Valderas cite this definition as following: ".. the three levels that activities have: activity, action and operation". This means that every action we foretake, cannot be easily classified as activity - other categories exist. I especially liked the description that authors offered for this statement - "activities may be automated and frozen when carried out repeatedly under similar circumstances, making conscious control unnecessary, thus transforming the acts into operational constituents of an action".
As with any such elaborate system (more socio- than technological) it is apparent that there are some short-comings to the system. I agree with Uden & Valderas, who state that "key limitation of this approach is that the researcher must have a complete understanding of the activity system under observation, including the dynamic interplay of all the units of the activity system and such understanding takes time to acquire". Altough if this time-consuming actionplan would be carried through, we could easily state as Uden & Valderas do, that "activity theory also provides us with adequate period of time for understanding users' behaviour and their motivation".
This can be especially said in my described case before, where my stances all do not actually have researched backgrounds - this could lead to a situation where some short time period later I'd have to state that the needs of my customers are changed while they simply were left un-researched.
Source
http://informationr.net/ir/13-2/paper340.html
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