Re: Planning Actions Through Anticipation

From: Yjö Engestrm (yrjo.engestrom@helsinki.fi)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2000 - 13:58:33 PST


Dear Chris, my research group has been using activity theory to analyze and
help redesign work and care in hospitals for some time now. We'd be very
interested in interaction and collaboration on this theme. For starters, I'd
like to send you some of our recent papers on hospital work. If you are
interested, please give me your postal address.

Cheers,

Yrjo Engestrom

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>From: "Chris Francovich" <cfran@micron.net>
>To: "Xmca who-is-at Weber. Ucsd. Edu" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Subject: Planning Actions Through Anticipation
>Date: pe 11. helmi 2000 01:26
>

> Hello All,
>
> I am wondering what interested people think about the text quoted
> below. I am involved in a 3 year study looking at patient
> centered care at our local VA hospital under a VA Health Services
> Research and Development Grant(HSR&D). We are using a CHAT type
> approach and are at the end of our first year. We are now coding
> and analyzing our participant/observer data and using
> operational, action, and activity level categories to help parse
> the data. We are also coding breakdowns and seeking ways to link
> their effects to the nested levels. The perspective articulated
> by Jakob Bardram below is appealing to me for its strong links to
> the psychology of the individual and the practical treatment of
> artifacts in a primary care clinic.
>
> Any feedback would be appreciated?
> Thanks,
>
> Chris Francovich
>
> Snipped:
> " Planning Recurrent Actions through Anticipatory Reflection
> At all three levels the human activity is guided by anticipation.
> This anticipation is the motive of the activity, the goal of the
> action and the orienting basis of the operation, respectively.
> The anticipation of future events is the fundamental principle of
> anticipatory reflection as developed by Anokhin. The classical
> example of anticipatory reflection is Anokhin's rethinking of
> Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex: When a dog
> salivates in response to the ringing of a bell, it is not because
> saliva is needed to digest the bell but because the dog
> anticipates food to appear in the future which has to be
> digested. The anticipatory reflection guides the activity by
> making an afferent synthesis between a perception of the
> environmental state of the activity, and memory (i.e. the
> cumulated experience of the person). This afferent synthesis
> forms an anticipation of the future state as a result of the
> activity about to be performed. When the activity is performed
> there is a feedback mechanism which compares the result of the
> activity with the prediction, and any incongruence (i.e. a
> breakdown) gives rise to a learning situation (i.e. the
> experience of the person is expanded). This model of anticipatory
> reflection based on the afferent synthesis between perception and
> memory is a general model for all levels of the activity.
> The basic principle that makes the anticipatory reflection
> possible is the recognition of recurrent structures in the world.
> The existing of all living beings and their reflection of
> recurrent structures, which repeat themselves over time, is the
> indispensable prerequisite for prediction. Pavlov's experiments
> also illustrate this because the response is mutually correlated
> with the amount of training sessions."
>
> From:
> http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~bardram/ECSCW97.html
>



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