ALD10 Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman is an anthropologist of science and technology. She used to hold the position of Principal Scientist and manager of the Work Practice and Technology area at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Nowadays, she is the Professor of Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University, and the Co-Director of the Centre for Science Studies. Her home page is here.

Lucy's work has had a big influence on both my PhD, and the way I try to work with clients. When I was starting out in IT, everybody wanted to get down and build stuff, but compared to me, it seemed they didn't want to sit with the business people, "the users", and talk to them, and listen and observe, and find out what they do all day before they started designing stuff. That's what anthroplogists of technology do, and my journey has been all about finding out what I'm comfortable with, and what I'm good at, and how I can add value.

Lucy's most famous book (still, I think, though I'm no expert) is called 'Plans and Situated Actions'. It explores the differences between they way people talk when people ask us what we're doing ('Plans') and what we do when we are actually trying to get the job done (the Situated Action part.) This is a very important distinction for feminists, because a lot of the talk about work has been done by bosses who are male, and not by the people who actually do the work. It's also very important for knowledge workers in general, and anyone who has ever struggled to explain to an asshat bureaucrat - *cough*, sorry, to a manager, what is that's going on and why it matters. And of course, it is incredibly important for designers, who need to understand people's working practices well enough to create technology that serves its users, rather than slowing us down and getting in our way.

In a profession where most of the geeks are men who fancy themselves as engineers, I'm happy to be known as an anthropologist and an aspiring feminist.

Lucy is a real hero of mine. I'd like her to be your hero too.

Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day in celebration of women in technology everywhere, named in honour of Ada, who was Babbage’s assistant and the world’s first computer programmer. About six months ago, I signed a pledge to say that I would write a blog today about a woman I admire in technology, and I have chosen to write about Susan Laflin.

I wrote my first programs as a second year undergraduate at Birmingham University, on a mainframe that probably had as much processing power as an iPhone, and cost several million pounds. The alpha geek who taught me was a grey-haired woman. Thanks to her, my stereotype of a ‘geek’ has never been a spotty, inarticulate male. (That’s my stereotype of ‘student’.)

Dr Laflin taught us about pre-tested and post-tested loops, Dijkstra’s theorem, and much else that I can’t remember. She also told wonderful anecdotes that made her seem wiser still, and made the world of computers seem fascinating and rewarding to the enquiring, creative mind.

She told us about the first British mainframe at Manchester University (when the British universities were still ahead of Caltech and MIT) and how they used to debug their programs using the command ‘hoot n’. Your program played a tune as it executed, and if the tune went wonky, you had an idea of whereabouts in your code you needed to look for the bug. That means of course, the code must have been running on a mainframe that executed about four instructions per second!

If you Google the name of this fantastically enthusiastic woman, you will see that she retired in 2000, is a prominent figure in Wargaming, and researches family history. I’m pleased that the stuff about how many children she has, that normally clogs up women’s biographies, is low down in the rankings.