![]() To me, this external/internal dimension is easy to be confused with the one in Vygotsky’s work. Rubinstein proposed the principle of “unity and inseparability of consciousness and activity”, which means human conscious experience (internal) and human behavior (activity, external) are closely interconnected and mutually determine one another. Over time, the individual progressively masters the function so that they can perform without help from others, namely, intra-psychological. Initially, the individual cannot perform the function alone. New psychological functions are first distributed between individual and other people they emerge as inter-psychological functions. All animals have “natural” psychological functions (e.g., memory, perception), but only human beings have higher psychological functions (e.g., driving, navigation using map). The second dimension is individual/social (or inter-psychological/intra-psychological). Note that it does not mean that the internal plane is pre-existing instead, the internalization creates the internal one. The whole process of solving a task remains to be mediated, but mediated (partially) by internal signs rather than external ones. Vygotsky called this phenomenon internalization. In many cases, subjects who used external tools (mediating artifacts) to solve a task gradually stopped using those artifacts and transitioned to use internal ones. Such culturally developed tools change the structure of human behavior and mental processes. Human beings use tools to mediate the world, including physical tools (e.g., hammers) and psychological tools (e.g., a map, an algebraic notation, and so on). ![]() The first dimension is external/internal. Vygotsky is known for the “cultural-historical psychology”, which studies the relationship between 1) the mind and 2) culture and society. The initial version of activity theory originated from Russian/Soviet psychology of the 1920s and 1930s, notably Lev Vygotsky and Sergei Rubinstein. ![]() On the other hand, the activities can transform both subjects and objects. On one hand, the properties of subjects and objects define the activities. In this process, activities and the entities (i.e., subjects and objects) mutually determine one another. Subjects interact with objects to achieve some needs through activities. A common way to represent activity is “S O.” The foundational concept of activity theory is “activity”, which represents the interaction between the subject (i.e., the actor) and the object (i.e., an entity objectively existing in the world). The content is largely inspired by the book: Activity Theory in HCI - Fundamentals and Reflections (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2012). Here, I briefly summarize activity theory, its origin, and the application to human-computer interaction (HCI). In other words, activity theory is more like a meta-theory than a predictive theory. This is unlike a traditional “theory” that acts as a predictive model. Activity theory is a framework that can help designers and researchers ask the right questions to resolve their complex problems, but it does not provide a ready-to-use solution.
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