Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman
Born	Ithaca, New York
Occupation(s)	Professor, anthropologist
Employer	Lancaster University
Known for	Human–computer interaction
Website	lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/31/

Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom,^[1] 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.^[2] Suchman is a member of International Committee for Robot Arms Control^[3] and the author of the blog dedicated to the problems of ethical robotics and 'technocultures of humanlike machines'^[4]

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.^[1][5] While at PARC, she conducted an influential ethnographic study, using video, of office workers and research scientists struggling to use a copy machine.^[6][7][8]

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.^[2] While at Berkeley, she wrote her dissertation critiquing the AI planning model as a basis for interactive interface design. She also studied procedural office work to understand how it was similar to and different from a program, and how assumptions about the work informed the design of information systems.