Lucy Suchman
Lancaster University
Chair in the Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology
Lancaster, United Kingdom
Lucy Suchman has engaged for over 30 years in research at the interface of humans and machines, with a particular focus on initiatives in the delegation of human capabilities to technological systems. Before taking up her present post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she spent twenty years as a researcher. Her current research extends her longstanding engagement with the fields of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and robotics to the domain of contemporary war fighting, including problems of ‘situational awareness’ in military training and simulation, and in remotely-controlled weapon systems. She has written for both social and information sciences audiences, and is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987), both published by Cambridge University Press. In 2002 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences, in 2010 the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award, and in 2014 the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Bernal Prize for Contributions to the Field.