13 Facts About Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman is professor emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.

Lucy 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.

Lucy Suchman 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.

Lucy Suchman challenged common assumptions behind the design of interactive systems with a cogent anthropological argument that human action is constantly constructed and reconstructed from dynamic interactions with the material and social worlds.

Lucy Suchman has made fundamental contributions to ethnographic analysis, conversational analysis and Participatory Design techniques for the development of interactive computer systems.

Specifically, Lucy Suchman addressed the relationship and interactions between humans and machines with a focus on the idea of human-like machines.

In 1988, Lucy Suchman served as the program chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Lucy Suchman served as the Program Chair for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems.

Between 1982 and 1990, Lucy Suchman was on the board of directors of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group she helped to form.

Lucy Suchman is currently a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.

Lucy Suchman served as president of the Society for Social Studies of Science from 2016 to 2017.

Lucy Suchman has served as a visiting senior research fellow with King's College London's Work, Interaction and Technology Research Group and as an adjunct professor for the Interaction Design and Work Practice Laboratory at Sydney's University of Technology.

Lucy Suchman currently serves as an adjunct professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark.