Overview
Lucy Suchman's work on situated action, particularly her 1987 book "Plans and Situated Actions," was a major influence on Agre's thinking. Her ethnographic studies at Xerox PARC demonstrated that human action is fundamentally situated and improvisational rather than plan-following, providing empirical grounding for the philosophical critique Agre was developing from within AI.
Agre and Suchman were part of a broader intellectual community in the late 1980s and 1990s that challenged the cognitivist assumptions underlying AI and HCI.