According to Kari Kuuti article about Activity Theory the historical roots go back to 18th and 19th century scientific thoughts of German Philosophy from Kant to Hegel that emphasized on humans evolution ideas and its active and constructive role. Marx and Engels elaborated on the aspect of activity being the transforming of material objects. Vygotsky’is cultural-historical psychology was the base for further research of activity theory by Leont’ev and Rubinstein. The psychological meta-theory theorizes that when individuals interacting with environment, production of tools results. These tools are forms of mental processes and mental processes reveal in tools becoming more accessible and communicable to social interaction.
Three main principles of the Activity theory from Kuuti article state:
- Human actions are the basic of analysis but they are impossible to understand without the context. Individuals take part of many activities at the same time.
- Activities elements are under continuous change and discontinuous development. Activities stay often embedded and have history in themselves, which help to understand the recent situations.
- Activity always contains artifacts which feature is having mediating role. When there is mediation between an actor and the related object, the object is manipulated by the limitations of artifact. Artifacts have created and transformed during the development of the activity itself with addition in culture.
Activities consist of tools to enable communicate between subject and object. This mediates relationship at individual level. For a larger environment there needs to be added community. Activities have motives and they consist of several steps: actions that have goals and operations that have conditions.
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