This means that consciousness and activity are not independent of each other, but interdependent.
In Activity Theory, human activities are the unit for analysis (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006), and the intentional use of tools or artifacts by people to accomplish tasks are the focus of study.Īctivity theory is concerned with understanding the relationship between consciousness and activity (Nardi, 1996). Activity Theory developed in the 1920s primarily as a way of describing child development, but stayed constrained to the Soviet Union until the 1970s, after which it spread to domains as diverse as education and human-computer interaction.Īctivity Theory, also known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, holds that any human activity can be described and analyzed and that all activities have a structure, happen under certain conditions and can be assisted by particular tools, instruments, or artifacts and are performed to meet a purpose.Later theorists added a plethora of new factors to this model. Activity Theory, in its original form, has three key principles: the subject, or the person who carries out the activity the object, or the objective and the artifacts, or the tools used to achieve an object.Cultural-Historical Activity Theory posits that human activities can be described and analyzed by considering the dynamics of motivation, societal structures and rules, and the means of doing activities.