I was struggling on selecting a theory from the phenomenology system and a concrete HCI phenomena from my personal interests. Because I always found they’re hard to be connected. One of my interest is the online Anime book watching, but what to apply there? Ready-to-hand? Ethnomethodology? Activity theory? I found none of them fits to it very well.

I decided to do this in another way. So I picked up my most familiar phenomenological theory – Activity Theory and one of my most familiar softwares – Instant Messenger, to see what I can get from this combination.

I am hesitating to say this combination went pretty well, but I do get a huge list from it:

The points made in the mind-map may not be useful for a paper, but I found the process of connecting IM and AI together was pretty interesting. I am not quite sure what in this list can contribute to a paper, but at least I found mind map is a good method to list everything out.