ABSTRACT
Motives and their congenital goals are individual, vary with every human subject (HS), and coexist in space and time. They are dynamic and as such formulate the contingent nature of the social aspect of activity. Overall, subjective goals, motivation, and significance may contradict with objective stimuli. This paper presents a case study of a HS who skims through news feeds on the corporate intranet to explore possibly relevant information. One subjectively significant news feed causes him to temporarily interrupt work activity and instead follow up a link where he can make a decision regarding his next year’s contribution of the local pension fund with its 13’236 members. Contrary to his intention to instantly attain his goal, his task strategy succeeds in undesirable abandoned actions, which gradually increase frustration. Under the umbrella of the applied systemic-structural theory of activity (SSAT), we discuss emotional-motivational effects on task performance, manifest differences between the holism of human goal-oriented activity and engineering, contrast objective design goals with subjective goals of activity, and present issues and findings from informal and semi-formal qualitative analysis (QA) of our HS’s exploratory behavior and rational decision-making. Theoretical and pragmatic discoveries encourage us to postulate an ameliorated task strategy. We finalize this paper with possible future research prospects.
