Suchman's early research was heavily influenced by ethnomethodology, a subfield of sociology that argued that people create meaningful action by improvising based on their social and environmental resources. Suchman's book, "Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication" (1987), provided intellectual foundations for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). She challenged common assumptions behind the design of interactive systems with a cogent anthropological argument that human action is constantly constructed and reconstructed from dynamic interactions with the material and social worlds. The theory of situated cognition emphasises the importance of the environment as an integral part of the cognitive process.