Theoretical figure · The structural update of a defining HCI framework · 2026

Tool, Medium, Social Actor, and what they become when computing constitutes rather than persuades.

BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology (2003) defined a field with three categories of computing behavior: Tool, Medium, Social Actor. Each category assumed a pre-formed user whose intentions, information needs, or social bandwidth the technology served. AI configurations break each assumption. This figure maps Fogg's wave-three triad against its wave-four successor, and shows what each break makes visible.

Wave-3 triad: Tool / Medium / Social Actor Wave-4 triad: Practice / Cognition / Identity The break: co-constitution dissolves the sender-receiver model
§ 01The triadic shift

Three categories, three breaks, three updates, read each column top to bottom.

Each column is one of Fogg's three categories paired with what AI breaks in it and the wave-four concept that replaces it. The three columns together form the full triadic shift from persuasive technology to constitutive technology.

Vertical reading
Column 1 · what tech does as instrument
Column 2 · what tech does as carrier
Column 3 · what tech does as relation
Wave 3 · Fogg 2003
Persuasive Technology
"Computers as instruments of behavior change." The user is a finished subject; technology acts upon them through three modes.
Tool
Definition
Technology that makes a target behavior easier to perform, by reducing barriers, providing feedback, simplifying tasks, or automating routine work.
Examples
Pedometers, dietary trackers, financial calculators, route planners, smart thermostats.
What it assumed. The user has stable, pre-formed goals. The tool serves those goals as an instrument. Decision authority remains with the human.
Academic background
Norman 1988 (affordances) · Gibson 1979 (ecological psychology) · Skinner (operant conditioning) · Thaler & Sunstein 2008 (nudge) · Fogg Behavior Model (B = MAT)
Medium
Definition
Technology that delivers symbolic, sensory, or narrative experience to motivate behavior, through simulation, video, audio, story, or interactive scenario.
Examples
Flight simulators, training games, persuasive documentary, VR empathy experiences, gamified learning.
What it assumed. Technology is a carrier of content. The user is a receiver who processes that content and is moved by it. The sender–receiver model is intact.
Academic background
McLuhan 1964 (the medium is the message) · Green & Brock 2000 (narrative transportation) · Gee 2003 (games and literacy) · Reeves & Nass 1996 (media equation)
Social Actor
Definition
Technology that motivates behavior through relationship, by displaying social cues, expressing emotion, responding to the user, encouraging, praising, or providing role-modeling.
Examples
Tutoring systems, virtual coaches, conversational agents, anthropomorphic robots, chatbot companions.
What it assumed. Technology and user are distinct social entities. Tech mimics human social cues; users respond as if it were human. Mimicry is the mechanism.
Academic background
Reeves & Nass 1996 (The Media Equation) · Nass, Steuer & Tauber 1994 (CASA paradigm) · Weizenbaum 1976 (ELIZA effect) · anthropomorphism research
The Break · what AI dissolves
The Co-Constitution Problem
In every Fogg category, the user pre-exists the interaction. AI configurations dissolve that premise. The three breaks are not symmetric failures. Each reveals a different layer of what was being assumed.
Break 01 · Tool dissolves into Practice
The instrument has become co-author.
AI does not execute pre-formed user intentions. It co-constructs the intention through interaction. Clarifying questions reshape the goal. Suggested reframings narrow the problem before the user has decided what the problem is. The user-as-source-of-intent dissolves. The work output is not the user's work that AI helped optimize. It is a hybrid artifact that wouldn't exist without either party.
Break 02 · Medium dissolves into Cognition
The carrier has entered the thinking.
AI is not a carrier of content delivered to a receiver. AI is in the cognitive loop. The user's reasoning happens with and through AI, not against an AI-delivered prompt. Cognitive offloading, frame-setting, the completion of half-formed thoughts: these are not "media effects" on a downstream receiver. They are co-cognition, distributed across human and AI in continuous intra-action.
Break 03 · Social Actor dissolves into Identity
The mimicry has become constitution.
The CASA paradigm framed social responsiveness as users treating computers as if they were social. AI configurations dissolve the as-if. Across sustained interactions, the user does not just respond socially. They are becoming someone, with the AI continuously in the configuration that produces that becoming. Identity is what is being shaped, not what is doing the shaping.
Wave 4 · Constitutive Technology
Constitutive Technology
"Computing that constitutes rather than persuades." The user is no longer a pre-formed subject; the triad names what gets constituted in the configuration.
Practice
Definition
Technology configures what you do: the workflow, the output, the practice itself. AI is in the practice, not adjacent to it. The work is hybrid by construction.
Examples
Drafting with AI, debugging with copilot, AI-pair-programmed code, AI-co-authored briefs, configured research with retrieval-augmented systems.
What it makes visible. Practice is constituted with AI from the first move. The output does not pre-exist the configuration that produced it. The diagnostic question is: what practice is being enacted here, with what consequences?
Academic background
Verbeek 2011 (mediation theory) · Ihde 1990 (phenomenology of technology) · Suchman 2007 (Human–Machine Reconfigurations) · Schatzki 2001 (practice theory) · Pickering 1995 (mangle of practice) · Schrage 2020 (recommendation engines)
Cognition
Definition
Technology configures how you think. It frames, narrows, completes, suggests. AI is in the cognitive loop, distributed across human and machine in real time.
Examples
Frame-setting by an AI's first response · cognitive offloading of memory and synthesis · AI-completed reasoning chains · meta-cognitive scaffolding · hybrid problem-formulation.
What it makes visible. Thinking is hybrid by default. The cognitive boundary between user and AI is not a stable edge but a continuously-redrawn agential cut. The diagnostic question is: who is thinking what, with whom?
Academic background
Clark & Chalmers 1998 (The Extended Mind) · Hutchins 1995 (Cognition in the Wild) · Hayles 1999 (How We Became Posthuman) · Vallor on AI and reasoning · contemporary work on cognitive offloading
Identity
Definition
Technology configures who you are. Continuously, at identity-level, in change that has no off state. The Schrage becoming-question at scale.
Examples
A year of AI-integrated practice reshaping professional identity · recommendation engines shaping aesthetic and ethical preference · LLM-mediated communication shifting tone and selfhood · Promethean shame and its productive forms.
What it makes visible. Identity is the deepest layer of constitution. The diagnostic question, Schrage's question, is: who are you becoming, and is that the becoming you want?
Academic background
Schrage 2020 (Recommendation Engines; becoming-question) · Forlano 2017 (posthuman design) · Haraway 1985 (Cyborg Manifesto) · Barad 2007 (agential realism) · Frauenberger 2019 (Entanglement HCI)
§ 02The structural argument

Why the wave-four triad replaces Fogg's rather than extending it.

Fogg's triad was extraordinarily generative. It gave the field a vocabulary for distinguishing what computing was doing in any persuasive design: instrumenting a behavior, delivering an experience, or relating socially. It produced two decades of intervention research that depended on those distinctions. The triad is not wrong. It is wave-three.

The wave-four triad does not refine Fogg's three categories. It changes the question being asked. Fogg asked: what is the technology being, in relation to a pre-formed user? The wave-four triad asks: what is the configuration constituting, across human and machine? The shift in the unit of the question is itself the wave-four move. Once the configuration becomes the unit, "tool / medium / social actor" stops being a productive typology. Those distinctions were ways of cutting up technology-acting-on-a-finished-subject, and there is no finished subject left to act upon.

This is the same structural pattern that played out at the individual-outcome layer (User Experience to Constitutive Identity) and at the organizational layer (Digital Transformation to Constitutive Configuration). At every layer, the wave-three frame preserves the pre-formed subject as the thing the technology acts on, and the wave-four update names what is happening once that subject is recognized as configured-into-being rather than configured-around. The wave-four triad, Practice, Cognition, and Identity, names the three layers at which constitution is occurring on the human side of the configuration.

The triad nests. Practice changes precede cognitive changes precede identity changes. A new way of drafting (practice) reorganizes how the user thinks about a class of problems (cognition), and over sustained use begins to reshape what the user understands themselves to be as a professional (identity). The timescales differ: practice can shift in days, cognition in weeks, identity in years. This nesting makes the triad analytically useful rather than just descriptive. A diagnostic can target a specific layer and trace what is shifting at that layer, while remaining alert to what is shifting at adjacent layers.

One careful note. The wave-four triad does not abolish Fogg's. Persuasive techniques continue to operate inside constitutive arrangements. A tool layer still serves goals once goals are formed. A medium layer still delivers content within the configurational arrangement. Social cues still mediate AI relationships. The wave-four claim is that those operations are no longer the dominant mode and no longer the unit of analysis. Constitution is the new unit. Persuasion is one effect inside it.

The triad does not replace persuasion. It absorbs it. The unit of analysis becomes the configuration; persuasion becomes one of the things the configuration produces.
§ 03How to read the triad

Three uses for the wave-four triad once it is on the table.

The triad is not just a theoretical update. It is a working frame, for research, for design, and for organizational diagnostics.

Use 01 · As research lens
For studying human–AI configurations.
The triad gives empirical research a layered target. Studies can focus on the practice layer (what work is being done together), the cognition layer (how thinking is being redistributed), or the identity layer (what professional or personal becoming is occurring), and trace dependencies across layers. The lab's Configurational Probes operationalize this targeting empirically.
Use 02 · As design frame
For asking the right question of an AI system.
Designers using the triad as a frame ask: What practice is this system constituting? What cognition is it shaping? What identity is it producing across sustained use? These three questions surface trade-offs that the persuasive frame ("is this changing behavior?") does not. Constitution is upstream of behavior change.
Use 03 · As organizational diagnostic
For seeing what AI is doing to a team.
At the team and organizational scale, the triad maps onto the 3×3 framework. Practice corresponds to changes in workflow and decision rights. Cognition corresponds to changes in how teams reason collectively. Identity corresponds to changes in what the organization understands itself to be. The diagnostic X-ray reads across all three layers simultaneously.
The figure as a paper artifact

Beyond Persuasion: Constitutive Technology and the Wave-Four Update to Fogg's Functional Triad.

This visualization is structured to function as a figure in the eventual paper of this title: the wave-four successor argument made in print, with the lab as its named source. The figure carries the structural argument visually. The prose carries the citation work and the empirical operationalization through Configurational Probes.

The Configurations Lab · An independent research practice
Bogotá · Chicago · est. 2024
v2.0 · 2026