Payal Prabhu
Assignment 9
Due: Wednesday, February 20th, 2002
Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research
The authors could probably have spent a little more time on the ship navigation system and the airline cockpit examples to illustrate the resutls of those cognitive ethnography studies.
The main message of the article is that people form tight bonds with their environments. Human-computer interaction has to be viewed within the sociotechnical context of the environment and only in doing so can the design of systems be greatly enhanced.
Could you please explain the idea of "active representations" again? And maybe say a few lines about the two examples (cockpit and ship navigation system).
Distributed cognition:Distributed cognition implies that cognitive powers extend beyond the individual to cover interactions between humans and their environment (tools, resources, materials, etc). It is a broad concept that includes phenomena that emerge in social interactions as well as interactions between people and artifacts in the environment.
Ethnography:Ethnography, roughly, is a study of the effect of the environment (and cultures) on human cognition; examining the way humans interact with and use the available tools and materials, and vice versa.
Active Representations:Not too clear on this one.
"In future work environments people will pursue their goals in collaboration with elements of the social and material world":This is the theory of distributed cognition that emphasizes the importance of understanding human cognition beyond the individual's mind. The future of HCI lies in examining and utilizing group interactions with computer systems and everyday devices.
The "old" foundations placed emphasis on the individual directly interacting with the system without taking into account other environmental factors that could essentially enhance the cognitive design process. The user typically manipulated the system manually to achieve a goal. Examples of this would be a word processor, and GUI(s) for operating systems. As compared to the systems developed with the theory of distributed cognition, these systems are not that old. One of the factors of distributed cognition is the interaction of the individual with the tools. Systems like the word processor or spreadsheets can be considered as tools for the individual's use; these software systems do have (albeit limited) capacity to record histories, suggest tips, etc. I believe, the "new" foundations are definitely much more encompassing though not altogether novel.
The recording of histories would be a good extension for the EDC system. This could be done with audio and video media. In fact, I think attempts are already being made in this direction.