Assignment 1: Distributed Cognition

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The theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies.
We are interested not only in what people know, but in  how they go about using what they know to do what they do.
This means that in order to understand situated human cognition, it is not enough to know how the mind processes information. It is also necessary to know how the information to be processed is arranged in the material and social world.
And now the answers to the questions:
1. Give some examples from the text of how people create affordances in the physical world and on a computer display to facilitate their work.
EXAMPLE 1: Screen space often has no natural correlate in physical space. Thus when we rearrange the layout of directory windows, it makes no sense to ask whether we have brought those directories closer on the hard drive. The screen as desktop allows us to interpret such actions as analogous to shifting folders about on a flat desk, but folders can be made to pop in and out of existence, or to change in size, which again has no easy counterpart in the real world. The same applies when one changes the way files in a directory are displayed. It is certainly conceivable that alphabetizing, sorting by recency, or sorting by size are actions that change the order in which files are written on a disk. But it is more plausible to think of these as actions on the labels of files, not as actions on the files themselves.
Because we manipulate icons in icon space it is possible to take advan- tage of the way they are displayed to help us further simplify our activity. We can opportunistically exploit structural possibilities of the interface. Files may be left near the trash can to remind us that we need to delete them. Files that are to be used for a single project can be bunched together, or aliased so that they appear to be in two folders at once.
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the train- ing programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
EXAMPLE 3: In direct-manipulation interfaces the objects on-screen are meant to be so closely coupled to the actual computational objects we are dealing with that we are supposed to feel as if we are manipulating the real objects themselves and not just their stand-ins. To achieve this feeling of immediacy [Hutchins et al. 1985], it is essential that meaningful interface actions have meaningful counterparts in the system. Thus, in dragging an icon of a file from one folder to another we are not to think we are just moving icons, but rather moving the actual folders and all their contents.
2. Give some examples of how people offload cognitive activity to the environment.
EXAMPLE 1: Cockpit episode in which the flight engineer explains to the captain and first officer that they have a fuel leak. He interacts with the panel both as if it is the fuel system it depicts, and, at other times, as if it is just a representation of the fuel system (when he flicks a gauge with his finger to get the needle to move, for example).
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the training programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
3. Give some examples of internal and external representational states, and of how they are coordinated.
Yvonne Rogers: The Distributed Cognition approach emphasises the distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artefacts and internal and external representations in terms of a common language of 'representational states' and 'media'.
EXAMPLE 1: Ideas of the architect are composed in the computer software and distributed back to the company.
EXAMPLE 2: The Knowledge about our plant`s geography is printed to the globe.
EXAMPLE 3: My knowledge about specific topic is inserted into my blog.