Distributed Cognition: Towards a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research

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Distributed Cognition Towards a New Foundation
for Human-Computer Interaction Research

• Authors James Hollan, Edwin Hutchins, David
  Kirsh
• Presented by Luis Bathen

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Outline

• Theory behind Distributed Cognition
• A Distributed Cognition Approach at HCI
• Socially Distributed Cognition
• Embodied Cognition
• Culture and Cognition
• Ethnography of Distributed Cognitive Systems
• Integrated Framework for Research
• Ethnographies
• Beyond Direct Manipulation
• History-Enriched Digital Objects
• Intelligent Use of Space
• Conclusions

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Outline

• Theory behind Distributed Cognition
• A Distributed Cognition Approach at HCI
• Socially Distributed Cognition
• Embodied Cognition
• Culture and Cognition
• Ethnography of Distributed Cognitive Systems
• Integrated Framework for Research
• Ethnographies
• Beyond Direct Manipulation
• History-Enriched Digital Objects
• Intelligent Use of Space
• Conclusions

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Theory behind Distributed Cognition

• The term cognition comes from the Latin term
  cognoscere, which means to know and it is
  commonly referred to as the human ability to
  process information
• The traditional view of cognition in HCI (not
  limited to HCI, also in other fields like
  psychology, AI, etc.) limits it the individual
  processes within a mind
• This limits us to think of only a user level and
  how he/she will interact with a system
• This model is insufficient to really examine
  todays complex systems because they do not take
  into account interaction between individuals
• As systems become more complex, and they scale to
  larger and larger systems, an individual will no
  longer have complete control over it, rather, it
  requires multiple individuals to collaborate in
  order to accomplish a goal
• Navigational Systems (Ships and Airplanes)
• Distributed Cognition tries to extend the concept
  of what is cognitive beyond the individual

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Theory behind Distributed Cognition (Cont.)

• There are two main principles that separate the
  classical view of cognition and distributed
  cognition
• Boundaries The classical view of cognition
  limits it to just an individual. Distributed
  cognition looks for cognitive processes wherever
  they occur on the basis of functional
  relationships of elements that participate
  together in the process
• Range of mechanisms participating in a cognitive
  process The traditional view of cognition looks
  at the manipulation of symbols within an
  individual, where as Distributed Cognition looks
  at a broader class of cognitive events that are
  not necessarily encompassed by the skin or skull
• When these principles are applied to human
  behavior in the wild there are at least three
  interesting kinds of cognitive processes
• Cognitive processes may be distributed across the
  members of a group
• Cognitive processes may involve coordination
  between internal and external (material or
  environment) structure
• Processes may be distributed through time in such
  a way that the products of earlier events can
  transform the nature of later events

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Outline

• Theory behind Distributed Cognition
• A Distributed Cognition Approach at HCI
• Socially Distributed Cognition
• Embodied Cognition
• Culture and Cognition
• Ethnography of Distributed Cognitive Systems
• Integrated Framework for Research
• Ethnographies
• Beyond Direct Manipulation
• History-Enriched Digital Objects
• Intelligent Use of Space
• Conclusions

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A Distributed Cognition Approach

• Socially Distributed Cognition
• Anthropologists and sociologists studying
  knowledge and memory, AI researchers building
  systems that do distributed problem solving,
  social psychologists studying small group problem
  solving, etc., have all arrived at the same idea
• Social organization is itself a form of cognitive
  architecture
• Cognitive processes involve trajectories of
  information transmission and transformations, so
  the patterns of these information trajectories
  reflect some underlying architecture
• Rationale Since social organization plus the
  structure added by the context of activity
  largely determines which way information flows
  through a group, then social organization may
  itself be viewed as a form of cognitive
  architecture
• Distributed cognition means more than that
  processes are socially distributed across members
  of a group, rather, it encompasses the group
  members as well as their interactions with other
  people as well as with their environments

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A Distributed Cognition Approach (Cont.)

• From the Society of Mind each brain contains
  hundreds of different types of machines,
  interconnected in specific ways which predestine
  that brain to become a large, diverse society of
  partially specialized agencies.
• Implication the cognition of an individual is
  also distributed
• Social organization in a ship there is a
  captain, navigators, radio operators, engine
  engineers, etc., all working to move the ship

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Embodied Cognition

• The only way to understand the mind, and how it
  works is to consider the body and what helps the
  body and mind to function
• Tools and work materials are not just stimuli for
  a cognitive system, but at times, they become
  part of the system itself
• A blind persons cane is part of his/her world
• A cell biologists microscope is a central part
  of the way they view the world
• A tool can be integrated in the way people think,
  see, and control activities and part of the
  distributed system of cognitive control

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Culture and Cognition

• The study of cognition cannot be separated from
  the study of culture because agents live in
  complex cultural environments
• Culture emerges out of the activity of human
  agents in their historical contexts, as mental,
  material and social structures interact
• Culture in the form of history of material
  artifacts and social practices, shapes cognitive
  processes, particularly cognitive processes that
  are distributed over agents, artifacts and
  environments
• By moving the boundaries on cognition from the
  individual, it becomes part of culture
• Cognitive sciences traditionally view culture as
  a body of content on which the cognitive
  processes of individual persons operate
• From distributed cognitions perspective, culture
  shapes the cognitive processes of systems that
  transcends individuals

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Culture and Cognition (Cont.)

• The basic idea behind the connection between
  culture and cognition is in that culture,
  particularly, a persons environment serves as a
  reservoir of resources for learning, problem
  solving and reasoning
• Culture is a process that accumulates partial
  solutions to frequently encountered problems
• Without these partial solutions we as agents
  would have to find solutions to these problems
  from scratch, hence, culture allows us humans to
  learn from our ancestors experiences
• Of course, culture is not without its evils
  since it programs us to a way of thinking, and
  there might be problems that could be considered
  unsolvable using this one way of thinking where
  the problem may in fact be solvable if one was to
  take a different approach

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Ethnography of Distributed Cognitive Systems

• Ethnography by definition, ethnography refers to
  the genre of writing that presents qualitative
  description of human social phenomena, based on
  fieldwork
• Earlier ethnographic methods on cognitive focused
  on understanding the meaning of words
• Ethnography of distributed cognitive systems
  retains the interest of the individual mind, but
  adds to that a focus on the material and social
  means of the construction of action and meaning
• It is important to emphasize the ethnography of
  distributed cognitive systems focuses not only on
  the meaning of things or what people know but
  also, action, or how people go about doing
  things, how they use what they know to do what
  they do
• Action was ignored by previous approaches, this
  is no longer the case in the new model
• Cognitive ethnography brings together many
  specific data collection and analysis techniques
  such as interviewing, surveys, participant
  observation, and audio and video recording
• Because understanding both the individual, what
  he/she knows and what actions he/she takes based
  on the knowledge he/she has, it is imperative to
  use experts and observe their behavior while they
  work in their environments
• Their interactions with their surroundings as
  well as how data is used need to be observed in
  order to design more useful tools

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Outline

• Theory behind Distributed Cognition
• A Distributed Cognition Approach at HCI
• Socially Distributed Cognition
• Embodied Cognition
• Culture and Cognition
• Ethnography of Distributed Cognitive Systems
• Integrated Framework for Research
• Ethnographies
• Beyond Direct Manipulation
• History-Enriched Digital Objects
• Intelligent Use of Space
• Conclusions

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Integrated Framework for Research

• The proposed approach for human-computer
  interaction research integrates distributed
  cognition with methods for design of digital work
  materials
• Distributed cognition theory identifies a set of
  core principles that widely apply
• People establish and coordinate different types
  of structure in their environment
• It takes effort to maintain coordination
• People offload cognitive effort to the
  environment whenever practical
• There are improved dynamics of cognitive of
  load-balancing available in social organization

Distributed Cognition
Ethnography
Work Places
Experiments
Work Materials
Integrated Research Activity Map
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Integrated Framework for Research (Cont.)

• These principles serve to identify classes of
  phenomena that merit observation and
  documentation
• Cognitive ethnography has methods for observing,
  documenting and analyzing such phenomena,
  particularly, information flow, cognitive
  properties of systems, social organizations, and
  cultural processes
• Cognitive ethnography seeks to understand what
  things mean to the participants in an activity
  and to document the means by which the meanings
  are created
• Unfortunately, there are times when tools are
  used for other means than for what they were
  originally intended, expert users make
  opportunistic use of environmental use to
  simplify tasks, and this phenomena can only be
  captured through observation
• Consider the following example while observing
  a group of pilots, it was observed that they
  routinely displayed the test pattern on the
  weather radar as a reminder that a final fuel
  transfer was in progress
• Fork as a knive

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Integrated Framework for Research (Cont.)

• While the study of cognition in the wild can
  answer many kinds of questions about the
  workplace, the richness of real world settings
  places limits on the power of observation, this
  is where focused experiments come in place
• After observing certain phenomena in the wild
  tests can be conducted in order to fully
  understand the behavior
• Ethnography offers clever ways of getting things
  done that can be incorporated into a new design.
  
• Experiments can be run in order to refine the
  results obtained from ethnography which in turn
  can be introduced into the design
• This can all be done in a form of feed back look,
  where on each pass, new uses for different things
  as well as ways of doing things can be refined
  and introduced into the design

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Ethnographies

• During the 80s, Professor Hutchins conducted an
  extended cognitive ethnography of navigation
  aboard U.S. Navy ships.
• It was based on this ethnography that the very
  notion of distributed cognition and the need for
  cognitive ethnography arose from the observation
  that the outcomes that matter to the ship were
  not determined by the cognitive properties of a
  single individual but instead were a product of
  the interaction of many individuals and their
  tools
• From this ethnography, distributed cognition was
  developed as well as the introduction of tools
  into the cognitive processes
• It documented the social organization of work and
  showed how learning happened both in individuals
  and at the organizational level
• It talked about how navigators had mental models
  of the ships and how they were able to see
  themselves in these models, by doing so, they
  were able to detect errors in their tools.
• Since error detection is a key cognitive property
  of this system, it would be nice to know how
  navigators perceived these models in their minds
• Although observation detected this behavior, it
  alone was not enough to understand it, hence the
  need for expert users and focused experiments to
  understand it

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Beyond Direct Manipulation

• One of the key focus of research based on
  distributed cognition is the nature of
  representations and the ways that people use
  representations to do work
• This goes back to the use of icons, and metaphors
  to represent things
• Desktop/PC, Files, Folders, etc.
• Ethnography results showed that people often go
  back and forward between representations of items
  and the actual things they represent
• For instance, when we move the icon of a file
  from a folder to another, we dont think we are
  just moving an icon, but rather, we are moving
  the actual contents of the files
• There are limits to how well a representation can
  resemble the thing that it represents. For
  instance, in a mac, if we drag a CD or a Floppy
  disk to the trashcan, it does not actually mean
  that we are throwing the items away, rather, we
  are going to eject them

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Beyond Direct Manipulation (Cont.)

• Because we manipulate icons in space, it is
  possible to exploit them. For instance
• We can leave files we want to delete later near
  the trashcan
• We can group files we need for a project in a
  single location
• As users become more familiar with an
  environment, they become expert users, adapt to
  the environment, and find new ways of achieving
  their goals
• As system complexity grows, it is very important
  for the field of HCI to understand how agents
  become closely coupled with their environments

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History-Enriched Digital Objects

• In the real world, history of use is sometimes
  available and informs us of ways to interact with
  objects
• A well-worn section of a door handle suggests
  where to grasp it
• A used book with highlights might suggest
  important subjects
• In the office, the most used pieces of paper are
  usually at the top of stacks of paper
• We can translate this history of use notion from
  the real world to the digital world
• Digital objects can contain usage information and
  history data like who used it last, when it was
  used and for how long
• For instance, a website that logs usage, can keep
  track of what subjects were browsed the most, who
  looked at them, for how long, and so on
• It is beneficial for users who are looking for
  the most recent data or for the most commonly
  viewed pages
• Of course, privacy issues come into place, but
  users can be allowed to keep control of what data
  is logged
• History in systems environments can be used by
  the users to become more efficient users, and to
  build upon the experiences of other users

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Intelligent Use of Space

• By observing peoples behavior we can see what
  things are important to them, and how they
  arrange items to fit their needs
• A left handed hot-dog vendor can position his
  ketchup/mustard/etc. to his left while a right
  handed hot-dog vendor can do the opposite
• It is important to understand how users arrange
  items because it is part of their thinking
  process
• In Kirsh (1995) functions of space were
  classified into three main categories
• Spatial arrangement that simplify choice things
  that need more attention next to each other,
  order of things to be processed, helps makes
  decision problems less complex
• Spatial arrangement that simplify perception
  chef differentiates between identical spoons by
  placing them near different spices, jigsaw
  puzzles where similar pieces are grouped together
  thereby exploiting capacity of the visual system
• Spatial arrangement that simplify internal
  computation largest spaghetti noodle can be
  singled out by striking the bundle on the table,
  the max is computed by using the material and the
  properties of the world

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Conclusions

• The authors proposed a new methodology for the
  study of cognition, or the interaction between
  humans and systems
• Their work extends the study of cognition from
  the individual mind to the individual and its
  surroundings including the tools that aid them
  with their daily activities and their
  interactions with their peers
• They propose a research framework that consists
  of distributed cognition, ethnography,
  experiments and the users environment to design
  complex systems

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Questions?