on the board the desired 3/4 of 2/3 a cup.
Similar to Suchman’s canoe example, the dieter example of using external resources to solve a math problem paved the way for rethinking cognition in practice rather than in abstraction, and the insight that mathematics is for something; the mathematical abstractions taught in schools don’t necessarily transfer well to use outside the classroom. A number of other examples in Lave’s book are used to emphasize how people use the resources from the context they are in to solve problems. Together, the examples convincingly demonstrate how activities in settings are complex improvisations that have much variability. Doing math when out there takes a different form in different situations. One of the outcomes of this early form of in the wild research was to make studying everyday and common sense reasoning acceptable, by giving it credibility and respectability (cf. Rogers, 1993).
2.4 COGNITION IN THE WILD
Ed Hutchins published Cognition in the Wild a few years later in 1995. His seminal book was also very much a reaction against the status quo; but more broadly than either Lucy Suchman’s or Jean Lave’s efforts. His beef was very much a rally against “cognition in captivity” and “disembodied cognition.” He argued that much of mainstream thinking about cognitive science for the past 30 years had resulted in systematic distortions of our understanding of the nature of cognition. Instead, he proposed that cognition should be studied in its natural habitat and that, in doing so, it would change our ideas about its nature. He argued that what was problematic with the classical cognitive science approach, was not its conceptual framework per se, but its exclusive focus on modeling the cognitive processes that occurred within one individual. As an alternative, he argued that what was needed was for the same conceptual framework to be applied to a range of cognitive systems, including socio-technical systems at large (i.e., groups of individual agents interacting with each other in particular environments). To do this, he proposed studying cognition beyond the skin of the individual, encompassing the distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artifacts, and internal and external representations.
Hutchins also argued that in order to reveal the properties and processes of such a cognitive system required conducting an ethnographic study of a setting. Paying close attention to the activities of people and their interactions with material media was considered fundamental to understanding how such a cognitive system works. Hutchins’ intricate analyses of what happens inside a cognitive system at both the micro and macro levels were at the time groundbreaking. One of his most well known examples is an account of how the cockpit plus air traffic control tower system work together as a cognitive system. He illustrates this eloquently by describing the joint activity and accomplishment of a situation when a pilot and co-pilot fly their plane to a higher altitude in conjunction with listening to and talking with air traffic controllers. It demonstrates just how much coordinated activity depends on the orchestration of mechanisms through which co-located and distributed people make small signals to each other in order to progress a sequenced activity, and the levels of inter-subjectivity involved for different states of the system. A missed cue can easily result in a misunderstanding, especially if someone is not expecting it. These can happen even for the most routine of activities which then requires the cognitive system to engage in various forms of repair work and sometimes the adoption of workarounds to get the activity back on track.
The legacy of the distributed cognition approach is its demonstration of how insightful it can be to analyze the complex interdependencies between people and artifacts in their work activities—which is often overlooked in other kinds of cognitive analyses. Hutchins approach to “cognition in the wild” clearly showed how important micro-analyses can be to reveal the multi-layered work that a cognitive system has to do—and where subtle actions, such as a glance, a gesture, or a flick of a switch at a particular time, are often integral to the coordination and mediation of teamwork.
2.5 EMBODIED INTERACTION APPROACHES
Since these early pioneering “in the wild” theory books, there have been further writings in HCI and cognitive science that have stressed the importance of understanding the ways people are closely coupled with their environment. These include seminal works that view interaction as embodied (Dourish, 2001), cognition as external (Scaife and Rogers, 1996), and perception as enactive (Noë, 2004). In the 2000s, and to this day, conceptualizing human-computer interactions as embodied in real-world contexts has become an influential approach (Marshall et al., 2013). In its broadest sense, embodied interaction refers to the “everyday, mundane experience” (Dourish, 2001, p. 125) and the ways that people understand the world through their accomplishment of practical activities. However, many questions remain as to exactly what it means in practice and whether it can be considered a coherent program of research in HCI.
Many of the ideas about embodied interaction, which have been developed in HCI, built upon the phenomenological ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. These earlier philosophical writings were largely concerned with the essence of what it means to be, to see, to have a conscience and be aware of the world. The “lived” experiences were accounted for in terms of many aspects, but primarily in terms of space, time, and what it means to live in the world. Likewise, McCarthy and Wright’s (2004) influential Technology as Experience framework, concerned with the “felt” experience of being in the world, was based on phenomenology, and in particular, the writings of John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin. Instead of describing HCI in terms of how usable a device or interface is, they argued for explaining user’s interaction with technology more in terms of their felt experience, i.e., how something is felt by them. In so doing, they make the case for understanding users in terms of their whole experience of a technology, especially how they makes sense of it in the context of use, by considering the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of their interactions with technology. This stance emphasizes the importance of understanding how people do not just use technology, but that they also live with it.
Contemporary philosophers have also become interested in understanding cognition in the world. Particularly notable, is Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ (1998) “Extended Mind” hypothesis—the underlying idea being that the mind does not have to be contained within the brain or physical body, but can be extended to elements of the environment. The hypothesis suggests how technology continues to extend and increase what humans are capable of doing, enabling them to make more rapid decisions, understand complex situations, and find solutions to difficult problems. Since, Clark and Chalmers ideas have been taken up and elaborated by other philosophers, including Ward and Stapleton’s (2012) provocative paper, “Es are good. Cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, affective and extended.” A central idea is that tools and artifacts are absorbed into the body schema, extending and changing it. An example that is often used to illustrate this idea of extended cognition is the blind man with his stick—where the stick becomes an extension of his arm/hand, extending the boundary of the space surrounding his body and perception of the world.
Alva Noë (2009) also wrote cogently about how perception is not like looking at pictures in the mind; instead we perceive the world by gradual active inquiry and exploration of it. A central tenet of his position is that given that we spend all our lives embodied and situated in the world around us, it follows that our perceptual experiences are acquired through our bodily experiences with the world. Hence, it does not make sense to understand the mind, consciousness, or problem-solving as something that occurs in the brain. We are in the moment in a shared context—whether it is a football match, having dinner together, or engaged in banter on social media. A challenge is how to take into account this context when designing new technologies to aid, augment, or provide new opportunities for cognition, social interactions or cultural experiences.
Technologies, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and haptic feedback, have been able to provide philosophers with new interactive tools with which to investigate and validate embodied theories of body/mind. For example, Bird et al. (2009) explored how they could design tactile interfaces to mediate novel sensory information to enable people to experience the technology as an extension of
