to recognize how people solve problems, create meaning, and make decisions. That is precisely the focus of subsequent chapters in this book. Debating the existence of mental representations is part of building theories, but largely irrelevant for creating more understandable information. Where scholars want scientific truth, we need analytic utility: a way to examine problems of understanding so that we can create better ways of thinking. In short, we’re more interested in utility than in truth.
Taking embodiment seriously means there is much to be gained by shifting our position away from the brainbound view and toward the radical one. That means recognizing that our default view is the brainbound model and the limitations it imposes. But it doesn’t mean we have to also become radicalized. Representations and how we transform them, whether in our head or in the world, are a useful way of looking at problems of understanding. In fact, much of this book is about how we can create understanding by moving representations out of the head, putting them into the world, and using technologies to manipulate them. As authors, we like the way Andy Clark puts it: Some problems seem to be “representation hungry.”27
Seeing the World Through a New Lens
How does this extended view of cognition help us see the world and the way people make sense of information, in a new way? What does it provide over the standard brainbound model? For now, let’s consider a single, illustrative example. Imagine you’re in a kickoff meeting for a new project. First, let’s consider the usual way these meetings proceed ...
The Brainbound View
More than likely, one person is leading the meeting. This person has prepared a PowerPoint deck chock-full of information. Attendees are expected to listen and then ask questions. Some take notes on their laptops, or maybe on paper. Everyone expects a copy of the presentation to review later, which excuses (although no one would admit this) the partial attention given to the presenter. And, as you’d expect, half of these people will spend much of the meeting discretely dealing with emails or otherwise being distracted.
The entire meeting is structured around an information transmission model: I have information. You should pay attention and file this away. Understanding depends on how well information is communicated and how carefully people pay attention. We might easily imagine some future technology, let’s call it PowerPoint Plus, where you could attach a cable from your laptop to your brain and download the slides directly. Given how these meetings work, this sounds appealing: skip the boring stuff and download the information straight into your brain. The brainbound model says this is at least a theory.
The Extended View
Here’s an alternative way that we might design this meeting through our lens of understanding.
People are themselves viewed as part of a distributed system of cognitive resources—we believe each person in attendance brings with them a set of experiences and perspectives that are probably vital to the meeting topic. In addition to the people in attendance, the whiteboard, the markers, the sticky notes—even the height of the table—are all viewed as potential resources to be designed. The leader views their role as more of a facilitator than speaker, more as a cognitive enabler than an information transmitter. This means that attention is managed through active learning and sharing. Care is taken to create a psychologically safe environment. Rather than marching people through a bullet-laden deck, a single problem statement is handed to all, with an opening challenge to explore options and share ideas. If there was background knowledge, it was distributed ahead of time for folks to read. Knowledge is curated rather than transmitted. Ideas are drawn together, on the board, with markers or sticky notes handed to people to make their ideas visible, or to show how their idea fits into or contradicts what someone else has rendered. The meeting moves fluidly between moments of standing and sitting, depending upon the activity, as the facilitator knows there’s a correlation between the body and thinking. The facilitator is also careful to frame and reframe the problem in many different ways (and encourages others to do the same), challenging how this problem is viewed. In short, people are actively working and learning together, to make sense of the project ahead (see Figure 2.5).
There’s a lot to unpack in this second scenario. It illustrates many of the principles that run throughout our work, principles that guide how we work and think and create understanding with information. These principles might be stated as follows:
• Attend to every association
• Make learning active
• See learning as a communal activity
• Make concepts tangible
FIGURE 2.5 Two very different kinds of meetings—one originating with a brain-bound view of cognition, the other with an extended view of cognition.
• Make concepts visible
• Design the environment
• Explore multiple frames
• Use the whole body
• Make it safe to share
Although this is an incomplete list, we provide it to show how all this theoretical discourse might be applied in a daily activity. Our concerns are practical rather than theoretical—we’re more interested in utility than truth. First, how do people understand information, especially when they have a lot of it? And second, how can we make information more understandable? Understanding the underlying theories of cognition provides us with a chance to radically reframe how we approach all problems of understanding.
Becoming Smarter
In the beginning, the web was all text, no video, not even pictures. That changed in 1993 when Marc Andreesen and a colleague, Eric Bina, released Mosaic, the first graphical web browser. This was the moment when “several million [people] noticed the web might be better than sex.”28 Mosaic led to Netscape, which attracted people to the web in droves and paved the way for everything from Wi-Fi and smartphones to social media and ebooks. We are all familiar with this evolution: more powerful technologies that allow us to do more powerful things with information.
This chapter has followed another evolution, one not widely known outside of graduate seminars and scientific journals: a new science of mind that gives us a different perspective on how we understand information. This book aims to stitch these two parallel evolutions together. In doing so, we echo the words of the cognitive scientist Don Norman, who wrote “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained.”29 Precisely.
We don’t just think. We create tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more, and solve bigger problems. Norman reminds us that our ability to understand is limited when we try to do everything in our head, especially when we have lots of information and when the challenges are daunting, say cancer, sustainable energy, or space travel. We need to appreciate the complex interplay between prior associations, things we bring into and manipulate in the world, and how we figure things out by collaborating and cooperating with others.
If we treat sensemaking as brainbound, the cost of understanding will be expensive, perhaps too costly. This is not to say we should never rely on what the brain can do. But when
