Examples of cognitive artifacts include: a string tied around the
finger as a reminder, a calendar, a shopping list, and a computer.
In the modern world, many cognitive artifacts rely on literacy and
numeracy skills. Lists of various kinds support not only memory, but
reasoning about classification and comparison. Goody (1977) argues
that the advent of literacy fundamentally transformed human cognition.
Non-linguistic inscriptions such as maps, charts, graphs and tables
enable the superimposition of representations of otherwise
incommensurable items (Latour, 1986). Tabular formats for data are at
least 3000 years old (Ifrah, 1987) and support reasoning about the
coordination of differing category structures, types and quantities of
goods, for example.
People often engage in activities characterized by the incremental
creation and use of cognitive artifacts. Doing place-value arithmetic
amounts to successively producing artifact structure, examining it,
and then producing more structure (Rumelhart, et.al, 1986). Everyday
tasks such as cooking involve a continuous process of creating and
using cognitive artifacts. Kirsh (1995) refers to the systematic
creation and use of spatial structure in the placement of cooking
implements and ingredients as the intelligent use of space. Here, the
arrangement of artifacts is itself a cognitive artifact.
Norman (1993) relaxes the definition of cognitive artifacts to include
mental as well as material elements. Rules of thumb, proverbs,
mnemonics, and memorized procedures are clearly artifactual and play a
similar role to objects in some cognitive processes (Shore, 1996). Of
course, material cognitive artifacts are only useful when they are
brought into coordination with a corresponding mental element - the
knowledge of how to use them.
The behaviors of other actors in a social setting can serve as
cognitive artifacts. Activity theory (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Wertsch,
1985) emphasizes the role of others in creating a "zone of proximal
development" in which the learning child is capable of cognitive
activities that it could not do alone. Activity theory takes words and
concepts to be powerful psychological tools that organize thought and
make higher-level cognitive processes possible. In this view,
language becomes the ultimate cognitive artifact system, and cognitive
artifacts are absolutely fundamental to human consciousness and what
it means to be human.
One of the principal findings of studies of cognition in everyday or
real world settings is that people make opportunistic use of
structure. The method of loci in which an orator who must remember a
speech associates elements of the speech with architectural features
of the place where the speech is delivered is a well-known
example. Lave, et.al (1984) examined the way that shoppers made use of
the structure of supermarkets. The layout of the supermarket itself
with the orderly arrangement of items on the shelf is the ultimate
icon of the shopping list. Regular shoppers develop routing
trajectories through this space, thus creating a sequence of reminders
of items to buy. Scribner (1984) documented the ways that dairy
workers take advantage of the layouts of standard diary product cases
in filling orders. Beach (1988) went to bartender's school and
learned how to use the shapes of drink glasses and their placement on
the bar to encode the drinks in a multiple drink order. Hutchins
(1995b) showed how airline pilots take advantage of an incidental
feature of the airspeed indicator to identify +/- 5 knot deviations
from target speeds by looking at the display in a particular way
rather than by calculating. Frake (1985) shows how medieval sailors
in northern Europe used the structure of the compass card to "see" the
times of high and low tides at major ports. In each of these cases
people use designed objects in ways that were not intended by the
artifact's designers.
Sometimes even structures that are not made by humans play the same
role as cognitive artifacts. Micronesian navigators can see the night
sky as a 32 point compass that is used to express courses between
islands (Gladwin, 1970; Lewis, 1972), and forms the foundation for a
complexly layered mental image that represents distance/rate/time
problems in analog form (Hutchins & Hinton, 1984; Hutchins, 1995a).
The Micronesian navigator uses the night sky in the same way that many
manufactured artifacts are used.
There is a continuum from the case in which a cognitive artifact is
used as designed, to cases of cognitive uses of artifacts that were
made for other purposes, to completely opportunistic uses of natural
structure.
If one focuses on the products of cognitive activity, cognitive
artifacts seem to amplify human abilities. A calculator seems to
amplify my ability to do arithmetic, writing down something I want to
remember seems to amplify my memory. Cole and Griffin (1980) point
out that this is not quite correct. When I remember something by
writing it down and reading it later, my memory has not been
amplified. Rather, I am using a different set of functional skills to
do the memory task. Cognitive artifacts are involved in a process of
organizing functional skills into functional systems.
While cognitive artifacts do not directly amplify or change cognitive
abilities, there are side effects of artifact use. Functional skills
that are frequently invoked in interaction with artifacts will tend to
become highly developed, and those that are displaced by artifact use
may atrophy.
Any particular cognitive artifact typically supports some tasks better
than others. Some artifacts are tuned to very narrow contexts of use
while others are quite general. The ones that are easy are easy
because one can use very simple cognitive and perceptual routines in
interaction with the technology in order to do the job (Norman, 1987,
1993; Hutchins, 1995a; Zhang, 1992).
Cognitive artifacts are always embedded in larger socio-cultural
systems that organize the practices in which they are used. The
utility of a cognitive artifact depends on other processes that create
the conditions for its use and that can exploit the consequences of
its use. In culturally elaborated activities, partial solutions to
frequently encountered problems are often crystallized in practices,
in knowledge, in material artifacts, and in social arrangements.
Since artifacts require knowledge for use, the widespread presence of
a technology affects what people know. Most members of Western
society know how to read, use a telephone, drive a car, and so on.
Conversely, the distribution of knowledge in a community constrains
technology. If everyone already knows how to do something with a
particular technology, an attempt to change or replace that technology
may meet resistance because learning is expensive.There is no
widespread consensus on how to bound the category "cognitive
artifacts". The prototypical cases seem clear, but the category is
surrounded by gray areas consisting of mental and social artifacts,
physical patterns that are not objects, and opportunistic practices.
The cognitive artifact concept points not so much to a category of
objects, as to a category of processes that produce cognitive effects
by bringing functional skills into coordination with various kinds of
structure.
COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS/Hutchins
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