Re: Planning & Doing

Chuck Goodwin (GoodwinC who-is-at Garnet.cla.sc.edu)
Mon, 6 Nov 1995 21:39:35 -0500

For an excellent study of the tensions between planning and situated
practice see

Suchman, Lucy A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human
Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Just to throw one more extremely interesting book into the pot that is
boiling here you might take a look at Ed Hutchins analysis of navigation (I
imagine that figuring out how to get from one place to another constitutes
a prototypical example of both planning and situated action) which has very
clear and powerful demonstrations of distributed cogniton, the importance
of historically shaped cognitive artifacts, such as maps, and analysis of
how different cultures (Micronesian and Western navigators) construct quite
different tools to solve a common problem.

Hutchins, Edwin (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Chuck

============================
Chuck Goodwin
Anthropology
University of South Carolina
Columbia SC 29208
(803) 356-6006
(803) 777-0259 (fax)