Name: Cognition in the Wild
ISBN: 9780262581462

Cognition in the Wild

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "in the wild.". Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that differ from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture; thus the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing life in the Navy and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system.

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chaimgingoldJun 2024

I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too.

Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital computing), and (here's the historical aspect) it compares this to some traditional Polyponesian navigational practices.

The closest thing off the top of my head are titles in MIT Press's Platform Studies series, like Racing the Beam, about the Atari 2600, which is historical and technical. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/

Maybe Casey O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma? https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-Dile...

If you make a Venn diagram with history, ethnography, technical details, and code as different circles, the central intersection may not be huge, but I think there may be a lot more if you remove some of the constraints. But I want to see more work at this intersection, and I hope more people do it.

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asoloveMay 2024

If you're interested in this topic but want more, I recommend "Cognition in the wild": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262082310/

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vigormortisNov 2023

I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not).

Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I was doing an undergraduate independent study in his lab, where we spent hours watching videos of airline pilots in 747 flight simulators, looking out for errors while using the flight guidance system. Our "textbook" was the operations manual for the 747 guidance and autopilot system.

An example of the sort of UI things we were looking for:

"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.

Anyway, here are the links:

This is the introduction and table of contents:

https://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/citw.html

Amazon link

https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Bradford-Edwin-Hutchin...

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nicolaskruchtenSep 2020

I often find a book fascinating and wonder if any other author has expanded on the ideas or rebutted them, but I don't usually know how to find such writing. For example I loved Cognition in the Wild and Seeing Like a State and I want to read more about these ideas! Does anyone here have any ideas about a good way to search for "follow-ups" on certain ideas other than just sifting through Google Scholar results?

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dr_dshivFeb 2020

Distributed cognition is a really powerful idea that breaks a lot of our assumptions about individuality and agency. When applied to something like AI, I think it promotes much better thinking about how to get productive work done -- since it isn't so much about the algorithm as the system as a whole.

I recommend Ed Hutchins book "Cognition in the Wild" or Don Norman's "the design of everyday things"

Other related ideas are "the extended mind" and "actor-network theory". It is hard not to come to the conclusion that personal identity is useful for drivers licenses but ultimately a very elaborate social illusion/myth.

I really like the implications for reincarnation, though!

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skmurphyAug 2019

I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful:

Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"

Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"

Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"

James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"

David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"

Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"

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