KDI: A Distributed Cognition Approach To Designing Digital Work Materials For Collaborative Workplaces

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This is a three-year continuing award. To ensure that new workplaces and digital work materials serve human needs requires both a different theoretical base and an integration of theory with ethnographic and experimental methods. We propose a research framework based on distributed cognition. Distributed cognition provides a reorientation of how we think about designing and supporting human computer interaction. It permits one to move boundary of the cognitive unit of analysis out beyond the skin of the indivdual to include the material and social environment as components of a larger cognitive system. This focuses attention on the processes by which people take advantage of both internal and external resources to organize their actions. For the design of workplaces, this means that work materials are more than stimuli for disembodied cognitive sytems. Work materials become elements of the cognitive system itself, and cognition becomes an emergent property of the interactions among people and work materials. We will apply our integrated approach to developing a distributed cognition based theory of annotation and explore a range of application domains: collaborative scientific research, education, and commercial aviation. In each domain, we will conduct ethnographic and experimental studies, design and implement digital work materials and analyze their effectiveness. In addition, to help us develop and communicate our distributed cognition perspective, we are developing: (1) a series of prototypes of history-enriched work materials that support collection and selective sharing of personnel and group activity histories and annotations, (2) annotation facilities to assist collaborations, and (3) information visualization facilities to exploit rich histories of interactions and provide effective access to annotations.