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

这是一个连续三年的奖项。为了确保新的工作场所和数字工作材料服务于人类的需求，需要一个不同的理论基础，并将理论与民族志和实验方法相结合。我们提出了一个基于分布式认知的研究框架。分布式认知为我们如何设计和支持人机交互提供了一个重新定位。它允许我们将分析的认知单位的边界从个体的皮肤中移出来，将物质和社会环境作为更大的认知系统的组成部分。这集中注意人们利用内部和外部资源组织其行动的过程。对于工作场所的设计来说，这意味着工作材料不仅仅是对非实体认知系统的刺激。工作材料成为认知系统本身的要素，认知成为人与工作材料相互作用的一种涌现属性。我们将应用我们的综合方法来开发基于分布式认知的注释理论，并探索一系列应用领域：协作科学研究，教育和商业航空。在每个领域，我们将进行人种学和实验研究，设计和实施数字工作材料，并分析其有效性。此外，为了帮助我们开发和传达我们的分布式认知观点，我们正在开发：（1）一系列历史丰富的工作材料的原型，其支持个人和团体活动历史和注释的收集和选择性共享，（2）注释设施以协助协作，以及（3）信息可视化设施，以利用丰富的交互历史并提供对注释的有效访问。

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.