Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
David Brooks of the NY Times writes about our externalized cognitive functions. In the beginning it was only the calculator, now it is everything, even things we couldn’t think that would be outsourced:
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
I click on its recommendations, […]
Wired has a nice article about the locus of memory moving from “wetware” to hardware. The fact that it simply is more convenient to digitally store, or altogether bypass low-level pieces of information (like telephone numbers).
Sure, I’m a veritable genius when I’m on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I’m not? Does an […]
Futurologist Paul Saffo sings the praises of RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators. RPN is a notation that never caught on, as we got stuck in a local optimum: similarity with pen and paper problem solving. The problem is that when transfered to the digital world, the “infix” (i.e. traditional) notation is very inefficient. It’s like […]
The paper “Hidden aspects of the Anaesthesia Chart” has been accepted by the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (to appear soon).
The paper is concerned with our research in the domain of anaesthesiology and the anaesthesia chart in particular. The most important insight gained was the fact that constraints outside the worksystem that have nothing […]
The use of Complexity Science to serve the study of sociotechnical systems began in the 90s, mainly through the work of Pavard (2003) and the COSI Training Network. This line of work was pursued by colleague and friend Nikos Zarboutis, who presented this paper co-authored with Peter Wright in 2006. Because of my military tour […]
This interesting paper by Goodwin is concerned in the ways professionals perceive and structure their environment.
…investigates the discursive practices used by members of a profession to shape events in the phenomenal environment they focus their attention upon, the domain of their professional scrutiny,into the objects of knowledge that become the insignia of their […]
This paper attempts to disentangle the messy notion of embodied cognition. Different authors tend to mean different things by the term, and the author analyzes it to six claims:
Cognition is situated Cognition is time pressured We off-load cognitive work onto the environment The environment is part of the cognitive system Cognition is for action Off-line cognition is body based
There is […]
An interesting article in the relatively new journal “Artefact”. It examines the evolution of matching tile games (e.g. Bejeweled, Zookeeper etc.).
When refering to his own experiences in designing a similar game, Juul notes how players from different backgrounds appropriated the game in different ways:
During testing, it became clear that players understood the game very differently […]
A recent post in pasta and vinegar, touches the subject of delegation, namely the fact that pretty much most solutions to a problem include delegating it to a human or machine. He cites a very interesting article by Latour which points out that in the act of delegation, we equip artefacts not only with the […]
Is an object used as a tool, an artefact? That’s how the discussion begins in Pavlos Lefas’ excellent article on the Greek philosophical magazine “Cogito” (Lefas, 2006). Is the first bone used a club to hit an enemy an artefact? One way is to follow Aristotle and claim that it is not an artefact, as […]
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