Thursday, August 25, 2005

Development of DC framework:

Hutchins (1991, 1995) is the main architect of the DC framework when he was studying complex ship navigation of U.S. Navy vessels. Hutchins (1995) was interested to know about how people go about knowing what they know and of the contribution of the environments in which knowing is skilled. These questions became the main source of foundation of the DC framework. He published a paper, "How a cockpit remembers its speed" (1995), in which he explained about the classical cognitive science approach. Classical cognitive could be applied to a unit of analysis that is larger than a person. In contrast, a classical cognitive science approach efforts to assume what was inside an individual's mind since these information processing phenomena can not be directly observed.
Distributed cognition is not some "new" kind of cognition, rather a recognition of the perspective that all of cognition can be fruitfully viewed as occurring in a distributed manner. Rogers and Ellis (1994) encouraged Hutchin's DC framework and also argued that it attempt to overcome the limitations of existing single-discipline frameworks for studying combined working purpose. The main point in the paper is that any sufficient of work activities requires crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries such that there can be analysis and synthesis of information from traditionally separate sources. Rogers and Ellis presented Hutchin's DC framework as one that crosses the conventional disciplinary boundaries (e.g, cognitive, social, organisational).
Nardi (1996) discussed critically about DC and argued that the DC framework uses an unreasonable conception that artifacts are cognizing entities. Nardi also discussed that an artifact cannot know except materials and resources in the system that can be used in a deliberate and conscious way by humans. An artifact serves as a medium of knowledge for a human. As a result, DC places people and machines/artifacts on equal cognitive footing in his critics. Wright et al. (2000) argued against Nardi’s criticism by clarifying the 'misunderstanding'. He stated that DC views technological artifacts as objects of cognition. Wright et al. (2000) argue that artifacts can be used in a deliberate and conscious way by humans and thus humans have a different epistemic status to technological artifacts, although both are modeled as representational systems in DC.
Wright et al., (2000) developed a 'distributed information resources model to HCI model based on DC concepts. This model has two components: information structures and information strategies. Information structures allow for the description of the information form and content and how information is distributed between people and artifacts. Information strategies describe different ways in which resources can be used to make decisions about action. The strategy a user adopts is shaped in part by the resources available. This model would help to relate HCI and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) issues more closely. The resources model by Wright et al. (2000) is one of the very few direct attempts to use the ideas of DC to account for HCI.
Presently, Hollan et al. (2000) are presenting DC as a "new foundation for human computer interaction research". They are working on an integrated framework for research that includes their DC framework while combining ethnographic observation with controlled experimentation.

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