Ian Oakley

Cognition in the Wild

By Edwin Hutchins (1996)

Hutchins, a cognitive anthropologist and skilled sailor, writes eloquently of his time as an observer on a U. S. navy ship during exercises. Inspired by how the crew successfully dealt with a potentially catastrophic engine failure in tricky waters, Hutchins presents a rich exploration of the practices, artifacts, processes, and structures involved in determining a ship’s position (or “fix”) during nautical navigation—a highly evolved, time-constrained activity that involves coordination of a large team to perform precise and technical work. Hutchins argues that meaningful analysis of position fixing needs to be considered as a single cognitive system encompassing all the different individuals, tools, roles, relationships, and even mechanisms by which knowledge is accumulated and shared.

In this sense, the book

Embodied Cognition

By Lawrence Shapiro (2010)

Embodiment is a recent
buzz word in HCI—we
must interact through our
bodies, after all, and the
technologies to sense and
respond to things in the
physical world have never
been more available. But
despite all the attention,
embodiment remains
something of an intractable
term. What does it really
mean for the designers of
digital systems? Shapiro’s
pithy review of the
carving up diverse research
on and around embodied
cognition into three more
digestible perspectives,
each based on a broad
central claim. The first
is conceptualization, the
idea that body form and
capabilities fundamentally
shape the concepts
an organism is able to
acquire. The second is
replacement, the search
for accounts of cognition
based on embodiment
and situatedness that
aim to supplant currently
dominant abstract
computational models.
The third is constitution,
which deals with the extent
to which the mind adopts,
adapts, and leverages
external resources (i.e.,
the physical and social
environment) as integral
components of its thinking
process. Shapiro reviews,
consolidates, and weighs
the diverse evidence for
each claim in order to
expose an informative set
of shaky propositions, solid
findings, lively debates,
and open questions. This
is not a book on HCI—
there are no implications
for design. Instead, it’s an
accessible, comprehensive,
and critical introduction
to embodiment that’s well
worth reading.
fundamental literature
sheds valuable light on this
question. He does this by

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