Cognition in the Wild
by Edwin Hutchins · first published 1995
78% recommend22% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Ethnographic study of how a Navy ship's navigation crew works as a distributed system, showing how cognition spreads across people and tools; suits readers of cognitive science and systems design.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "i
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For research supporting this mode of working, see Bruno Latour's "Laboratory Life": https://www.amazon.com/Laboratory-Life-Construction-Scientif... and Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild": https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Press-Edwin-Hutchins/d...
on “The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland” ↗…something like AI, I think it promotes much better thinking about how to get productive work done -- since it isn't so much about the algorithm as the system as a whole. I recommend Ed Hutchins book "Cognition in the Wild" or Don Norman's "the design of everyday things" Other related ideas are "the extended mind" and "actor-network theory". It is hard not to come to the conclusion that personal identity is useful for…
on “Spiders think with their webs, challenging our ideas of intelligence” ↗I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not). Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive…
on “One of the greatest user interface disasters in history” ↗I'd be very interested to hear of other books and articles like this, too. Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild is one of my favorite books. It's very technical and ethnographic, but less historical. It doesn't deal with code, but that's because it's about the nitty gritty of navigation on a Navy ship (pre digital…
on “Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine” ↗…here are six technology historians I have found very insightful: Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology" Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena" Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild" James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation" David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems…
on “We Need a New Science of Progress” ↗I often find a book fascinating and wonder if any other author has expanded on the ideas or rebutted them, but I don't usually know how to find such writing. For example I loved Cognition in the Wild and Seeing Like a State and I want to read more about these ideas! Does anyone here have any ideas about a good way to search for "follow-ups" on certain ideas other than just sifting through Google Scholar…
on “Ask HN: How to follow up on a non-fiction book?” ↗If you're interested in this topic but want more, I recommend "Cognition in the wild": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262082310/
on “The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought (2014) [pdf]” ↗“...Cognition in the Wild, a detailed study of distributed cognitive processes in a navy ship...”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hutchins
on “Norwegian frigate sinking has far-reaching implications” ↗Your comment made me remember the book Cognition in the Wild: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cognition-wild
on “Veteran submariner on how sonar crews tirelessly hunt enemies they can't see” ↗…well-developed intuition of how far they had travelled into a formalized system of generally-invisible islands that they used as a mental model to externalize this intuition. (My knowledge of this is from Cognition in the wild, Hutchins, E., 1995.) Edit: D'oh, I should have finished TFA. This is described at the end, although more roughly.
on “A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'” ↗