Abstract
The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science has been and is becoming increasingly central within human factors and ergonomics (HF&E) and, since at the same time, there has long been a call for a more systems perspective in the area with a somewhat wider unit of analysis. This paper argues that the theoretical framework of distributed cognition would greatly benefit the application of HF&E to manufacturing and would offer a more holistic understanding of the interactions between different entities within a greater context, including the social, cultural and materialistic. We aim to characterize and analyse manufacturing as a complex socio-technical system from a distributed cognition perspective; focusing on the use, mediation and integration of different forms of representations, tools and artefacts in this domain. We present illustrative examples from authentic manual assembly, showing the cognitively distributed nature of the work, ranging from scaffolding strategies of the individual worker to the emergent properties of a whole assembly line. The paper further proposes and provides benefits of using a distributed cognition framework as a novel approach in the toolbox for the HF&E discipline, where it may have been found before, but the application to manufacturing has been absent.
Highlights
It has been widely acknowledged that an increasing number of researchers are calling for a more unified view of human cognition in the fields of Human Factors and Ergonomics (Feyen, 2007; Karltun, Karltun, Berglund, & Eklund, 2017; Marras & Hancock, 2014; Thorvald, Högberg, & Case, 2012)
The inclusion of distributed cognition (DCog) may be a promising step in that direction given the absence of relevant cognitive frameworks that provides a systems perspective in theory and practice in human factors and ergonomics (HF&E) applications to manufacturing
In an effort to stay true to Hutchins’s original concept of distributed cognition (DCog), we have had no intention of investigating all the different adaptations that have been derived from Hutchins’s work in the past 20 years
Summary
It has been widely acknowledged that an increasing number of researchers are calling for a more unified view of human cognition in the fields of Human Factors and Ergonomics (hereafter abbreviated HF&E) (Feyen, 2007; Karltun, Karltun, Berglund, & Eklund, 2017; Marras & Hancock, 2014; Thorvald, Högberg, & Case, 2012). It should be pointed out that the original DCog framework views cognition as a socio-cultural process, which is distributed in complex socio-technical environments It offers a shift from studying individual cognizers to studying the whole functional system, including the people, the tools and artefacts that they use in order to perform their work and cognitive activities. DCog fits hand in glove with Wilson’s request for a systems approach for studying complex socio-technical systems, offering the desired characteristics by providing a holistic and emergent perspective It focuses on interactions between entities, widening the unit of analysis beyond the ‘individual skull’ combined with a major emphasis on the cognitive processes and the social context, and is conducted ‘in the wild’. The final section summarizes and discusses the work presented here, and briefly addresses some future work
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