Research in the Wild. Paul Marshall
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the way the pairs understood how it worked or what to do when it did not work in the way they thought it should. The outcome of her detailed analyses of the mismatched photocopier-user interactions led many programmers and developers to rethink how they should structure and what to include in their human-computer models, replacing the simplified process models, that followed sets of rules, such as “if x then y” with alternative kinds of situated models of action (Dourish, 2001).
An analogy that she used in her book to illustrate what she meant by situated action is a description of what it is like to ride the rapids in a canoe. She notes how a great deal of deliberation and reconstruction goes into a canoeist’s plan both before they begin and in their account of what happened after the event, but from then how they actually navigate the rapids, depends on embodied skills in responding to whatever comes their way. This powerful image resonated with many as to why models of plans as a control structure that specify behavior were inadequate when designing user interfaces. Despite its impact on a generation of researchers, however, this example, itself, has been somewhat parodied and often misunderstood. Many took it to mean plans are irrelevant to how we act. Suchman never claimed this (and goes to great length to explain what she meant in her later revised version of the book), arguing that what happens in practice is the interaction of both the contingencies and the projected course of action. A legacy from her pioneering work is the commonly accepted view that users don’t follow instructions and plans as simply as had been assumed.
2.3 COGNITION IN PRACTICE
Jean Lave’s (1988) book Cognition in Practice, published a year later, was primarily concerned with debunking the academic snobbery associated with “common sense explanations and real-world contexts.” Similar to Suchman’s critique of cognitive science models of everyday planning, she went to great lengths to explain how experimental lab research wasn’t superior to everyday people’s accounts of what they do in their lives. Moreover, her program of research showed how it was more valuable and legitimate to study people’s cognitive behavior in everyday contexts, which she described as “cognition in the wild.” To demonstrate how her approach could provide new understandings, she studied adults practicing math in a variety of real-world contexts. Some of the examples she described in her book, which are most illuminating, are of people working out the best price for groceries when shopping in the supermarket and for how dieters measure unusual quantities of ingredients when making a dish at home while following a recipe. Similar to Suchman’s book, she compellingly demonstrates, through her detailed case studies, how people often use opportunistic structures in the real world in their everyday cognition.
The legacy of Lave’s work was to show how it was possible and necessary to move one particular form of cognitive activity—arithmetic problem-solving—out of the laboratory back into the realm of everyday life. In so doing, she showed how mathematics in the real world is the same for all kinds of thinking, shaped by the reflexive encounter between human minds and the context people find themselves in. A salient example that has been much cited—as illustrative of doing math in practice—is the “cottage cheese” problem; a male dieter, preparing a meal, was faced with having to measure out 3/4 of 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese that was stipulated in the recipe he was using. How did he work it out? Not by multiplying 3 × 2 and dividing that by 4 × 3, resulting in ½, as would be expected if using algebra in school, but instead by using the available structures in the environment in a situated way. He first measured out 2/3 of a cup, and then spread it on a chopping board in the shape of a circle. Next, he divided the circle into 4 quarters, removed one of them and returned it to the container, leaving on the board the desired 3/4 of 2/3 a cup.
Similar to Suchman’s canoe example, the dieter example of using external resources to solve a math problem paved the way for rethinking cognition in practice rather than in abstraction, and the insight that mathematics is for something; the mathematical abstractions taught in schools don’t necessarily transfer well to use outside the classroom. A number of other examples in Lave’s book are used to emphasize how people use the resources from the context they are in to solve problems. Together, the examples convincingly demonstrate how activities in settings are complex improvisations that have much variability. Doing math when out there takes a different form in different situations. One of the outcomes of this early form of in the wild research was to make studying everyday and common sense reasoning acceptable, by giving it credibility and respectability (cf. Rogers, 1993).
2.4 COGNITION IN THE WILD
Ed Hutchins published Cognition in the Wild a few years later in 1995. His seminal book was also very much a reaction against the status quo; but more broadly than either Lucy Suchman’s or Jean Lave’s efforts. His beef was very much a rally against “cognition in captivity” and “disembodied cognition.” He argued that much of mainstream thinking about cognitive science for the past 30 years had resulted in systematic distortions of our understanding of the nature of cognition. Instead, he proposed that cognition should be studied in its natural habitat and that, in doing so, it would change our ideas about its nature. He argued that what was problematic with the classical cognitive science approach, was not its conceptual framework per se, but its exclusive focus on modeling the cognitive processes that occurred within one individual. As an alternative, he argued that what was needed was for the same conceptual framework to be applied to a range of cognitive systems, including socio-technical systems at large (i.e., groups of individual agents interacting with each other in particular environments). To do this, he proposed studying cognition beyond the skin of the individual, encompassing the distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artifacts, and internal and external representations.
Hutchins also argued that in order to reveal the properties and processes of such a cognitive system required conducting an ethnographic study of a setting. Paying close attention to the activities of people and their interactions with material media was considered fundamental to understanding how such a cognitive system works. Hutchins’ intricate analyses of what happens inside a cognitive system at both the micro and macro levels were at the time groundbreaking. One of his most well known examples is an account of how the cockpit plus air traffic control tower system work together as a cognitive system. He illustrates this eloquently by describing the joint activity and accomplishment of a situation when a pilot and co-pilot fly their plane to a higher altitude in conjunction with listening to and talking with air traffic controllers. It demonstrates just how much coordinated activity depends on the orchestration of mechanisms through which co-located and distributed people make small signals to each other in order to progress a sequenced activity, and the levels of inter-subjectivity involved for different states of the system. A missed cue can easily result in a misunderstanding, especially if someone is not expecting it. These can happen even for the most routine of activities which then requires the cognitive system to engage in various forms of repair work and sometimes the adoption of workarounds to get the activity back on track.
The legacy of the distributed cognition approach is its demonstration of how insightful it can be to analyze the complex interdependencies between people and artifacts in their work activities—which is often overlooked in other kinds of cognitive analyses. Hutchins approach to “cognition in the wild” clearly showed how important micro-analyses can be to reveal the multi-layered work that a cognitive system has to do—and where subtle actions, such as a glance, a gesture, or a flick of a switch at a particular time, are often integral to the coordination and mediation of teamwork.
2.5 EMBODIED INTERACTION APPROACHES
Since these early pioneering “in the wild” theory books, there have been further writings in HCI and cognitive science that have stressed the importance of understanding the ways people are closely coupled with their environment. These include seminal works that view interaction as embodied (Dourish, 2001), cognition as external (Scaife and Rogers, 1996), and perception as enactive (Noë, 2004). In the 2000s, and to this day, conceptualizing human-computer interactions as embodied in real-world contexts has become an influential approach (Marshall et al., 2013). In its broadest sense, embodied interaction refers to the “everyday, mundane experience” (Dourish, 2001, p. 125) and the ways that people understand the world through their accomplishment of practical activities.