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4.4 Conceptual frameworks 133

texts, the system failed because it was asking too much of the users to change the
way they communicated and worked. However, it should be noted that the Coordi-
nator was successful in other kinds of organizations, namely those that are highly
structured and need a highly structured system to support them. In particular, the
most successful use of the Coordinator and its successors has been in organizations,
like large manufacturing divisions of companies, where there is a great need for
considerable management of orders and where previous support has been mainly
in the form of a hodgepodge of paper forms and inflexible task-specific data pro-
cessing applications (Winograd, 1994). 1

4.4.2 Distributed cognition
In the previous chapter we described how traditional approaches to modeling cog-
nition have focussed on what goes on inside one person's head. We also mentioned
that there has been considerable dissatisfaction with this approach, as it ignores
how people interact with one another and their use of artifacts and external repre-
sentations in their everyday and working activities. To redress this situation, Ed
Hutchins and his colleagues developed the distributed cognition approach as a new
paradigm for conceptualizing human work activities (e.g., Hutchins, 1995) (see Fig-
ure 4.15).
The distributed cognition approach describes what happens in a cognitive sys-
tem. Typically, this involves explaining the interactions among people, the artifacts

processes
/

Inputs
(sensory)

Outputs
(motor behavior) representations

Figure 4.15 Comparison of traditional and distributed cognition approaches.