Manufacturing in the wild : viewing human-based assembly through the lens of distributed cognition

• The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science has been and isbecoming 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 fromauthentic 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 toolboxfor the HF&E discipline, where it may have been found before, but the application to manufacturing has been absent.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik -- Interaktionsteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies -- Interaction Technologies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Distributed cognition

DCog

scaffolding

socio-technical systems

human-based assembly

manufacturing

Interaction Lab (ILAB)

Interaction Lab (ILAB)

User Centred Product Design

Användarcentrerad produktdesign

INF202 Virtual Ergonomics

INF202 Virtual Ergonomics

INF302 Autonomous Intelligent Systems

INF302 Autonoma intelligenta system

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)