<p>The role of information technology within health care is getting more central and prominent. The purpose of this change is both to make the health care more efficient and to heighten patient safety. This exploratory case study of four care units aims to provide a glimpse into the clinical work of nurses, and to indentify and describe their communication and information needs. The analytical framework used in this study is distributed cognition and the research method used is cognitive ethnography. The study provides a peek into the complex system of health care, and how the central artifacts such as patient records, whiteboards and different alarm systems are used in this context. The result of the study describes the current work practices and information flows in the studied care units. From these results general system design implications are made.</p>

<p>An ethnographic study loosely informed by the theoretical framework of distributed cognition was carried out in order to describe how mariners have adopted the Automatic Identification System (AIS) in their work practice, or"made the technology their own". AIS is a transponder-based identification and communication system that allows ships to automatically identify and track each other. In addition to facilitating the identification and tracking of ships, objectives behind the introduction of AIS are to"simplify informational exchange", and"provide additional information to assist situation awareness". Participant observation and interviews were made at four different ships, as well as at two shore stations. A focus group was also held at a maritime conference. The study gave some interesting results. For example, a Problem of Public Information Loss was identified. It is tentatively suggested that this problem has been overlooked partly because of a widespread but impoverished model of communication which does not account for the role of side-participants in a conversation. It is concluded that more research needs to be done on maritime work and the use of new bridge technology.</p>

Distributed cognition has been emerging as a new research direction in cognitive science over the last two decades and is gaining momentum. In a recent study Hollan, Hutchins and Kirsch argue that the distributed cognition framework enables the study of interaction between people and artifacts. This thesis views tools as an integral part of cognition, and focuses on the complex interaction between brain, body and environment, which complements automatic internal processing in the brain and assists with individual and group problem solving. The thesis analyses some existing research about teams working in high-pressure environments and their complex interactions with their external environment, cognitive tools and each other.

Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a safety-critical system which places high demands on air traffic controllers’ (ATCO) multitasking abilities. Having the requisite information for well-informed decision making is central, and as new technologies such as remote towers demand an increase in capacity, efficiency, and safety there is a need for research that informs system development. Adopting a systems perspective, Distributed Cognition is an approach for investigating system functioning, and Resilience Engineering is a way of observing safety factors in everyday work. The purpose of this study is to understand how air traffic controllers work from a distributed cognition perspective, and manage safety in everyday tasks from a resilience perspective. Six observations and six interviews were conducted in a Swedish control tower. The data was analyzed using Distributed Cognition for Teamwork (DiCoT) and Resilience markers (REM), which both focus on the transformation and propagation of information. The results of DiCoT show how cognitive processes in ATCO work are supported in models of physical layout, artefacts, information flow, social organization, and evolutionary design. The results of REM show potential for resilience enhancing behavior in several episodes of ATCO work. Moreover, the results suggest that methods such as DiCoT and REM may work well in the ATC domain, as well as complementary to each other. The results may be used for informing system development, and enable a before-and-after study as the control tower of study will be transformed into a remote tower.

The role of information technology within health care is getting more central and prominent. The purpose of this change is both to make the health care more efficient and to heighten patient safety. This exploratory case study of four care units aims to provide a glimpse into the clinical work of nurses, and to indentify and describe their communication and information needs. The analytical framework used in this study is distributed cognition and the research method used is cognitive ethnography. The study provides a peek into the complex system of health care, and how the central artifacts such as patient records, whiteboards and different alarm systems are used in this context. The result of the study describes the current work practices and information flows in the studied care units. From these results general system design implications are made.

The research problem addressed in this thesis is the lack of understanding of dentistry in practice, and the limited amount of work from a HCI-perspective in dental informatics. The aim of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of the area as a socio-technical domain from a Distributed cognition-perspective using workplace studies. Dentistry is a complex socio-technical domain where humans, technology, tools and artifacts together form a system. The ubiquitous presence of computers has made a mark on the dental profession with e.g. record systems and digital x-ray, and the integration of IT-system in the dental field may inform how dentists make decisions for their patients and how they perform their work. The problem is that not much work has been done in the dental informatics field from a HCI-perspective. This thesis applies workplace studies and Distributed cognition as an approach to HCI to gain an understanding of dentistry in practice and also draw conclusions how Distributed cognition could be applied as a method in HCI. This thesis presents a detailed account of work in dentistry regarding the propagation of information through representational stages and the roles, tasks and artifacts that are present in the complex socio-technical domain of dentistry. The thesis also provide implications for Distributed cognition regarding how it could be developed to fit into today’s complex socio-technical domains both as a method in HCI and as a theoretical framework. Key words: Dental informatics, Human-computer interaction, Distributed cognition, Workplace studies.

The study of large-scale decentralised systems composed of numerous interacting agents that self-organise to perform a common task is receiving growing attention in several application domains. However, real world implementations are limited by a lack of well-established design methodologies that provide performance guarantees. Engineering such systems is a challenging task because of the difficulties to obtain the micro-macro link: a correspondence between the microscopic description of the individual agent behaviour and the macroscopic models that describe the system's dynamics at the global level. In this thesis, we propose an engineering methodology for designing decentralised systems, based on the concept of design patterns. A design pattern provides a general solution to a specific class of problems which are relevant in several application domains. The main component of the solution consists of a multi-level description of the collective process, from macro to micro models, accompanied by rules for converting the model parameters between description levels. In other words, the design pattern provides a formal description of the micro-macro link for a process that tackles a specific class of problems. Additionally, a design pattern provides a set of case studies to illustrate possible implementation alternatives both for simple or particularly challenging scenarios. We present a design pattern for the best-of-n, decentralised decision problem that is derived from a model of nest-site selection in honeybees. We present two case studies to showcase the design pattern usage in (i) a multiagent system interacting through a fully-connected network, and (ii) a swarm of particles moving on a bidimensional plane. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Integrated Thinking är en ny trend inom företagsstyrning. Begreppet är dock mångtydigt och det råder oklarheter i hur organisationer kan nå Integrated Thinking. Studien ämnade att konkretisera begreppets innebörd. Genom användning av ramverket Distributed Cognition for Teamwork genomfördes en fallstudie på ett universitetssjukhus för att även utröna bättre förståelse för hur arbetsmiljö kan skapa förutsättningar för en organisation att nå Integrated Thinking. Studien visar på vikten av god interaktion och samarbete mellan organisationens medlemmar. En platt social struktur är i detta syfte önskvärt. Arbetslokaler utmärker sig skapa goda förutsättningar för interaktion och lärande. I stora organisationer är artefakter och informationsflöden centrala funktioner i integrationen av medlemmar. Studien mynnar ut i definition av Integrated Thinking som en kultur med god integration, lärande och holistisk problemlösning. Slutligen förs en diskussion om definitionen är komplett, samt huruvida Integrated Thinking är möjligt att uppnå.

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Technical artifacts, such as smartphones, computers, search engines and computer programs are extensively used by the modern human. It seems like people use these artifacts to remember important information and become better at finding information effectively with them as a constant available aid. This study aims to explore the possibility that human memory sieves away information that is saved in a database and instead focuses on remembering how to get access to the needed information. More precisely this paper aims to examine if people do focus on the content of information or where information is to be found. The motivation of the study was to investigate if smartphones can bring positive outcomes to human cognitive processes and if modern humans are adapting to the technical world. The present study is a replication of Sparrow et al.’s (2011) original study, which presents findings that suggest that humans remember things they know they have access to less than information they do not have access to. Two research questions were investigated in the present study through an experiment, conducted with university students at Linköping University as test participants. The experiment investigated if the participants focused on remembering the content of presented statements, or remembering if the statements were about to be saved or deleted after being exposed to them. The result presented nostatistically significance. Conclusively it is recommended to continue with further studies on the subject and to conduct more replication of Sparrow et al.’s original study, due to the conflicting findings. A speculation is that a cause for the lacking significant result is the relatively small sample size, and future studies are therefore recommended to test a greater number of test participants. Despite the result it is possible that humans use technical artefacts to enhance cognitive processes, and use smartphones as a transactive memory partners, due to the extensive use of technical artifacts and the original study’s findings.