stanford hci group / cs376 u Jeffrey Heer · 29 April 2009 Distributed Cognition

Project Abstracts  For final version (due online Fri 7am)  Flesh out concrete details. What will you build? If running an experiment, what factors will you vary and what will you measure? What are your hypotheses and why? Provide rationale!  Need to add study recruitment plan and related work sections (see  ~8-9 paragraphs addressing required topics.  Iterate more than once! to discuss. 2

In-Class Exercise I need three volunteers. (No mathematical savants.)

Solve Multiplication Problems Contestant 1  Use long multiplication, with pen and paper Contestant 2  Use the Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm  (1) Write down the problem  (2) Think very hard  (3) Write down the answer

102 x

34 x

Multiplication 34 x

Zhang & Norman, The Representation of Numbers

What makes a representation “good”?  Capture important features  Remove irrelevant details  Provide external memory  Replace computation with perception  Appropriate to task

Tower of Hanoi Goal: Move stack to pole 3. Only one at a time. Top piece only. Smaller above larger.

Distributed Cognition The classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person. One can still ask the same questions of a larger socio-technical system that one would ask of the individual. - Hutchins 1995

Distributed Cognition … many of the representations can be observed directly, so in some respects, this may be a much easier task than trying to determine the processes internal to the individual… Posing these questions in this way reveals how systems that are larger than an individual may have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual persons. - Hutchins 1995

What is the role of theory in HCI?

What Still Matters about Distance? Gary and Judy Olson CS 547 HCI Seminar Friday 12-2pm, Gates B1