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

Abstract

The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science has been and is becoming 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 from authentic 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 toolbox for the HF&E discipline, where it may have been found before, but the application to manufacturing has been absent.

Considering farmers' situated knowledge of using agricultural decision support systems (AgriDSS) to Foster farming practices: The case of CropSAT

“…Hollan et al, 2000), aviation (Hutchins, 1995), healthcare (e.g. Hazlehurst et al, 2007) and manufacturing (Andreasson et al, 2016;Andreasson et al, 2017;Lindblom and Thorvald, 2017). To our knowledge, DCog has not previously been applied to the agricultural domain, although it can serve as an appropriate theoretical lens for investigating and analysing the complex work activities in agriculture, providing a portrayal of how people, environment and tools are coupled and related to each other (but see Lindblom et al, 2013 for an exception).…”

Tool use and collaborative work of dock assembly in practice

“…This means that the use of tools in the workspace becomes a form of DCog; including actions such as deliberately selecting certain tools and materials in preparation of a specific task, picking up and putting down various tools during the performance of the task, and moving tools that are no longer needed further away from the central point of reaching (Baber et al, 2014). Similar findings were reported in Lindblom and Thorvald (2017), where workers in traditional assembly placed articles for assembly in sequence to help keep track of production status. The relationship between the available tools and materials used by an assembly worker forms a distributed system that not only supports different kinds of actions but also shapes cognition.…”

The Cognitive Operator 4.0

“…Viewing exoskeletons and physical enhancement as mainly having to do with physical interaction might be reasonable given where the cognitive ergonomics field is largely influenced by theories from cognitive psychology where the separation of human factors into physical and mental aspects is still far too common. However, development in cognitive science during the past few decades have somewhat successfully started to question these assumptions and this argument is also finding its way into the applied ergonomics field [4,[24][25][26]. In essence, it is argued and demonstrated in many ways how our physical bodies not only affect how we cognize in the world but that it is necessary for cognition [26][27][28][29][30].…”