Tool use and collaborative work of dock assembly in practice

Abstract

In order to deepen the understanding of the intrinsic interactions and interplay between humans, tools, and environment from a systems perspective, research in the wild (RITW) approaches have gained traction during recent decades as they provide a higher ecological validity of findings. This paper presents a RITW study, investigating how assembly, in this case dock assembly of forwarders, was done in practice. As our theoretical foundation, we used the framework of distributed cognition, which is one of the main pillars of RITW. The findings are presented in narrative form, describing and highlighting that the workers achieve an efficient production outcome by being integral parts of the whole production process and doing so through coordination of activities benefitting the shared goal of the distributed socio-technical system.

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).…”