The End of Cognition?

 

The first 25 years of human-computer interaction (HCI) have been dominated by what has been described as rationalistic design. Winograd and Flores (1987) describe this as the attempt to model people as “cognitive machines”, whose psychology and behaviour can be built or reproduced by digital computers. This in turn was a major influence in the first great HCI text - The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction (Card et al., 1983) which sought to create a scientific HCI.

 
But times have changed - cognition is now situated, distributed, external and even collective and the methods of rationalistic design have been replaced with “enlightened trial and error”.
User experience is also supplanting usability as the must-have attribute of interactive applications, devices and systems. So is there still a place for cognition except in safety critical or otherwise demanding situations?
 
This workshop will consider the future of cognition.
 
Themes
Submission details
 
The major output from the workshop will be a Special Issue of Human Technology