Page - 75 - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

Distributed Cognition: Understanding Complex Sociotechnical Informatics Dominic FURNISS a,1 , Sara GARFIELD b, c , Fran HUSSON b , Ann BLANDFORD a and Bryony Dean FRANKLIN b, c a University College London, Gower Street, London; UK b Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London; UK c UCL School of Pharmacy, London; UK Abstract. Distributed cognition theory posits that our cognitive tasks are so tightly coupled to the environment that cognition extends into the environment, beyond the skin and the skull. It uses cognitive concepts to describe information processing across external representations, social networks and across different periods of time. Distributed cognition lends itself to exploring how people interact with technology in the workplace, issues to do with communication and coordination, how people’s thinking extends into the environment and sociotechnical system architecture and performance more broadly. We provide an overview of early work that established distributed cognition theory, describe more recent work that facilitates its application, and outline how this theory has been used in health informatics. We present two use cases to show how distributed cognition can be used at the formative and summative stages of a project life cycle. In both cases, key determinants that influence performance of the sociotechnical system and/or the technology are identified. We argue that distributed cognition theory can have descriptive, rhetorical, inferential and application power. For evidence-based health informatics it can lead to design changes and hypotheses that can be tested. Keywords. Distributed cognition, Sociotechnical, Informatics, DiCoT Learning objectives After reading this chapter the reader will be able to: 1. Summarise the theory of distributed cognition. 2. List different methods and frameworks that have been developed to facilitate the application of distributed cognition. 3. Give examples of how distributed cognition has been applied in health informatics. 4. Explain how distributed cognition can be used in formative and summative stages of a project life cycle. 5. Explain how distributed cognition can lead to design ideas and testable hypotheses. 1. Introduction of distributed cognition Distributed cognition [1] is a theory that represents a radical departure from traditional notions of cognition focused on information processing in the brain. Distributed cognition focuses on information processing in sociotechnical systems, which we dub 1 Corresponding Author: Dominic Furniss, E-mail: d.furniss@ucl.ac.uk Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics P. Scott et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI190113 75