Edwin Hutchins (b. 1948) is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

. Hutchins is one of the main developers of

distributed cognition Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s. From cognitive ethnography, Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive ...

. Hutchins was a student of the cognitive anthropologist Roy D'Andrade and has been a strong advocate of the use of anthropological methods in cognitive science. He is considered the father of modern cognitive ethnography. His early work involved studies of logic in legal discourse among people of the

Trobriand Islands The Trobriand Islands are a archipelago of coral atolls off the east coast of New Guinea. They are part of the nation of Papua New Guinea and are in Milne Bay Province. Most of the population of 12,000 indigenous inhabitants live on the main isla ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

. For a time he worked in the Navy doing research on how crews of a ship can function as a distributed machine, offloading the cognitive burden of ship navigation onto each member of the crew. He was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur "Genius Grant". In 1995, Hutchins published ''Cognition in the Wild'', a detailed study of distributed cognitive processes in a navy ship (an ''Iwo Jima''-class amphibious assault ship); like other works related to distributed cognition, it criticizes disembodied views of cognition and proposes an alternative which looks at cognitive systems that may be composed of multiple agents and the material world. Other areas of his work include the study of airline cockpits,Hutchins, E. (1995). How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds. Cognitive Science, 19(3), 265-288. the development of cognitive ethnographic methods and tools, and human-computer interaction. He ran the Distributed Cognition and Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at UC San Diego, in collaboration with James Hollan until 2014. He is now professor emeritus in the UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science.

Selected Bibliography

* Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT press.

References

External links

Hutchins's home page
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people MacArthur Fellows Psychological anthropologists University of California, San Diego faculty Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society {{US-anthropologist-stub