A Brief Introduction to Distributed Cognition©

History and Background The Distributed Cognition (dcog) approach was developed by Ed Hutchins ad his colleagues at University California, San Diego in the mid to late 80s as a radically new paradigm for rethinking all domains of cognitive phenomena. The traditional view of cognition is that it is a localised phenomenon that is best explained in terms of information processing at the level of the individual. In contrast Hutchins was making the claim that cognition is better understood as a distributed phenomenon. The theoretical and methodological base of the distributed cognition approach derives from the cognitive sciences, cognitive anthropology and the social sciences.