Hutchins

“How a cockpit remembers its speeds”

Theme of the reading

This article describes how the airline cockpit, taken as a cognitive system, computes and remembers a set of correspondences between airspeed and wing configurations. It identifies the following phenomena in the process: Situated seeing – adding structure to a perceptual array; distribution of cognitive labor; robustness through redundant processing; control through propagation of representational state; memory in a socio-technical system; amortization of complexity; when one sense mode is overloaded, convert info to another; opportunistic use of structure in the environment to make a hard task easy to do.

Getting ready to read

Questions to keep in mind while reading

What role does each of the phenomena described above play in the memory process?

Hutchins gives three different descriptions of the memory process. What are the three descriptions? How do they relate to one another?