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.