Supporting Collaboration and Distributed Cognition in Context-Aware Pervasive Computing Environments is a paper written by Gerhard Fischer and others. It was presented at the 2004 “Computing Off the Desktop” Workshop.

In this paper, we will first describe conceptual frameworks that have guided the development of the socio-technical environments moving computing beyond the desktop. Our work is grounded in the basic belief that there is no media-independent communication and interaction: tools, materials, and social arrangements always mediate activity. We explore here the unique possibilities that computational media can have on design and on distributed cognition. Cognition is shared not only among minds, but also among minds and the structured media within which minds interact. The second part of the paper describes a set of interrelated socio-technical developments that support collaboration and distributed cognition among design communities in context-aware pervasive computing environments.

The paper is part of a larger group of research projects called “computing off the desktop”. There are three themes that are being explored for design and development: going large, going small and going everywhere.

Relevance: For both the Fugitive location-based game and my thesis project on tagged informaton spaces, I see distributed cognition as a useful theoretical framework for understanding interaction within these shared spaces.

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