Joint Cognitive Systems

ix

Preface

The gadget-minded people often have the i llus ion that a highly

automatized world will make smaller claims on human ingenuity than

does the present one ... This is pa lpably false .

Norbert Wiener, 1964, p. 63

For almost 25 ye ars, Cognitive Syst ems Engineering (CSE) has searched out and

listened to stories of claims on human ingenuity as fields of practice have changed

and adapted to new pressur es, new devices, and new opportunities. In these stories,

change challenged how activities are coordina ted, how systems are resilient at

boundaries, and how artifacts provide affordances.

This meant we could complemen t the previous book on join t cognitive systems,

which focused on the foundational concepts, with a book tha t used stories of