I attended a Cognitive Archaeology meeting at Leeds Beckett last week. No, really! This was at the invitation of Andrew Wilson of @PsychScientists fame. It was a great day, thanks, and I learned a lot, but it did get me thinking: why would an engineer want to get involved in archaeology? And not the "Let's build Stone Henge" or "Let's build a seige engine" kind of archaeology, where interesting mechanisms might need designing and making. No, this is all about spheroidal rocks, and at the moment, mainly about throwing them. Hence the "cognitive" - as in Perception-Action-Cognition. Actually, there is a lot of interesting engineering in this, and learning more about things like knapping I'm excited to see where we can take it. There's a fascinating blog post there: but not this one.
No, this blog post is titled after a question asked of me about five years ago by one of my PhD students, jointly supervised with our ethics centre, IDEA-CETL. We were discussing engineering decision-making, ethnographic studies of engineering, as well as my work on iPAM and MyPAM (to which I often made reference when discussing engineering decisions, since it was the most direct experience I had of engineering a system), Together Through Play and Postural Assessment. Working with clinicians and physiotherapists on rehabilitation robots; working with sociologists on matters of inclusive play and social participation; working with psychologists and movement scientists on posture and later prehension, while also supervising a number of PhD students doing decision support in supply chains. Which raised the question: What did I do in all this? It's a good question, which is why it stuck with me, and I realised at that point that I really needed to have a sharp answer. Well, I've since added Professors of English (Stuart Murray), Law (Anthea Hucklesby) and Transport Studies (Bryan Matthews) - among others! - to my list of collaborators through the Augmenting the Body, Tracking People and WHISPER projects over the last two years, and now here I am getting involved with archaeologists. When it came to writing up a blog post about this, it suddenly struck me that the obvious question was - Why? "What do you do, exactly?".
Allow me to explain.
At heart, I'm interested in design. How the world around us takes shape, and how we can do that more effectively. I'm most interested in how we can make better design decisions, but that's a very, very nebulous area - and if I'm honest, it's the goal of almost all engineering research from Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics, to Sociotechnical Systems Analysis and Robotics. I mean, there's no point in any of this research if it isn't going to make someone's design decisions better, either by giving them better options, or helping them to identify good options more efficiently. I'll spare you a lengthy discussion on decision support and decision analysis (you can find a good account of it in my thesis), but suffice to say that design tools remain one of my key interests. I just think that generic decision-making tools aren't terribly useful - or at least, the ones that we've got are as useful as they're going to be.
No, if you want to develop tools to help engineers and designers make better decisions, you need to dig into some specific areas, and the area I decided to focus on is the link between task demands and person capabilities, and how we can improve the fit between them. That's where my interest in inclusive design and rehabilitation comes from, and it drives a lot of my bread and butter research - which is largely on finding ways of measuring motor skills and ways of improving them (hence my being embedded in PACLab here at Leeds). Which is all well and good, but if you're going to design assistive devices, or rehabilitation technology, or otherwise assess matters related to disability and inclusivity (rather than just study the underlying science), you're immediately getting into user-centred design, and questions of trade-offs and ethics. Hence my links with the Centre for Disability Studies, with Tracking People and with Augmenting the Body. These things don't exist in a vacuum, and assuming you're interested in having stuff that actually works and is actually useful to people, you need to take these perspectives into account. It's not easy, and I don't necessarily get it right, but still - you try.
So, how does Cognitive Archaeology fit into this? Well, archaeologist Ian Stanistreet of Liverpool University, hit the nail on the head when he noted that (and I'm paraphrasing): you have the objects, and you want to know what they're good for, but you don't have access to the users. And struck me as a very good analogy for design. It's a little bit different, of course: designers generally can get access to their users, but in my experience it's rarely as many as they'd like, and if you're working with people who have specific impairments, then testing time is extremely precious, and you don't want to spend it finding problems that you could have found another way. One of the goals of design tools is to find problems faster, and fix them. So, a lot of the work I want to do in relation to task demands and capabilities falls into exactly this category. I have a design: now I want to know if my intended users can make use of it before I go anywhere near evaluating it with them. Unless they happen to be an exact match for me, then I can't do this just by trying it out myself. The problem is, at some level, the same - Andrew's solution of affordance mapping, which he is applying to the Cognitive Archaeology work, could help to address that issue and it's something I've been chomping at the bit to apply to design. The Cognitive Archaeology work provides a great avenue for exploring that, and developing and getting my head around the methods involved: I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it.
