Assignment 3 Christina Caiozzo

My roommates and I try to eat dinner together every Sunday. With eight mouths to feed, that all have conflicting schedules- this is a bit of a process. According to Hutchins, a cognitive system extends beyond the individual, to include multiple people and artifacts that coordinate together to achieve the same goal. We make it a shared goal to fit each other in, and spend some quality time together for dinner on Sunday. Thus, our desired end state is getting all eight of us sitting around the table together at the same time eating something delicious.
Both internal and external representations are used to achieve this goal. In terms of internal representations, both our short-term and long-term memories are useful. Remembering how nice previous Sunday dinners were motivates us to rearrange our schedules around future dinners. Externally, we make shopping lists to help us remember what food we need to buy. We also schedule a time on our kitchen calendar to help everyone remember. We have not done this, but creating a facebook event might also be a useful external representation to remind everyone of the date. Essentially, the message being represented is that spending time together is important, and we should try and make it a priority.
The representations we use would not be effective if they did not have the same meaning for everyone. We try and do a lot of things ahead of time so that we are not cognitively overloaded. Penciling our date into the calendar, and arranging who needs to bring what helps us efficiently prepare for dinner. These preparations allow for successful dinners, where we all come downstairs and divvy up responsibilities.
Eating dinner together is comprised of both loose and tight coupling. Preparations for the dinner are fairly loosely coupled. There is not too much interaction between everyone aside from notes, and lists intended to remind everyone. During the dinner itself, interaction is tightly coupled. We must communicate with one another about who is responsible for what. We decide together what we should eat, and who will take care of each aspect of dinner. Also, the main point of eating dinner together is to interact and talk to one another.
In terms of task uncertainty, making Sunday dinner a routine affects how we think of it, and makes it easier to make it a top priority. We rely on each other as an interdependent team- there is no set plan for who contributes when. Eating together is very much a cooperative task.
Essentially, we rely on each other as a cognitive system to coordinate our schedules and achieve our shared goal of a Sunday dinner.