Assignment #3: Lisa Park

One of the ongoing groups that I am a part of is my household of three apartment-mates. This is our third year as a cognitive system. Thus, a 3-year-long task is shared upkeep of our living space. In our first year together, as new apt-mates, we were determined to divide this work fairly and execute it systematically. We got together and discussed ideas about household chores, meaning we exchanged our individual internal representations and cross-checked them against each other, much like how the jet pilots in Hutchins' paper "How a Cockpit Remembers its Speeds" verify their own internal representations of speed and various positions against each other's. In groupwork, it is important that our internal representations of the task at hand are similar so that we agree on our goal state (some level of cleanliness) and how to achieve that goal. The meeting concluded with the task of maintenance broken down into several individual tasks: taking out trash, taking out recycling, washing the dishes, and vacuuming. We transformed our own internal representations to match the agreed-upon goal state, then transformed these into an external representation, a chore schedule chart. The representation of fairly divided labor was encoded into this schedule, along with the tasks, as each member was assigned a different task every week.

Now, after years of living together, we no longer need an external representation to remind us what our tasks are. Our tasks are internally encoded in our minds. However, we may have gotten lazy and without this external representation, our individual representations of an acceptable cleanliness and fairness become misaligned. Thus, we sometimes meet again as a group to get our representations straight.

Unlike the pilots whose procedure requires a back-and-forth protocol between them, the task of household upkeep is generally loosely-coupled work. I do not need my roommates' help in washing the dishes or taking out the trash; we do these things separately and on our own time. However, the meeting/discussing part of this task is tightly coupled, as we bounce opinions off each other, and we need to consider other members' wishes to achieve coordination and general household happiness. This aligns with the coupling concept outlined in Olson's paper: loose coupling results when "people need to be aware of others’ activity and decisions, but without the need for immediate clarification" (422). Our chore chart enabled this loosely-coupled state, while our eventual slide into atrophy/apathy makes the task uncertain again and we require tight-coupling to get back on track.