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Edwin Hutchins is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition.
Hutchins was a student of Roy D'Andrade and has been a strong advocate of the use of anthropological methods in cognitive science. His early work involved studies of Micronesian navigators and their use of modus ponens in land transactions. He was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur "Genius Grant".
In 1995, Hutchins published Cognition in the Wild, now a classic in Cognitive Science. CITW provides a detailed study of distributed cognitive processes in a navy ship, and as with other works related to distributed cognition, criticizes disembodied views of cognition and proposes an alternative which looks at cognitive systems that may be composed of multiple agents and the material world.
Other areas of his work include the study of airline cockpits, the development of cognitive ethnographic methods and tools, and human-computer interaction. He currently, in collaboration with James Hollan, runs the Distributed Cognition and Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at UC San Diego.
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