Book: "Cognition On The Edge"
Release of the book about the CubeBrowser object. This publication covers the theory of distributed cognition, which is spread amongst people and artefacts.
The book is available for download:
Cognition On The Edge (PDF, 100MB)
Extract from the preface:
Inter - Trans - Multi - Disciplinarity
In the beginning, this book was started as the formal, written part of my diploma thesis at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. It was my declared goal for that to bring some of the thinking that I learned there to the world of Computer Science. In a way that is taken serious within the formal literacy of that discipline. By having been invited to the CHI conferences in Boston and Leiden as well as many other venues I can state that this goal as successfully achieved.
But the revised edition of my thesis that you are reading right now has been lead by yet another motivation. During all the presentations I have had with this project so far and with all the nice feedback I received, people asked the same question over and over again: How can somebody come up with this? How can you leave the paths of the known to create something like a CubeBrowser? And people wanted to know about my background, the discipline I have been educated in. They wanted to know whether you have to be an engineer and inventor or if you have to be a designer and artist. My answer to these questions is that you have to be all of them at once. You cannot make it if you stick to one discipline alone.
Technology is mirrored in society and vice versa. Since the machines we create become more and more a part of our lives, serving ever more purposes and senses, we have to think broad and interconnected between different disciplines, techniques, materials, styles and philosophies.
As mentioned above, the initial motivation was to contribute to the current discourse of computer science, but in the end I had the impression that I had adopted to that style of science with my project too much. The effort and concentration that was necessary to finish the prototypes of this project have kept much time from thinking in that really interconnected way of design and development. Therefore, I decided to create this overworked edition of my thesis, that documents much of the processes around the CubeBrowser in a more design oriented way.
Whom is this book for?
Obviously, it addresses the interests of engineers, artists, philosophers and designers. With these designated goals nothing else would be appropriate. This project is an adapter between man and machine and this book should be understood as a bridge between the professions as well. I hope that everybody who is coming from his side of the bridge can find something valuable on the other side.
But being a diploma thesis, this book can only touch the peak of the iceberg. Therefore, I would like to encourage you to have a look into the work of the other people who I am referring to.
How to use this book?
The single chapters and appendices of the book can be seen as mostly modular and independent. After two chapters of theoretical background and introduction to cognition science and hyper-text theory the CubeBrowser project is presented. While these chapter should be easy and brief to read, it makes perfectly sense to skip them and jump directly forward to the CubeBrowser chapter. The most important ideas of this project will be repeated there. After that, you find four CubeBrowser related appendices with a mostly photographic documentation of the different international presentations, exemplary user paths through the Flickr database and a technical documentation.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank many people at the academy: Prof. Georg Trogemann and Lasse Scherffig for teaching their unique, experimental approach to Computer Science and running the fabulous lab3, Prof. Zil Lilas for his incredible talent to motivate and fascinate people to explore unknown terrains of design and play, Prof. Peter Friedrich Stephan for his seminars on philosophy and hyper-text theory, which created the foundation for many thoughts in this project, and Prof. Frans Vogelaar for his steady encouragements towards a radical rethinking of design.
Special thanks for Andreas Muxel and Charlotte Krauss, their early interest in and helpful hand for the project gave it a marvelous kick-start at the Yahoo! Design Expo in California. And I want to thank Martin Nawrath and Bernd Voss, none of the prototypes could have been built without their technical support.
Furthermore, many thanks go to Anselm Bauer, Martin Rumori, Therese Schulheit, Charlotte Krauss and Jana Paapenbrook for being the beta-readers of this document. Special thanks go to Christoph Haag: without his LaTex magic this book definitely would not have been possible. Last but way not least I want to thank my family for giving me the freedom to develop my ideas.