Cognitive Artifacts in Refrigeration System Configuration?

“In watching people thinking in the wild, we learn about their environment for thinking not what is inside them. But the environments of human thinking are not ‘natural’ environments. They are artificial. Humans create their cognitive power by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers.” Hutchins, 1995: 169 This paper deals with cognitive artifacts and their relevance for configuration practice in industrial refrigeration. It will explore the role and significance of cognitive artifacts in such a context. To what extend and when are cognitive artifacts used in refrigeration system configuration? This paper will give examples of relevant cognitive artifacts and illustrate their use in the studied context. How can the researcher approach the wish to analyze those in a context as complex as that of configuration practice? Does such analysis actually help a designer in understanding the context to be able to design technological solutions for it? This paper will introduce the method ‘video collage’ as a tool to analyze cognitive artifacts in configuration practice. In order to do this, the author will firstly start out with introducing and framing the theory of ‘distributed cognition’, from which the term ‘cognitive artifacts’ evolved, its advantages for analyzing a wellstructured cognitive system as well as its shortcomings for general practical use context analysis, and, secondly, the author will end with discussing particularly ‘cognitive artifacts’ with regard to the practice of refrigeration system configuration.