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The Cognitive Biographies of Things

In this paper I argue that there is much to gain by constructing “cognitive biographies of things”. These are accounts that detail the history of an artefact and its use, focus on the physical changes undergone by the artefact over time, and draw out the cognitive corollaries of those changes. There are a number of reasons for why we might want to construct such biographies. If we subscribe to a situated view of cognition, then at least some of our cognitive achievement stem from the physical structures around us. To ignore the genesis, development and appropriation of cognitively significant structures would then be to paint an incomplete and misleading picture of cognition. Even without commitment to situated cognition, constructing such use-histories may be required if we are to discern the cognitive roles currently being played by some artefact (which may be of interest, for instance, in the process of designing artefacts). By overlaying succeeding phases of an activity with preceding ones, areas of possible cognitive significance can be highlighted and explored. In this paper I take a shot at constructing a cognitive biography of a large spice shelf that I encountered whilst conducting a study of people cooking. The biography is based on video of a session of cooking as well as a number of interviews. The resulting account spans a period of roughly 30 and details the mutual influence between cognition, activity and changing physical structures. In constructing this biography I hope to show some of the possible difficulties of doing so, as well as some of the benefits.