Can artefacts be analyzed as an agent by itself – yes or no: what does hutchins ‘how does a cockpit remember its speeds’ tell us

This paper re-iterates Hutchins’ study ‘How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds’ from 1995. This latter emphasized the unit of analysis in exploring the processes and knowledge structures that underpin the activity of a socio-technical system. Hutchins investigated this concept through conceiving the cockpit as a joint cognitive system: how this work-system observed and remembered the speeds by which the aircraft operated, with a focus on turning non-observable properties of system performance into adaptive strategies. Hutchins’ main conclusion was that “the classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person” (Hutchins, 1995, p. 2). Starting from this macro-level conception about the joint system, our own study re-establishes that the unit of analysis in FRAM is functional, starting bottom-up by building a model of functions and inter-dependencies among agents, even at different levels of abstraction. The novelty of this study is that the traditional boundary between medium and agent was abandoned in favor of accepting aircraft systems and artefacts as agents of their own, all entitled to produce functions in the FRAM model and how this effected task and information propagation.