Scaffolding a Methodology for Situating Cognitive Technology Within Everyday Contexts

Abstract

Cognitive technology is leaving the lab and entering the world of the everyday. Systems such as knowledge navigators, conversational agents, and intelligent personal assistants are increasingly incorporated into real-world systems. This success of cognitive technologies poses novel methodological challenges for interdisciplinary teams tasked with their development. In order to behave successfully within the variegated conditions of the everyday, systems have to be developed within processes of continuous iterative evaluation and analysis. These development processes necessarily proceed in an interdisciplinary manner, combining the expertise of cognitive science and the productive know-how of interaction design. These disciplines operate within incompatible methodological and epistemological framings, complicating synthesis of their results. However, in order to situate cognitive technology productively within everyday situations their respective results have to be integrated into a single research process. We discuss a methodological framework facilitating this synthesis which was developed within concrete projects of interdisciplinary cooperation.