A cognitive system performs the cognitive work of knowing, understanding, planning, deciding, problem solving, analyzing, synthesizing, assessing, and judging as they are fully integrated with perceiving and acting. It is a distributed system in which people with diverse roles and capabilities, and with the assistance of technological capabilities, collaborate in the planning and performance of cognitive work.
As suggested by the graphic to the left, a cognitive system engages in adaptive activity. It does so within four sets of constraints; those provided by the structure of the work domain and work tasks, those provided by cognitive processing and cognitive strategies used in transition between cognitive states, those associated with individual work task assignments and cognitive processing modes, and those associated with group coordination and collaborative style.
A cognitive system is a thinking (or intelligent) information system. However, the enhanced intelligence is not generated by the activity of intelligent technological functions as many in the discipline of Artificial Intelligence will want to claim, but emerges from the coordinated collaboration of distributed human agents via their interactions with each other and with functionally heterogeneous technological artifacts.
In the sense that collaborations between human agents and their use of technological artifacts are coordinated, effective, robust, and meaningful, the cognitive system is intelligent.
It is sometimes argued that computer-based agents can be employed to reason about the beliefs of human participants in teams. From the perspective I promote here, people reason but technological devices do not. Two people in coordination can possibly reason more effectively than either in isolation, and if they (as a coordinated dyad) avail themselves of the opportunities presented by technological devices that can compute logical relationships, find and organize information, and probably offer a number of as yet unimagined supporting functions, these entities (the two people together with their technological devices) constitute a reasoning system.
The design of a cognitive system requires a special set of analysis and design tools and, on this site, I describe the fundamentals. I rely on the framework of Cognitive Work Analysis and the strategy of Functional (Ecological) Workspace Design. The tutorials available on this site offer a guide.
I have developed an extensive set of workshops on analysis and design of cognitive systems. Contact me if you would like to host a workshop on this topic.
My book titled "The Foundations & Pragmatics of Cognitive Work Analysis: A Systematic Approach to Design of Large-Scale Information Systems" is available from this site as a free download. The Contents & Preface are available here [0.4 M/B].
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