There were a few other concepts Josh brought up in his recent talk (). This is one of them: Extended Mind
Andy Clark’s idea of an active externalism gives an active role to the environment in driving cognitive processes. Josh illustrates this with a tasteless joke about Helen Keller: “How do you mess with Helen Keller? … Rearrange the furniture.” The underlying assumption is that some of her mind is externalized. She can’t see, can’t hear, yet her mental understanding of the world is reliant on the placement of things outside of her mind. Alzheimer’s patients live successfully at home because they engineer their lives with external scaffolds.
Designers utilize the extended mind through their iterations, which move thoughts into a tangible state and use the environment (and its inhabitants) to validate choices being made.
