Summary
I am a Professor and past chair of the Cognitive Science department at UCSD, where I have been since the department started in 1989.  My research interests vary, but all turn on understanding how we are tightly coupled to the outside world, and how that interactive coupling has shaped the inner and outer workings of our cognitive skills and capacities.  Over the years I have looked at how the environment can be configured to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space to cope with the complexity of everyday life, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought. Most recently, I have been studying the ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making and choreographic cognition.   My approach combines theory, experiment and ethnographic study.  Because my focus is on how we interact with the environment I am sensitive to the relevance of cognitive science for design.   I have strong interests in the cognitive foundations of design, and especially how we human use not just our brains and bodies as mechanisms for thought, but actual physical and now digital objects.  We think with things.