"With the Mac, you have always had the power to move around and organize applications and documents in your own virtual space, maintaining a neat or cluttered workspace, as is your habit. Other desktop systems, from Windows to Unix, have depended more on abstraction, forcing users to remember the location of objects in complex hierarchies. In theory, all of this reduced clutter, but it really only moved the clutter from the visible desktop to the back of your mind. Since most of us work better with visible clutter than with rote memorization, our efficiency drops." -https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html
Vygotsky developed this idea of the social origins of individual psychological functions in Society of Mind (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985). He argued that every high-level cognitive function appears twice: first as an interpsychological process and only later as an intrapsychological process. The new functional system inside the child is brought into existence in the interaction of the child with others (typically adults) and with artifacts. As a consequence of the experience of interactions with others, the child eventually may become able to create the functional system in the absence of the others. This could be seen in Minsky’s terms as a mechanism for the propagation of a functional skill from one society of mind to another. From the perspective of distributed cognition, this sort of individual learning is seen as the propagation of a particular sort of pattern through a community. Cultural practices assemble agencies into working assemblages and put the assemblages to work. Some of these assemblages may be entirely contained in an individual, and some may span several individuals and material artifacts.
- Edwin Hutchins in http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/%7Edrwhite/Anthro179a/DistributedCognition.pdf
