3. Bootstrapping, Artifacts, and Tokaimura, 1999
Channel: Adaptive Capacity Labs
Date: 13/03/2023

The 1999 Tokaimura event killed two workers and was, until the Fukishima disaster, Japan's most serious nuclear accident.

The accident was analyzed by a Japanese human factors team and the analysis published along with commentaries by important safety experts, many of whom had been working on nuclear safety since TMI. These papers appeared in a special issue of Cognition, Technology and Work (link.springer.com/journal/10111/2/4/page/1_.

Coming 20 years after TMI the Tokaimura accident shows both how far the study of safety had come and how difficult the actual creation and maintenance of safety is. Tokaimura demonstrates how complex, production work can be shaped over time to become hazardous in ways that go unappreciated until an accident generates intense scrutiny.

This seminar is also the jumping off place for considering how to 'get in' to complex cognitive work domains. We look more closely at the notion of studying the "messy details" of ordinary work and at the use of worker-generated cognitive artifacts as pointers to cognitively important symbolic activities. Concentrating on the ordinary details of work and studying how workers create and use cognitive artifacts leads naturally to the topic of distributed cognition. (Thumbnail credit: Clés CEA cited at laradioactivite.com)