There are indeed many facets to situated cognition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition) but the essential insight (and all food models, theories have these) is not so hard to grasp - effectively the situated paces emphasis on the fact that cognition, learning and other 'potentially' abstractable processes (as in some forms of psychology) all occur in an environment of social interaction and so any accounts of learning etc., (say hard-line schema theory) that abstract learning, cognition, development from these contexts are inaccuarte and misleading. This of course leads into multiple models of learning and doing, activity theory, actor-network theory, distributed cognition, legitimate peripheral participation, situated learning ....Now there are many ways in which these 'models' have application and usefulness for design : 1) they could help explain how designers practice, 2) how they learn, 3) how designed objects are used as mediating objects ... In fact, I cannot think of another approach which is more compatible with design practice, thinking and learning - it's very common sensical. It of course is also consistent with Schon's accounts of the practice of professions and other similar proposals in that it anchors accoutns of practice and learning always in real world situations (somewhat like Bourdieu's habitus etc). Thus it says that while as a heuristic we might want to describe what is going on in some situation using certain models, concepts, language - we are not sketching reality or practice but rather temporarily abstracting for the purposes of conversation (with students, readers). Schema theory and similar models when pressed to their limits attempt to abstract this pragmatic accounting process into some sort of internal mental model - when it is rather the fact that no account can ever fully represent or capture the embeddness of practice and the knowledge which is employed, reproduced and (sometimes) modified in response to real world need. (This description is also my attempt to account for the essentially unaccountable). Anwyay ... lots more could be said ...
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