Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

In contrast, expert workers were much more likely to scaffold this problem solving
by working directly from the visual appearance of cases, as illustrated in a very different
protocol:
I walked over and I visualized. I knew the case I was looking at had ten out of it, and I
only wanted eight, so I just added two to it. I don’t never count when I’m making the
order, I do it visual, a visual thing you know. (Scribner & Tobach, 1997, p. 303)
It was also found that expert workers flexibly alternated the distribution of scaffolded
and mental arithmetic, but did so in a systematic way: when more mental
arithmetic was employed, it was done to decrease the amount of physical exertion
required to complete the order. This led to Scribner postulating a law of mental
effort: “In product assembly, mental work will be expended to save physical work”
(Scribner & Tobach, 1997, p. 348).
The law of mental effort was the result of Scribner’s observation that expert
workers in the dairy demonstrated marked diversity and flexibility in their solutions
to work-related problems. Intelligent agents may be flexible in the manner in
which they allocate resources between sense-act and sense-think-act processing.
Both types of processes may be in play simultaneously, but they may be applied in
different amounts when the same problem is encountered at different times and
under different task demands (Hutchins, 1995).
Such flexible information processing is an example of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss,
1966). A bricoleur is an “odd job man” in France.
The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike
the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials
and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of
instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever
is at hand.’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 17)
Bricolage seems well suited to account for the flexible thinking of the sort described
by Scribner. Lévi-Strauss (1966) proposed bricolage as an alternative to formal, theoretical
thinking, but cast it in a negative light: “The ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who
works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman”
(pp. 16–17). Devious means are required because the bricoleur is limited to using
only those components or tools that are at hand. “The engineer is always trying to
make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of
civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or necessity always remains within
them” (p. 19).
Recently, researchers have renewed interest in bricolage and presented it in
a more positive light than did Lévi-Strauss (Papert, 1980; Turkle, 1995). To Turkle
(1995), bricolage was a sort of intuition, a mental tinkering, a dialogue mediated by
228 Chapter 5