Scaffolding minds: human collective intelligence through space, body and material symbols

D'Errico and colleagues argue that human collective intelligence emerges not just from individual cognition but from the scaffolding of space, body, and material symbols that extend thinking beyond the boundaries of individual minds. This connects directly to Andy Clark's extended mind thesis already in the library, but focuses specifically on the collective dimension — how groups think together through shared material culture. The framework offers product people a way to think about how digital environments either support or constrain collective intelligence in teams and user communities. The authors bring archaeological and anthropological perspective to questions of distributed cognition that complement the library's existing cognitive science works. A useful bridge between the individual focus of most cognition research and the organizational challenges product people actually face.