Socioplastics 11813 Can a Project Continue after Its Author Leaves?
A project can preserve thousands of files and still lose the knowledge needed to continue its work. BackupCognition names the shared records, people and procedures that let a team resume an inquiry after its original organiser leaves. A drive may contain drawings and several report versions while keeping no clear account of decisions, abandoned assumptions or unresolved measurements. The practical test is whether another person can reconstruct the question and choose a justified next step. Edwin Hutchins’s account of distributed cognition shows how thinking is organised across people, tools and settings. Lucy Suchman examines situated action and the relation between plans and practice. Their work makes project memory a collective arrangement: a record has value when people can interpret it, connect it to a decision and use it in the situation that follows. A handover protocol could combine a versioned archive with a concise decision log, open questions, contact map and next-action record. Each entry would link to its evidence and name the person or process responsible for review. A colleague unfamiliar with the project could test the protocol by reconstructing one major choice and locating the material that supports it. Gaps would show where the team needs a clearer explanation or a different form of documentation. BackupCognition treats continuity as a shared capacity that can be designed and tested. It supports transitions between collaborators and institutions while keeping the reasoning behind a project accessible. The archive becomes useful when it carries enough context for new participants to continue, challenge or redirect the work. The team can rehearse this handover before a staff transition, then update the record based on the questions a new collaborator needs answered.
REFERENCES
Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Suchman, L.A. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html