David Kirsh

David Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD.   From 2017-19 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture Univ College London, where he continues as part-time Visiting Prof. He was educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post-doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has held research or visiting professor positions at MIT and Stanford University, and has for many years been an Adjunct Prof at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.  He is currently President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.

 

He has written extensively on situated cognition and especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought.  He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world, and how human environments have been adapted to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life.   Some recent projects focus on ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making and choreographic cognition, how thought unfolds in many modalities, and how new digital and media tools are reshaping thought, especially in the different stages of design.  He is currently working on a new theory of interaction and visual reasoning.