  In a post-industrial society, the workplace is dominated primarily by
Knowledge Work, which is achieved mostly through human cognitive processing,
such as analysis, comprehension, evaluation, and decision-making. Many of these
processes have limited support from technology in the same way that physical
tasks have been enabled through a host of tools from hammers to shovels and
hydraulic lifts. To develop a suite of cognitive tools, we first need to
understand which processes humans use to complete work tasks. In the past
century several classifications (e.g., Blooms) of cognitive processes have
emerged, and we assessed their viability as the basis for designing tools that
support cognitive work. This study re-used an existing data set composed of
interviews of environmental scientists about their core work. While the
classification uncovered many instances of cognitive process, the results
showed that the existing cognitive process classifications do not provide a
sufficiently comprehensive deconstruction of the human cognitive processes; the
work is quite simply too abstract to be operational.
