Agents Writing on Walls: Cognitive Stigmergy and Beyond

One of the fundamental factors driving the (self-)organisation of complex social systems — such as human organisations, animal societies, and multi-agent systems — is the interaction of individuals mediated by the environment: sharing a workspace, mutually perceiving each other's actions, and modifying a common environment are simple yet powerful mechanisms that enable social coordination. In this article, we recall and classify some of the main sorts of environment-based coordination, and discuss their impact on the engineering of complex socio-technical systems.