It's not entirely the same thing, but this reminds me of the distributed cognition paradigm. Compare with the quote from this introductory article:

In several environments we found subjects using space to simplify choice by creating arrangements that served as heuristic cues. For instance, we saw them covering things, such as garbage disposal units or hot handles, thereby hiding certain affordances or signaling a warning and so constraining what would be seen as feasible. At other times they would highlight affordances by putting items needing immediate attention near to them, or creating piles that had to be dealt with. We saw them lay down items for assembly in a way that was unambiguously encoding the order in which they were to be put together or handed off. That is, they were using space to encode ordering information and so were off-loading memory. These are just a few of the techniques we saw them use to make their decision problems combinatorially less complex.

We also found subjects reorganizing their workspace to facilitate perception: to make it possible to notice properties or categories that were not noticed before, to make it easier to find relevant items, to make it easier for the visual system to track items. One subject explained how his father taught him to place the various pieces of his dismantled bicycle, many of which were small, on a sheet of newspaper. This made the small pieces easier to locate and less likely to be kicked about. In videos of cooking we found chefs distinguishing otherwise identical spoons by placing them beside key ingredients or on the lids of their respective saucepans, thereby using their positions to differentiate or mark them. We found jigsaw puzzlers grouping similar pieces together, thereby exploiting the capacity of the visual system to note finer differences between pieces when surrounded by similar pieces than when surrounded by different pieces.

Finally, we found a host of ways that embodied agents enlist the world to perform computation for them. Familiar examples of such off-loading show up in analog computations. When the tallest spaghetti noodle is singled out from its neighbors by striking the bundle on a table, a sort computation is performed by using the material and spatial properties of the world. But more prosaically we have found in laboratory studies of the computer game Tetris that players physically manipulate forms to save themselves computational effort [Kirsh 2001; Kirsh and Maglio 1995]. They modify the environment to cue recall, to speed up identification, and to generate mental images faster than they could if unaided. In short, they make changes to the world to save themselves costly and potentially error-prone computations.

All the work we have discussed above points to one fact: people form a tightly coupled system with their environments. The environment is one’s partner or cognitive ally in the struggle to control activity. Although most of us are unaware of it, we constantly create external scaffolding to simplify our cognitive tasks.