Cognitive Design

Traditionally designers and human factor specialists are very focused on functionality and usability. We want things that are useful and easy to use.  As we move into the next century more and more designers are looking to go beyond usability concerns to the systematic design of pleasurable or enjoyable products. The idea is to design for specific states of mind (mentality) in the user – pleasure, enjoyment and so on.   

Two excellent books that take this approach include Designing Pleasurable Products  by Patrick Jordan and Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment edited by Mark A. Blythe and others. Both books represent important efforts to design for mentality (user’s state of mind). They borrow a little from the cognitive science (or related) literature and quickly develop practical tools and methods for doing design.  Although productive, neither book provides (or purports to provide) the systematic review of what we know about how minds work (cognitive/neuro sciences) to effectively make the following shift:

Functionality à Usability à Mentality

I use the word mentality rather than pleasure or enjoyment because it denotes that the design challenge may be broader – encompassing any state of mind that is needed to drive more value from the artifact. No matter which word you use there is an important shift from a word that describes the artifact (functional and usable) to one that describes the mental states of the user. This is consistent with a more human-centric approach to design. I am not just designing to meet the “needs of users”, instead I am designing a cognitive artifact that integrates both the functional state of the product and the mental state of the user in hopefully a fully symbiotic relationship. Another advantage of defining Mentality as the goal is that it can also refer to a state of the product/artifact as functionality and usability do. Mentality in a product/artifact means I am designing smarter machines and other artificially intelligent artifacts. As described in the post below, Donald Norman sees smarts machines designed to work symbiotically with humans as the future of design.

The next step in design then is to “design for mentality” in humans by achieving a specific state of mind and in the artifact by adding functionality that makes it smarter.