Cognitive Design

Traditionally, how a customer thinks and feels about a product is the domain of advertising, marketing and branding.   But now, in cognitive design, we have made the customer’s frame of mind (set of mental states) part of what is being designed.  Design now includes functionality, usability and mentality (frame of mind).  Of course customers are always free to “make up their own minds” but cognitive design seeks to create artifacts that are optimized to support and enhance a particular frame of mind that she chooses to be in. Simple example – when going to the movies do I want to laugh (see a comedy) be scared (see a horror flick) or think deeply (see a drama).  Designing for cognition has a long tradition in art, entertainment and luxury products.  What is new?  

We now have untapped science-based insights into how minds work that will radically extend the scope and effectiveness of cognitive design (promise and peril). 

   Designing to achieve specific mental states in all artifacts means we are blurring the lines between advertising, marketing and product/service development as never before. For example, the EEG systems used to measure thoughts and feelings  that I’ve mentioned in this blog before can be used not only to assess the effectiveness of ads but also to test design concepts long before and product is built.  There are many implications to the merging of marketing and product development through cognitive design.

   One immediate opportunity is to look at the tools marketers have used to win mindshare and see how they can be adapted to design. Not surprising, marketers have been on the forefront of applied cognitive psychology. Recent innovations include metaphor and archetypes in marketing, cognitive bias in consumer decision making, viral marketing (applying the concept of ideas virus and memetics), customer mental models, emotional intelligence in selling and of course neuromarketing or the use of fMRI and EEG machines (clinical equipment) to “read out” a customers thoughts and emotions (among other things).   Thanks to human factor specialists, designers can tune functionality to improve usability. Perhaps the cognitive design specialist, adapting lessons from marketing, can now assist product developers with tuning functionality to improve mentality (a set of mental states). Said another way, the breakthrough that cognitive design promises may be rooted in giving the marketer more direct access and influence over product/service functionality.

Even better would be to bring the engineers, product developers, human factor specialists, designers and marketers together in common design framework and methodology that takes a holistic and human-centric approach to achieving functionality, usability and mentality.