Cognitive Design

 Doing cognitive design is hard.  We don’t have many guidelines for practitioners that say “add these features and functions to your design to create this-or-that mental state or support this-at-that cognitive process”.  On the flip side, sometimes we have too many guidelines but they are grounded in strongly-held opinions rather than peer-reviewed cognitive science.

Cognitive designers must often go to the science of how minds work and translate it into a hypothesis or candidate guideline that can be tested and refined through the design project.  This makes almost every cognitive design project a research effort. Exciting but very hard to justify in a commercial design environment.  Cognitive design is clearly still an emerging field rather than an established design discipline.

 To be most effective the practicing cognitive designer must be able to get to quality science about how the mind works that is “design ready” or easy to translate into a specific and testable feature-function level guideline.

One world class source that is free on the web is the OpenCourseWare available from MIT. Of particular use are the courses in the Media Arts and Sciences section and of course the Brain and Cognitive Science section.  You get the syllabus, course notes and lectures, readings – many online, completed projects from other students and even exams but no access to MIT professors.

These courses represent the cutting edge of what world class cognitive scientists are sharing with their students.  A very good stream for cognitive designers to drink from.