Cognitive Design

In service delivery it is important to be polite especially when things are tense. Politeness reflects respect and commands respect.  Being treated with respect puts customers and employees in a positive and productive mental state. Politeness is key to building and holding effective relationships.

Designing for politeness is good business and is a clear example of cognitive design or designing to create a specific “think and feel”.

Your services may be polite but what about products? Do they treat your customers with respect or are they rude?  We don’t normally think about products (versus services) that way but we should or so it is argued in the post, Designing For Politeness, on the Interaction Design blog. 

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Bruce Nussbaum has started an excellent thread on the importance of design thinking and how we may need to apply it to generate transformations rather than just innovations. Transformational impacts rather than incremental innovations are required in order to meet the dire challenges we face in healthcare, management, education,  global warming and other areas running on broken models.  And design thinking is the key!

For me, designs that look beyond usability and sensory delight to probe deeper into how our minds naturally work to create a specific “think-and-feel” (cognition) offer one approach to transformation.  

More boldly, designs that are optimized for how minds (people and machines) really work offer the best hope for transforming healthcare, management, education and our approach to global warming.  

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