Cognitive Design

Knowing how someone thinks about time tells you a lot about their cognitive needs, tendencies and biases. So I am always on the lookout for new insights into the psychology of time that might be useful for cognitive designers.

Earlier I blogged on The Time Paradox, a must read for all designers interested in understanding how clients think about time. The chart below offers a provocative hypothesis, namely there might be a best (most strongly correlated to happiness) time style.

                  [Image Source: Time Paradox Surveys] 

Your time style includes an orientation – past, present or future and an attitude – positive, negative, hopeful, fearful, etc. Past positive and past negative styles are just that. Present fatalistic focuses on the now and believes fate determines what happens in life. Present hedonistic focuses on now and is driven by the pleasure principle. The transcendental future style is focused on an unbounded future (death is a new beginning).  The red dots outline the authors position on the ideal time style. Do you agree?

Another interesting claim about the psychology of time was recently reported in a Research Digest Blog post, Doubt Cast on the Maxim that Time Goes Faster as You Get Older.  A couple of studies are quoted that look at the factors that drive our perception of how quickly time moves. Findings include, for example:

“Age accounted for four per cent of the variance in how quickly participants said the last ten years had passed and just one per cent of the perception of time’s speed in general. By contrast, how busy and rushed people reported feeling accounted for ten per cent of the variance in subjective speed of time. Consistent with this, women reported feeling more rushed than men, on average, and they perceived time to go by more quickly.”

Feeling rushed creates tremendous cognitive load and psychological stress. Understanding the objective and subjective factors that drive it is important for effective cognitive design.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Psychographics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.