Cognitive Design

                                                                                                           We live in an economy where most of the value is created by services not goods. That’s why there is a big push on to develop a new discipline of service science, management and engineering.  The other reason is that we don’t know much about services.  Unlike products, they are intangible, experience-based and operate on different rules.  The areas of service design and service innovation are buzzing.  Cognitive design will play a key role in services innovation and we will chronicle that closely in this blog.    As way of an example, check out Jeanne Rae’s recent article Seek the Magic of Service Prototypes.  Some key points: 

• “Studies show that people gravitate toward products and services that make them feel good, safe, calm, or happy”

• “Rather than defining a service by what it does, think of it as the reaction it elicits from the people using it.”

• “Good service prototypes appeal to the emotions and avoid drawing attention to features, costs, and applications that can clutter the conversation and derail the excitement factor. Storytelling, vignettes, cartoons, amateur videos—all are low-budget tools that bypass the intellectual “gristmill” and go straight to the heart.”  

This approach clearly puts designing for mental states on equal or even more important footing than designing for  the core functionality/features of the offering. That is what cognitive design is all about!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under Design, Service Innovation. 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.