Cognitive Design

Quick, how many tables do you have in your house? How many tables do you interact with throughout the day? For most of us the answer is lots. Desks, kitchen tables, restaurant tables, work tables, benches, coffee tables, bars and so on. The fact is you spend a lot of time “at the table” and more to the point of this blog, a lot of your cognition (perceiving, remembering, thinking, deciding, feeling, interrelating, etc.) happens at a table.  

Yet, with the rare exception, tables have been left out of the cognitive design revolution. They are functional, easy to use and delight our senses but we have not taken the next step to design tables that enhance how we think and feel.

What an opportunity!

There have been efforts to include more functionality in tables. Take for example the Misto, a high-tech coffee table prototyped by HP.   It combines touch screen technology with a table to support playing board games and sharing photos.

New functionality yes, but does it really enhance the way I think and feel?  

Sometimes at the end of one of my workshops or classes on cognitive design we form a few design teams and I ask participants to give a traditional table of their choice a complete cognitive makeover in three hours or less.  Not much time, but I can generally look at the prototypes or sketches and listen to their design story and know if they have mastered the class material or not. Sometime students redesign the very tables we have used all quarter in the classroom.

You can imagine tables that are more interactive, networked and loaded with low cost sensors providing a vast range possibilities for cognitive design.   Tables could lift my mood, help me remember, teach, support daydreaming and reminiscing, help me keep track of the kids or all my projects, act as a weight loss coach or help me manage chronic condition and so on.

 One key to making the cognitive table a reality is enabling technology. And it is clearly in the works on many fronts. Check out this post from the Interaction Design Blog that highlight a collection of interactive tables.   

The post (to be updated regularly) provides a glimpse at the emerging enabling technology and also some insights into how it can be used to accelerate cognition.

I don’t want to suggest that the only options for cognitively remaking the table are high tech. Indeed, the best student ideas I have seen are decidedly low tech.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 8:34 am and is filed under Design, Examples. 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.