Cognitive Design

Cognitive designers create artifacts that induce specific mental states (thoughts and feelings) and/or enhance specific mental processes (perception, learning, memory, decision-making, creativity, etc.) in the people that use them.  To do this systematically the cognitive designer must have empirical insight into how the mind of their target audience works.  So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that reveal the cognitive biases, dominate metaphors,  mental models, problem solving heuristics and other inner mental workings of particular groups.

An excellent example is the recent study, Engineering Stereotypes Drive Counter Productive Practices.   In the study, researchers from Northwestern and the University of Colorado give us insights into the mental model held by some engineering students on what it means to be an engineer. For example:

“There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves,” Leonardi says. “So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?”  In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone, they couldn’t consider themselves an expert engineer.” 

Some implications of this lone-wolf mental model of engineering expertise are obvious. It will not promote the teamwork that is essential to engineering corporate-style. Some implications are not so obvious.

Clearly something to consider for the psychographic profile the next time you are designing something for engineers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 3:11 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.