Design Research and Innovation Event
Many times in this blog I have argued that designing for a specific think-and-feel is a major source of innovation across industries. I am pulling those thoughts together into a two-hour workshop, Designing for How Minds Actually Work for the 2009 Design Research Conference to be held in Chicago this October. The abstract follows.
”We want products, services and experiences that are useful, easy to use, delight our senses and make us think-and-feel in a certain way. This last requirement, designing for a specific think-and-feel or set of mental states is an important innovation frontier for design researchers. The question is, how can we do it in a systematic and repeatable way?
Various positions for designing mental states including emotion, meaning, pleasure and fun have been proposed but no general purpose approach exists. This workshop presents one such approach called cognitive design that is based on modeling interaction as a conversion of mental energy. We put mental energy into artifacts to use them and we get mental energy out in terms of how they make us think and feel. The relationship between the mental work we do to access the functionality of an artifact (focusing, remembering, deciding, self regulating) and the mental benefits we get out (meaning, visceral responses, incidental processing) determines the frame of mind that is produced by the interaction. Depending on this mental energy in/out relationship, a range of frames of mind can be produced including agitate, tolerate, resonate, accelerate and even integrate. The key is to understand the cognitive science behind the factors that drive the mental energy in/out relationship and tune them through a design process to achieve the desired frame of mind.
The workshop defines 10 factors that provide heuristics for doing cognitive design across a range of artifacts. Case studies are presented. Participants are encouraged to bring an artifact for a hands-on activity involving the “cognitive makeover” of an existing product.”
