Addressing cognitive challenges in design: a designers’ perspective

Abstract

The advance in digital technologies is placing increasingly high demands on users’ cognitive capabilities, resulting in ubiquitous cognitive challenges (e.g. memory overload) in everyday interaction with products. Such challenges can be attributed to the inadequate understanding of cognitive capability for informing design. The literature review further specifies that current research has largely ignored how user cognition is understood and implemented by designers. This study thus aims to advance the understanding of user cognition by adding the designers’ perspective. This research adopts a mixed method approach, which helps highlight and address the designerly ways of knowing as well as the implicit nature of cognition in design. The research framework consists of three phases. First, the language differences between design practise and cognitive research were confirmed by interviewing designers and analysing designers’ articles. Second, a review of design languages of cognition and ethnographic fieldwork were conducted to explore the designerly ways of understanding and implementing cognition. Finally, the findings were tested in a larger-scale survey. By explicating the related design languages, this research elucidates designers’ Micro, Meso, and Macro perspectives on user cognition, thereby expanding the current rational information-processing conception of cognition to a more context-based understand- ing. The multiple perspectives also add more embodied and situated considerations to the conventional focus on elementary information processing capacity, advancing the existing understanding of users’ cognitive capabilities. Hence, this study enhances the predominant way of conceptualising user cognition in design research and empirically supports the postulated situated nature of cognition in cognitive research. Furthermore, it recognises a specific application field within the broader landscape of cognitive research, suggesting that designing interactions has its own research agenda rather than relying on other established sub-areas.