7 – CONNECTING DESIGN WITH COGNITION AT WORK

Publisher Summary One long-standing perspective on the relationship between cognition and design is that people have severe limits on their memory, attention, and problem-solving capabilities. People are prone to illusions and biases of many kinds. In this view, design then would use new technological capabilities to develop prostheses that overcome the inherent weaknesses of people. Depending on the machine’s assessment of how people’s mental or physical state is changing, the machine will decide when and how to change the interface and change user tasks so that the demands remain within people’s limited capabilities. This chapter discusses connecting design with cognition at work. It provides an introduction to some of the basic concepts about design and cognition, which can help design processes to enable or release human expertise. Technology change and new designs are one set of drivers in these processes of organizational transformation and human adaptation. The changes that are triggered result in new levels of performance on some dimensions, new squeezes on performance in other places, new side effects when things that were separate become connected, and new forms of complexity. In adaptive cycles, designs act as stimulants in two major ways. Designs can trigger expansive adaptations by users and stakeholders that exploit capabilities as they seek to achieve their ends. When these expansive adaptations occur, one discovers that people have exploited designs in ways typically unforeseen by the designers. But design change also can introduce impediments that create complexities to be adapted around and overcome—the workarounds often captured in compilations of designs with poor usability. Though specific designs often create a mix of both affordances to be exploited and complexities to be worked around, this mix can vary greatly for different people in different roles across an organization.