Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Simulating user experience
Since the 1950’s, the Human Sciences (in the broad sense that includes design) have embraced a user- or human-centered approach to research. This usually takes the form of ubiquitous user experience surveys, observation, and other methods of getting ecologically valid feedback. Many “experts” in these fields, however, still insist that users doesn’t know what they […]
The Human Sciences in TOK
This is an outline of a presentation that I recently gave to a group of students at the Mahindra United World College of India as part of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program’s Theory of Knowledge course, which investigates various ‘Areas of Knowledge’ and ‘Ways of Knowing’. The Human (or Social) Sciences provide a great synthesis […]
Thinking with your hands
One of my favorite scenes from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is when the title characters move to Bolivia and apply to be armed guards at a (coal?) mine. The mine’s owner tells Sundance to stand and shoot a stone tossed about 10 yards away. Sundance attempts to do so, but repeatedly misses, and […]
What is the cognitive lens?
cognition [,käg’ . ni . sh . ən] noun - the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Cognition and its underlying principles are powerful tools to use in understanding and interacting with the world, and Cognitive Lens is my attempt to bring related but often isolated fields together through a cognitive perspective.
This one goes out
So this gives Cognitive Lens three primary audiences: engineers, designers, and psychologists (particularly of the cognitive persuasion). A group I also hope to connect with more generally are those undertaking research degrees of all sorts - including undergraduates considering grad school, Masters students working their way through deeper coursework, and Doctorate students engaging in research at the deepest levels.
The change blindness advantage
If there is one take-home lesson from perception research, it is that humans wildly distort and simplify sensory input when attending to the world around them. In the past few years, research into change blindness has shown some stunning failures of our ability to identify changes in our surroundings - the principle of perceptual constancy, […]
Technology’s outgroup
The media regularly assert that the “younger generation” will comprise technical savants, fluidly emailing while watching YouTube while chatting with friends (on the phone and through IM, which increasingly overlap) while designing flying cars and nanobots. The claim boils down to the simple conclusion that new technologies are by the young and for the young, and only the young can understand it - cue the clichéd joke parents make about needing their four-year-old to program the VCR (that is so 80’s). Sure technology is rarely self-explanatory (’PC LOAD LETTER‘…). But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.