Design Model - statement

Literature Review

As my literature review has come to its current end on Mental Models I will now, over the next week, use this blog and my PhD Project Blog as a sounding board to synthesise all the cognitive science research I've engaged in since February. The forthcoming posts will hopefully inform a paper that will theoretically under-pin my first practical design project as part of my PhD. Please feel free to comment and make suggestions as I shape my understanding of Mental Models from a visual communication perspective. The main cognitive literature I have read and will use can be found at the bottom of this post. I will list the embodied cognition literature in a separate post.

Design Model

My desire is to creatively experiment through interactive design prototyping what Donald Norman describes as the Design Model. This is a designer's cognitive model of how an interactive product's functionality can be visually, spatially and temporally represented so that a user can operate the interactive product. The Design Model, a conceptual visualization on the designer's part, helps solicit the correct design choices to allow a user to use and experience the interactive product easily. The interactivity of the product is architectured in such a way to be implemented through coding and algorithms. This mechanistic programming of interaction may be HOW the product works, but the user won't understand how a product works from an implementation perspective.

User's Cognition

Users understand that an interactive product has to be experienced, and that causality affords decision-making as to how to use a product. Through cause and effect, prior experience and varying degrees of cognitive problem-solving, user's individually discover their method for understanding how to use the product. User's may all be able to use the same interactive product, but if asked HOW it works they will not be able to explain it based upon how implementally it was coded. They each will approximate a model of HOW they understand it works. As the cognitive science literature points out this user model will probably be fallacious, inferred, deduced, inaccurate and contradictory; but by constructing the cognitive model the user reasons how to use the interactive product. This user cognitive model is referred to as a user's Mental Model.

Objective

In my posts I will unpack these cognitive models in order to understand how to improve understanding of the Design Model in order to add to the sparse literature within interaction design and visual communication disciplines. Firstly I will process the cognitive science literature on mental models to ground myself in understanding HOW a user processes causal information. I will then post, as an alternative cognitive perspective, on how embodied cognition may view the same subject. Throughout I will be expanding upon what has been written about the Design Model.

Terminology

To end I just need to clarify my use of the terminology regarding Design Model. As with any subject that sits across disciplines people arrive at the same or similar concepts using different terminology. In trying to avoid a taxonomic history I will keep things simple. Norman uses the term design model (Norman, 1998) whilst interaction designer Alan Cooper calls it a representational model (Cooper et al, 2008). Cooper also refers to Norman's term as a designer's model. An earlier term from the Eighties used in the context of a designer was a "UCM" or user's conceptual model (Young, 1983).

To keep things simple within my research I will now only use Norman's term Design Model. I choose Norman's term as it is the simplest term to describe what all three describe, and a term that is devoid of personal individual ownership.

References:

COOPER, A., REIMAN, R. and CRONIN, D. (2007) About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Inc.

CRAIK, K.J.W. (1943) The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

de KLEER, J. and SEELY BROWN, J. (1983) Assumptions and Ambiguities in Mechanistic Mental Models. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp155-190

GENTNER, D. and STEVENS, A.L. (1983) Introduction. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp1-6

GENTNER, D. & GENTNER D.R. (1983) Flowing Waters or Teeming Crowds: Mental Models of Electricity. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp99-129

JOHNSON-LAIRD, P.N. (1983) Mental Models. Cambridge: University Press.

MARR, D. (1982) Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.

NORMAN, D.A. (1983) Some observations on Mental Models. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp7-14

NORMAN, D.A. (1998) The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press

PREECE, J., ROGERS, Y., SHARP, H., BENYON, D., HOLLAND, S., & CAREY, T. (1995) Human-Computer Interaction. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company

PREECE, J., ROGERS, Y. & SHARP, H. (2002) Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc

SPOOL, J. (2008) SpoolCast: Reviewing Mental Models with Indi Young [online]. [Accessed 13 May 2008]. Available from World Wide Web: [Podcast]

VARELO,J., THOMPSON, E. and ROSCH,E. (1996) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

WILLIAMS, M.D., HOLLAN, J.D. and STEVENS, A.L. (1983) Human Reasoning About a Simple Physical System. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp131-153

YOUNG, R.M. (1983) Surrogates and Mappings: Two Kinds of Conceptual Models for Interactive Devices. In D. GENTNER, and A.L. STEVENS, eds. Mental Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. pp35-52

YOUNG, I. (2008) Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Rosenfeld Media

Cognitive Modelling: Norman's 'Designer's Model'

Currently I am reading About Face 3 (Cooper et al.). In chapter 2 it deals with the existing position, dictated by software, of humans having to understand how computers 'logically' behave. Interaction design aims to rebalance digital products in favour of the human rather than the machine. By facilitating clearer cognitive behavioural understanding in the user, interactions can be made more beneficial to the user. Where this chapter really begins to become useful is in its explanation of conceptual models in order to visualise how humans and computers work.

The first model Donald Norman refers to as the system model. This is the cognitive model that explains the processing structure of the code. About Face 3 prefers to refer to it as the implementation model.

How code processes its actions and how human beings believe a computer/device/machine works are not the same. The human's mental model of how it works can be simplistic, counter-intuitive, fanciful, inaccurate, illogical; but as long as it helps the human successfully use their computer/device/machine it doesn't matter to them. Where a lot of problems arise within interactivity is the chasm that can form because these two mental models are representationally different. One is a mapping of actual processes - 'implementation', the other is purely notional - 'explanation'.

To interface between 'implementation' and 'explanation' a third model arises, a model that Donald Norman refers to as the designer's model, and Cooper et al refers to as a represented model. A designer's model that maps closer to a system/implementation model maybe more 'accurate' to the actual mechanics of processing, but is cognitively problematic to human users [A in diagram].

A successful interface is one where a user can see how their "goals and needs can be met" (Cooper et al, 2007, p32). This is achieved through making the designer's model follow as closely as possible the users' perceptions of how they believe they access the content [C in diagram].

There is nothing ground-breaking here in regard to interaction design, but it is the first time I have come across these definitions. I have known of the butler metaphor (Isaacs & Walendowski, 2002) but Cooper and Norman's models give it a more theoretical depth. Below is an expansion of the diagram in About Face 3 on page 30, with my annotations that link it back to my recent paper on the location of the graphic designer in GUI design.



Norman's designer's model and Cooper et al's similar represented model helps to give a cognitive psychological and theoretical base to the role that underpins the work of interface designers. In my paper I wrote about and cited Gillian Crampton Smith, former school director of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She sees the "graphic designers’ role as more involved in the interactive design process 'designing what a package is and what it does, and then designing what it will be like' (Aymer, 2001a, p33)". Graphic designers as part of their practice alternate between the “consideration of objective information and intuitive leaps” (Frascara, 2006, p32) in order to arrive at successful visual solutions. Graphic design, when performed well, can “inspire a behavourial change” in its audiences (Forlizzi & Lebbon, 2006, p53). These three points I raised and discussed in my paper can now also be assessed within the framework of the designer's model, and how effective are visual solutions when measured against the user's mental models.


References:

AYMER, G. (2001)a Norman Cooking. Create Online. 8. p38-40

COOPER, A., REIMAN, R. and CRONIN, D. (2007) About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Inc.

FRASCARA, J. (2006) Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science. In: A. BENNETT, ed. Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design - A Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p26-35

FORLIZZI, J. and LEBBON, C. (2006) From Formalism to Social Significance in Communication Design. In: A. BENNETT, ed. Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design - A Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p51-63

ISAACS, E. & WALENDOWSKI, A. (2002)Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology. New Riders Publishing

Back to Top