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

1st Practical PhD Project… thoughts

On my project blog PhD Project 01 I am still documenting research upon the cognitive psychology of users' mental models which will take me into April as I need to source a couple of key texts I couldn't get from ECA's or University of Edinburgh's libraries. That said one key text yesterday, firmly situated within cognitive science literature, has suggested a structure for my practical research project. I will expand upon this again over the coming months in more detail.

The idea so far in its embryonic state is this…

Phase

1. Qualitative Experiment on up to 36 subjects to undergo an initial online survey to identify a capacity to describe and communicate a cognitive model (subject to be defined). The subjects who can clearly communicate their 'mental model' will be graded into study groups for the next phase.
   
2. This study group will then be asked to explain how they understand how they perform an interactive task.
   
3. These 'mental models' will be visually documented.
   
4. From this documentation visual interactive prototypes will be produced as iterative tests of a 'designer's model'.
   

I do realise that this is very woolly right now and lacks definition. It's root is in an experiment performed by Dedre Gentner and Donald R. Gentner disseminated in their 1983 paper "Flowing Waters or Teeming Crowds: Mental Models of Electricity". My outcome will be demonstrably different to theirs, but their method is certainly a foundation to develop on. I will continue to work on this planning over April.

To summarize though what my intended outcome will focus upon: it will be creating a range of interaction prototypes that are define and designed using 'designer models' interpreting users' 'mental models' of the interaction. The outcome will be focused on visually communicating the experimentations of matching an interface design to how a user thinks it works rather than how it works.

I know I can communicate this better, so please bear with me as I begin to form my methodology and outcomes. Any comments would be greatly received, but please add them to this post by clicking 'Comments' rather than emailing them. Once I have the project more defined I will utilise the Interaction Design community www.ixda.org to inform me of any similar experiments, to ensure I am doing and experiment that will open new ground.

The final thing I need to emphasize is that this project will focus on the visual communication of the interactive process.

Reference:

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

UCM or UMM? Let IxDA decide?

I have been heavily reading into cognitive science and 'mental models' (see PhD Project 01 blog) with the help and advice of the members of the Interaction Design Association. I have now made 3 posts to their discussion lists and have made contact with Alan Cooper, the writer of About Face 3. My latest post I duplicate here as you need to be a member to be in the discussion.

I have just placed this into the cue for circulation so hopefully I will get some responses and therefore will eventually add these here. I post this message here to solicit a wider response, so please if you can advise post a comment to this blog.

Original post:
"Following on from my previous posts I am researching into what Don Norman calls 'designer's models' and Alan Cooper calls 'represented models'. In doing so I'm reading the literature on 'mental models' (Thanks to Alan Cooper, Vicky Teinaki, J. Ambrose Little, Francis Norton and Alan James Salmoni). I came across Richard Young's essay in Gentner and Steven's 'Mental Models', in which he discusses UCMs: "User's Conceptual Models".

Can anyone in the community advise whether Young's UCMs were an early incarnation of what becomes defined as 'User's Mental Models' or a separate area of research? Any comments would benefit me from maybe wasting time on a tangential research cul-de-sac.

Thanks"