The Beginning

In 2009 while interning for Intel in Portland, Oregon, I was handed a copy of The Female Brain. My dear friend Abhinav– a chemical engineer who, like myself and the rest of Portland, worked for Intel– insisted I read the book. Two years later his book still sits by my nightstand, each page wallpapered in tabs, scrap paper and my handwriting. Returning this copy to him would be a bit of a joke, I suppose, seeing how it’s now unreadable to anyone but myself. I’ll have to remember to buy a new one and send it to him.

Abhinav probably doesn’t realize what a profound impact the book had on me. He had lent me the book to help guide a freelance job I had just undertaken, which involved designing consumer electronics specifically for the female consumer. The text proved to be more of a hindrance than a benefit, really, given that I became so consumed by the concepts discussed in the book that I had a hard time focusing on what I was being paid to do. When I finally decided it was time to stop musing about progesterone and start sketching I had to banish the book to my storage closet to fight the distraction.

The book ignited an explosive curiosity about Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. I stand convinced that these sciences have much, much more to offer my field, Industrial Design, than the design community currently acknowledges.

The text explores the female brain throughout the various events and stages of life–birth, childhood, puberty, adulthood, and menopause– and investigates neurobehavioral systems to explain how and why the female brain functions the way it does.

The text answered questions I've had about myself for years: why I function and behave differently in different situations, why I seem so adept at certain tasks and so utterly hopeless at others, why I communicate and solve problems the way that I do. After reading the book I felt I had a deeper understanding about myself as a woman, as an individual, even as a consumer.

I can’t even begin to explain my excitement and amazement– teen girls get the same kind of dopamine rush when bonding with friends as heroin addicts do when they shoot up? Say what?­– and with each page I became more convinced that designers should be privy to this type of information. Men and women use different brain areas and circuits to solve problems and process language? Huh. Wouldn’t someone charged with the task of designing a product for a specific gender want to know about things like this?

My affinity for this topic continues to grow and extends past gender differences. More and more often I find coworkers, peers, blogs and design magazines discussing how to establish an emotional bond between consumers and the products they use. Despite all of this talk about the paramount significance of emotion, few designers’ make efforts to understand the science behind human emotion. With all of the time we spend frantically waving our hands around the squiggly arrows on our sketches denoting the material or detail or surface change that will make the product “delightful”, or “calming” or "exciting”, I’m surprised we don’t ever google what happens, biologically and neurologically, when a human being feels delighted or calm or excited.

Surely a deeper understanding of the people we design for can only result in products that better serve the consumer. In all of the established and developing methods that exist to provide this deeper understanding why do we so rarely consult the hard sciences? Why do we settle for mood boards, poorly constructed personas and image searches? As designers we constantly find ourselves scribbling statements such as “The large proportions of the temperature knobs connote robustness and solidarity” on our sketches, but do we even know what this means? When did we decide the best way to make something feel robust is to make it enormous?

A quick google search reveals that there is a lot of information about what makes an object “feel” a certain way that we designers aren’t utilizing. Take, for example, this fascinating article about how an object’s weight, texture, and hardness influences social judgments and decisions. “Participants completing a jigsaw puzzle covered in a rough material perceived the situation as being confrontational and more competitive than those completing the same puzzle made of a smooth material”. What do studies like this mean for the material choices we make?

This blog will attempt to link Cognitive Science and Industrial Design. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no scientist– in three months time I’ll be graduating with my BS in Industrial Design from the University of Cincinnati– but I’m curious, eager to investigate, and convinced that science has a lot more to offer design than most realize.