Design and Mind
- Akanksha Sharma
- Dec 6, 2022
- 4 min read
How would you define design? Especially as someone who is not involved in designing firsthand. For me, I have started exploring this topic recently without prior knowledge. This has intrigued me to understand the reason for my interest in this subject when I have never been exposed to this area of work before.
I personally resonate with this definition the most. Especially because of its relation to humans.
"A design is a plan to make something new for people, that they perceive as beneficial."
Moving forward from the definition lets look at how psychology became an nondetachable concept of design.
Design in itself is a work that has seen transformation through years. Earlier during World War 1 machinery like fighter planes, tanks, and other transports were usually designed so that humans could operate these machines. Humans who were required to use the machine needed to learn how to utilise it. It lead to a lot of failures like deaths and injuries. The focus was to design humans to fit the machine. Later in the era of World War 2 due to the increasing number of people there was a need to involve ‘human factor’ when designing these. This was mainly due to the difficulty in matching existing jobs with the people. So, the process of identifying human limitations and their capabilities began to take place. Like making the controls of a plane easier to use with the users pre-existing capabilities in the design. Years later and we still are engaging in understanding what would work best for humans!
Let's move on from understanding the design of machinery to something more relatable to our experiences. We have been using different types of apps for years. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram being some of them for a similar purpose. For most of us we already know which one seems to be our favourite. Well mine has to be Instagram. I feel Instagram offers me a good range of options of varying needs like searching for a variety of people, posting my work and sharing it, and also communicating with my connections all in one place. It fulfils the purpose it is built for. Just like me there are lots of us that prefer certain apps or websites that provide us a service we want to continue utilising. But don’t you think that there are a lot of platforms that are built to provide similar purposes but are either used less or not at all.
Digging deeper and trying to make sense of this pattern, I came to realise how the ‘design’ of a product or service has a great impact on our brains. This impact makes us choose to stay or leave.
Here I would focus on two most basic concepts that associate design and the human psyche which would help to easily gauge the link between both.
Human beings have an inclination towards things that are visually attractive.
Envision your favourite pub or café. How did it make you feel when you visited for the first time and what was it that you thought of when you stepped inside the place. Usually it is the ambiance that attracts us to it. Utilising physical space is like a storytelling medium which aims to create an emotional bond with the audience. The visual cues and spatial patterns produce a distinct and replicable spatial language that can communicate the identity of the place. The way it looks makes us notice it. Something that links our emotions with the visual.
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Now, take an example of your favourite website. Think of why you clicked on it and started to explore it without knowing how it functions. Mostly, it is the first impression that we make when we browse a platform without knowing in depth. Many people frequently stay on a website because of the way it seems and how differently it operates from others because we find it to be aesthetically pleasant.
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Slowly we decide to keep exploring it and then choose if we want to continue or not. This usually depends on the way it works. We can all mostly agree on how we like to continue on an app or website when we are easily able to achieve our task. We don’t want to spend hours on understanding an app just because it looks good when we can easily in a couple of minutes complete the same task on a less visually appealing app.
Well, this ease of completing a task is based on our ‘Mental Models’. Through years we have used commodities for different needs. This experience has made us understand what to expect and how to accomplish the task. When a product or service is able to help us complete that task based on our experiences we tend to choose that more, mainly because we do not want to put in effort to comprehend a new working style when we have something that our experiences already align with.
The co dependence of visual satisfaction and functioning is what we usually crave and pick.
The functioning of the website helps in easily achieving the task
https://www.koithe.com/en
Understanding what the consumers want and how they perceive the functioning is one of the most important attributes of a designer's job profile. The buildings we visit and like, the online services we consume, the machines we use are all required to be designed with relevance to our mind frames. It needs to be something that aligns with our intuition and brain systems.
Psychologists of varying fields and through the years have developed theories and principles that aid designers to engage in the importance of the human mind to create designs. Trying to put all of that together here would seem overwhelming and not enough justice to the complexity of the human mind. Also, it would deplete your attention span (one of many associations between design and mind)!
Resources
https://youtu.be/9gM8K4ooavY- UX Design basics: Mental Models
https://youtu.be/QgiB8KhbGKY - The psychology of decision making in UX, Joe Leech
https://youtu.be/PdQz27oq_uE- How Psychology affects design
https://www.archdaily.com/
https://www.koithe.com/en
https://bluebottlecoffee.com/us/eng
Very well put in here… elaborate and thoughtfull explanation of the topic!!