heheh

How can find applications for Cognitive Science research? How can we turn our knowledge about the human mind into something useful?

These questions have been of great interest to me ever since I took Cognition for Iris van Rooij at the TU/e. For an engineering student from Eindhoven, the most important question is how Cognitive Science can help technology. In the two years after I asked that question in class, Iris has invited me to give a guest lecture on this topic in her course.

The last lecture was about two months ago, and we had to do it through video conferencing (too bad the TU/e couldn’t pay me a plane ticket). It went great, and fortunately they recorded the lecture and put it online so that anyone can enjoy it. Here is the first part, and here the second part. It’s all in English.

A lot of the things in this second lecture were taken from the course “Applications of Cognitive Science” which I took this Spring, so if you want to know more about that course, just look at this lecture :).

Phew, got that out of the way… (see below)

Now, let me talk about the other stuff from last semester. I feel a bit ashamed that the first time I talk about these classes is when they’re actually over. :)

The class that got me my best grade (Programming Usable Interfaces) is actually the least interesting class to talk about. Basically, the class is about rapid prototyping. Conceptually, it is not too hard, since we get assigned a rather limited interface design problem (a copier, an ATM, an information kiosk) that we have to “solve”. The hard part is that we get one week to make a paper prototype and two or three iteration in Visual Basic or Flash. These iterations are interleaved with short think-aloud user tests that help find improvements on the system.

In these design cases, coming up with something is not the focus (that’s why we only get “small” problems), it’s more about improving what you made based on user feedback. This is typically something that is not hard, but really useful to do several times over and over again to become really good at it. Because if you’re designing interfaces, you’re gonna do this a lot.

So if it isn’t hard, what makes this course take up so much time? Well, the fact that you have to move quickly and find users to test with. But also the fact that you have to code your program in a way that it can easily be changed based on user feedback. Writing extensible code takes time, and that’s something you don’t have when you make so many iterations in one week!