What I Learned From a Designer About My Brain
illustration by Brad Jones for Outer Voice
Most folks in the design world are familiar with Don Norman. He coined the term “user experience” and wrote landmark works on how humans and objects interact, including Emotional Design and the 1988 opus, The Design of Everyday Things.
IDEO’s Tim Brown called the latter book, “part operating manual for designers and part manifesto on the power of designing for people.”
Norman carries degrees in both engineering and psychology, and he brings them both to bear in The Design of Everyday Things.
Last week, I found myself caught in the throes of the American crisis and beginning to doubt the importance of art in this moment. Does art matter when protesters are being tear gassed and the nation’s swelling demand for change meets the divisive rhetoric of its leadership? Theoretically and emotionally, sure. But… does it really?
I picked up the newly revised and expanded edition of Norman’s book, which (full disclosure time) I’ve always found too dense to complete, and flipped to the chapter called “The Psychology of Everyday Actions.” This passage smacked me full in the face:
“We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions.”
In this chapter, Norman is unpacking how we think in order to better understand how to design for us. How do we make decisions? How do we interact with the designed world? What do we need, and/or how do we convince ourselves we need something?
It all comes down to how our brains operate. And guess what? A lot of how our brains operate isn’t really up to us. Norman finds that “most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes.” He breaks our cognitive and emotional processes into three stages, the visceral, behavioral and reflective.
The visceral level is the good old lizard brain. These are immediate responses dictated by evolution, telling us if a situation is good, bad or neutral. They’re sensitive only to the current state of things.
The behavioral level is where our learned skills come into play, triggered by situations that match our learned patterns. This is where action and immediate analysis happens.
Finally, the reflective level is the home of conscious thought. This is “cognitive, deep, and slow.” “The highest levels of emotions come from the reflective level,” Norman writes. “For it is here that causes are assigned and where predictions of the future take place.”
In other words, our brains are wired to respond first at a survival level, then act from learned behaviors, and only then reflect and plan change.
Our brain chemistry maintains and reinforces this. Norman writes that it looks more and more like we make decisions with our feelings and “use logic and reason after the fact, to justify our decisions to ourselves … and to others.”
Here’s where these levels of cognition come into play when we look at economic and social inequality.
“In tense, threatening situations, the emotional system triggers the release of hormones that bias the brain to focus upon the relevant parts of the environment … in calm, nonthreatening situations, the emotional system triggers the release of hormones that … bias the brain toward exploration and creativity.”
Imagine the difference in how an artist might be formed (if formed at all) in a situation of great distress and poverty, versus in a situation of middle-class privilege.
This brings me back to the question — does art matter right now? I’d posit a hell yes.
Why? I’ll spare us all the pabulum of art ennobling the human spirit and bringing respite. Instead, I’ll offer this: art dares us to look. It dares us to listen. It dares us to stop. It dares us to act. Art dares us to feel something.
If we understand even a tiny bit of how we as humans operate, we can better understand these things:
how the artist’s mind operates
how our minds operate when we look/listen/touch/experience the work
how that artist was shaped by their environment
how we have been shaped by ours
If we are thoughtful enough to pause, this is a conversation that happens between artist and audience. It’s a conversation with myself, my motives and my unconscious behavior. And, as Tasneem Tewogbola says, “conversation is a pathway to building community.”
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