CLIENT COGNITION

Client cognition.  I have been looking for a term to describe one of the themes here at Transparent Drawing;  client / designer interface.  So I thought that client cognition would be an appropriate tag to give to what I feel is an under studied and under discussed interface.   Client cognition lies at the heart of what we get paid to do.  Yet we do not have an operative model.

I like this term because the word client is first.  And that is how it should be.  Without clients, none of this happens.  It takes a client to kick any of this off.

And then the word cognition has a richer meaning than listening.  Seems like we were always told to listen to our clients.  The word cognition goes further.  It mandates that we are mentally engaging with our clients.  Listening has a passive connotation.  Cognition implies active engagement.

Some synonyms of cognition include perception, discernment, learning, understanding, comprehension, insight, etc.  Any of these words goes farther than listening.

To tie Client Cognition into Transparent Drawing, let’s look back at some pages:

Overweighting;  the very human tendency to give unrealistic focus on unlikely outcomes.  So our clients will overweight the minimal possibility of a less successful design.

Passive Frame Theory;  our unconscious brain, rather than our logical conscious selves, typically makes the decision.  So we can expect that our client’s decision making will not be logical because of passive frame theory.

Utility Theory; we cannot quantify the enjoyment that we get from something we pay for.  Have you ever had an engaging discussion with your client about the simple enjoyment that they will get from your design?  A discussion like this would be difficult if not impossible.  The reason that you haven’t is summarized in utility theory.

Anchoring;  or the power of suggestion.  When your client says “gable roof”, that is an anchor.  An anchor such as gable roof will have a huge effect on the subsequent design process.  Anchors have different weights.  The anchor “flocked wallpaper”  will have a different design weight than will the anchor “cape” or the anchor “gable roof.”

The Familiar;  we are creatures of habit.  Kahneman uses the word “pastness” to try to define further what familiarity is all about.  Our clients have a strong tendency to prefer what is visually familiar because it is cognitively easy.  So you can expect cognitive strain if they see a design that does not look familiar.

These are just some of the concepts that have been addressed in these pages regarding the psychological client / designer interface.  Clicking on the links above will take you to a bit more discussion of each of these terms.  And I would like to incorporate these concepts under the umbrella term, Client Cognition.  With Client Cognition, we will have a more objective tool set with which to understand basic human / client tendencies.  We will have operative terms to apply to the incredible phenomenon of the client interface.  We will be able to use this objective model with I hope positive results.

I could easily see a course or a segment of a course devoted to Client Cognition.  If anybody needs something to do, then you could run with this concept of Client Cognition.