Cognitive Crash Dummies course at CHI 2012

Prototyping tools are making it easier to explore a design space so many different ideas can be generated and discussed, but evaluating those ideas to understand whether they are better, as opposed to just different, is still an intensely human task. User testing, concept validation, focus groups, design walkthroughs, all are expensive in both people’s time and real dollars.

Just as crash dummies in the automotive industry save lives by testing the physical safety of automobiles before they are brought to market, cognitive crash dummies save time, money, and potentially even lives, by allowing designers to automatically test their design ideas before implementing them. Cognitive crash dummies are models of human performance that make quantitative predictions of human behavior on proposed systems without the expense of empirical studies on running prototypes.

When cognitive crash dummies are built into prototyping tools, design ideas can be rapidly expressed and easily evaluated.

This course reviews the state of the art of predictive modeling and presents a tool that integrates rapid prototyping with modeling. Participants will bring their own laptops and learn to mock-up an interactive system and create a model of skilled performance on that mock-up. The course ends with a review of other tools and a look to the future of predictive modeling.