Syllabus 2007/2008 TNS112

Syllabus academic year 2007/2008

COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS

TNS112

Higher education credits: 6. Grading scale: UG. Level: G1 (First level). Language of instruction: The course will be given in Swedish. TNS112 overlap following cours/es: TNS110, TNS111, MAMA05, TNS110 och TNS111. Compulsory for: ID2. Course coordinator: Arne Svensk, university instructor, arne.svensk@certec.lth.se. Assessment: A passing grade will be given to students who pass individual and group assignments, oral presentations of group assignments and a written review of another group's report. Home page: http://www.certec.lth.se/kogn.

Aim
The aim of the course is for the students to learn, early in their education, how to develop products and phenomena adapted to the human capacity for thinking and to the situations where the products and phenomena are being used.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

be able to define basic concepts of cognitive ergonomics.
be able to describe how the capacity for thinking can vary among different people and in different situations.
be able to problemize the cognitive interaction between humans, technology, situation and activity.

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

be able to analyse a selected product or phenomenon from a cognitive ergonomic perspective.
be able to detect and identify cognitive difficulties and use concepts of cognitive ergonomics when analysing a presented product or phenomenon.
be able to change products or phenomena so they better correspond with the different cognitive conditions and abilities of people.
be able to detect and identify cognitively difficult products or phenomena in a familiar environment as well as in a presented scenario originating from other people.
be able to select relevant information from a work of cognitive ergonomics with help of group members and communicate that information using text/image/sound.

Judgement and approach
For a passing grade the student must

be able to take into account that people are different with a great variety of cognitive abilities.
be able to express the attitude that humans are not to blame when a product or phenomenon is hard to use, and instead see the positive challenge in trying to make products and phenomena easier to use.

Contents
The Cognitive Ergonomics course contains individual and group assignments in which the interfaces of different products and phenomena are analysed and improved from a usability perspective. The class is divided into groups of approximately four.

The theoretical portion of the course consists of lectures/seminars that cover the following areas:

Cognition, human abilities.
Attention. Visual and auditory perception.
Analysing a user interface.
Cognitive Ergonomics concepts.
Cognitive design.

Literature
Norman, D A: The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books 2002. ISBN:978-0-465-06710-7.
Material that is handed out at the beginning of the course and at the lectures and seminars.