Books Review: A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition: What Matters?

The benefits of transdisciplinary approaches to designing sociotechnical systems have become increasingly apparent in recent years. The emergence of insightful, actionable syntheses across diverse perspectives on issues of common concern is among its greatest advantages. Successful design depends on effective integration of relevant knowledge from across a range of expertise, relentlessly focused on users’ needs and the safety and quality of their experience. John Flach and Fred Voorhorst’s recent book extends this approach in important, new directions that will greatly expand readers’ understanding of the interactions among perceptual, cognitive, and contextual factors underlying system performance and user experience. Their book provides a pragmatic synthesis of theory, research, and practice from human factors and ergonomics (HFE), cybernetics, literature, philosophy, systems engineering, and diverse domains within psychology. The result is an approach to design focused on understanding and delivering “what matters” to users. At a high level, the importance of understanding what matters to users and how to design systems to provide it stems from the issue’s increasing existential significance. In the midst of rapidly changing technologies, clarity regarding our relation to them as humans, as well as the professionals who design and work with them, is essential. The importance the authors attach to this awareness is conveyed in their references to Pirsig’s (1975) “Metaphysics of Quality,” the view that our occasional or persistent sense of alienation from the technologies we interact with and rely on stems from insufficient clarity about or perceived control over our relation to them. From a systems design perspective, “alienation” of this sort can manifest as errors, poor performance, or a decision to not purchase a particular product. For example, the recent progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ ML) clearly affords many novel uses, some with promise for improving human life (e.g., decision support in emergency management, safe and reliable control of autonomous vehicles, etc.). Unsurprisingly, there are many important, unresolved questions involving issues such as how ML algorithms should be developed and adapted over time to ensure safe interactions with underlying systems, or how real-time decisions are to be made regarding handoff of control in autonomous vehicles. Flach and Voorhorst’s treatment of the nature of complexity, circular causality, and the relevance of these concepts for systems design is one of the book’s best discussions, and highly relevant to issues involving AI/ML design. Not all systems share the complexity of AI/ML, of course, but Flach and Voorhorst’s approach remains just as relevant. Within HFE, there is a residual belief that systems thinking only applies to complex systems, like autonomous vehicles. Yet this could only be true if even the simplest objects existed in a sociotechnical vacuum of the type that simply does not exist. As they argue, comprehending and accounting for contextual factors, the sociotechnical ecology within which even comparatively simple devices will be used is critical in design. Having worked on the design of numerous types of complex and “simple” systems, I found the applicability of their approach across the full range of system complexity to be one of its most important features. At more detailed levels of systems design, the authors’ conceptualization of what matters encompasses the interrelated design objectives of satisfying, affording, and specifying. What are the user needs that a product or system seeks to address (satisfying), what sorts of functional possibilities do we hope to realize with our system (affording), and how can we best make those possibilities available to the user (specifying)? As they state, “If you want to shape the quality of human experience, you should be targeting these dimensions” (p. 53). The major sections of the book are dedicated to examinations of the means for achieving these overriding design goals. This book will greatly reward close and repeated reading. Its clearly explained perspectives are occasionally challenging, very frequently enlightening, and offer an important, emerging perspective on system design. Voorhorst’s illustrations are especially effective in illuminating the book’s themes. Readers will encounter diverse topics (e.g., control theory, heuristics, and decision making), some new and some familiar, explained and synthesized in ways that are intuitive and illuminating. Most important, they add an important, new perspective on perennial HFE issues. Any HFE professional involved in product or systems design or operation, regardless of the apparent level of complexity, will benefit from the authors’ ideas. Having followed Flach’s work for many years, it is immensely gratifying to see his ideas, and those of other great, contemporary systems thinkers such as Nancy Leveson and David Woods, having the greater influence they deserve. This most recent work, a product of ongoing collaborations with Fred Voorhorst, is a culmination of decades of research and theoretical exploration and provides a set of clear considerations and processes for system design. Voorhorst, in addition to his artistic and pedagogical talents as an illuminator of ideas, is a senior product manager of Noumena Digital AG, while Flach is a senior cognitive systems engineer with Mile Two, LLC. For both, delivering what matters to users is a concrete concern. In this book, they have produced a brilliant synthesis of data and theory from across an astonishing range of domains to fully support that objective.