Tobias Gremmler, born in 1970 in Munchen. Since 1992 he is active internationally as designer for new media, motion graphics and interface. He works including media projects for apple, Adidas, BMW, Getty Images, MEC, O2, Phillips, Samsung, Sony, Siemens etc. Since 1996 he conducts courses on digital media and design in Germany, Switzerland, China and USA. His main research field: media convergence, cognition and design, information visualization, and augmented reality. He has also participated in cultural projects: music composition and scene design, and interactive performance in Germany, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan. In 2000 he co-founded pReview digital design Company, and was one of the directors till 2003.

Title of Speech: COGNITIVE DESIGN

The user is the media

Visual communication and Design fulfils its determination neither on a piece of paper nor on a TV or computer screen. It comes to destination through the perception of the recipient. As designers, we are not designing a certain kind of media like print or web - we are designing information; Information, which comes to life through the consciousness of the observer.

Digital communication allows a bidirectional information flow. Thus, it is essential to design a environment, which maps all interaction-possibilities between the user and a program or between users among themselves in a cognitive understandable way. In this scenario we are designing not just Information - we have to design the Interfaces between the Information and the users.

The most important Interface in this System is, in any event, the cognitive perception of the user itself, and all the other hard- and software interfaces has to be compatible with it. For that reason we have to analyse and evaluate all this cognitive processes and adapt interface design in an ergonomic manner. Thereby user interfaces are becoming an extension of cognitive perception. Not the user learns the software - the software learns the user.

In this lecture Tobias Gremmler gives a brief overview about cognition and information processing. He shows some of his research and commercial projects for companies like Sony, o2 and Adidas, on topics like online-games, mobile communication and interactive events. In addition he will show student projects, e.g. from the Shantou University, were he held several workshops in the last few years.