Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A successful design accounts for the structure of the problemit is aimed at solving. When it is a human-directed design,this includes the expectations of its users. How do we arriveat such a design? One approach starts from first principles(e.g., simplicity, unity, symmetry, balance) to evaluate thequality of proposed designs. Here, we introduce design fromzeroth principles, a form of human-in-the-loop computationthat synthesizes a design that conforms to its users’ expecta-tions. The technique begins by constructing a transmissionchain seeded with a random design. Each user in the chain isexposed to the design and then recreates it, passing alongtheir recreation to the next user, who does the same. Throughthis iterative process, the users’ perceptual, inductive, and re-constructive biases directly transform the initial design intoone that is better fit to human cognition. Such designs are eas-ier to learn and harder to forget. We evaluated the approach inthree domains — stimulus–response mappings, vanity phonenumbers, and letter placement in typeset words — and showthat it produces a good design in each.