Bridging the gap between artist and audience : An exploratory comparative study on the cognitive impact of proficiency and applied mental models on the unmediated understanding of design and affordance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between culture, affordance and proficiency. Further, to study the possibility of a cognitive gap between artists and the audience they design for, akin to the Designer-User gap in interaction design and user experience research. In order to contextualize the issue studied, relevant theories in ecological psychology, visual literacy, image interpretation and cognitive models are presented and discussed alongside contemporary industry issues that may have arisen from this type of cognitive gap. As artist and audience might have these vastly different interpretations of identical visual material, conveying or communicating specific design ideas or aesthetics may be compromised or lost in translation, negatively influencing visual communication. The study compared a set of individuals matching either the label of concept artist or target game audience on their unmediated reactions and mental heuristics when encountering a novel design from a familiar genre, using a method of concurrent verbalization. Results were discussed and compared to prevailing theories in cognition, user experience design and the presented research question. Said results indicate that there are distinct variations between how artists and audience apply their heuristics for unmediated design interpretation, although it also provides a few tentative suggestions as to a few methods in which said issue could be circumvented or surmounted