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G. Fitzpatrick:
"Reflecting Back on Designers´ Mental Models - The Power to Influence?";
Keynote Lecture: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2014), Vienna, Austria; 2014-09-01 - 2014-09-03.

The conference theme of ECCE 2014 refers to `cognition in the wild´ and how the various contexts involved in cognitive modelling can be revealed. The contexts that are noted - domain structures, task competences and learning capabilities - reflect the perspective of the researcher looking out to the domain and the users of interest. In this talk I want to turn the `in the wild´ mirror back onto ourselves as researchers and practitioners. A traditional way of talking about designer/researcher mental models is with respect to the system being designed, and the potential for mismatch between designer and user mental models about the system. Reflecting on some of our own past work, I will argue that there can also be much more subtle but powerful ways in which our mental models and conceptualisations matter. In telling some of our stories, the hope is to trigger more general reflections: What hidden assumptions and biases do we bring to how we conceptualise our domains or users, and that only reveal themselves when some unexpected mismatch arises `in the wild´? What ways are we unintentionally influencing, that we don´t even think to think about, in particular around sub-conscious processes that play out particularly `in the wild´? While the very point is that many of our most powerful mental models are hidden or implicit, there is also the potential for us to develop more reflective strategies to probe and help reveal these models, to better serve the domains and users of interest.