I'm an Engineer, and I've Dabbled in Behavior Science?

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i'm an engineer by profession, but this is clearly some kind of psychology, cognitive science experiment. So we set these things up so that the great pattern basically was broken into four quadrants. And what we, what we did was put extraneous marks in one of the quadrants, and then told people to make the pattern symmetrical from left to right and top to bottom. We ended up with a number of different paradimes that we used, showing people kind of adding more than they subtracted. But all of them were subject to this criticism that you could make about the legos, right? The other nice thing about this way of doing it is that it's just better to

There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It’s therefore interesting to see how our brains actually go about solving problems. Here’s an interesting feature that you might not have guessed: when faced with an imperfect situation, our first move to improve it tends to involve adding new elements, rather than taking away. We are, in general, resistant to subtractive change. Leidy Klotz is an engineer and designer who has worked with psychologists and neuroscientists to study this phenomenon. We talk about how our relative blindness to subtractive possibilities manifests itself, and what lessons might be for design more generally.

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Leidy Klotz received his Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering from Penn State University. He is currently Copenhaver Associate Professor of Engineering Systems and Environment and Architecture at the University of Virginia. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a school designer, and before that was a professional soccer player for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. His new book is Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.