Pragmatic Reasoning in Design

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This study investigates how users rapidly infer the design intent and functional structure of novel artifacts through minimal interaction. Framing user-centered design as a cooperative game between designers and users, the work introduces the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework to construct a collaborative model endowed with recursive theory-of-mind reasoning: designers convey information through their design choices, while users recursively infer the artifact’s causal model by integrating Bayesian inference with pragmatic communication principles. Evaluated on a key–door unlocking task, the model significantly outperforms non-theory-of-mind baselines and more accurately predicts human judgments. This research establishes the first computational framework for design understanding that formally integrates game-theoretic modeling with recursive mentalizing.

Abstract

People can often understand and use novel artifacts after only a few interactions, suggesting that design choices communicate underlying affordances and causal structure. We propose a formal account of this process by framing cooperative, user-centered design as a cooperative game in which the user is the principal and the designer is an assistant. Inspired by prior work on pragmatic communication (e.g. RSA), our model treats a designer's design decisions as communicative signals and predicts user judgments via recursive mentalizing: designers make design decisions to trade off informativeness about the artifact with efficiency, and users infer the true model of the artifact by inverting this cooperative designer model. We evaluate the model in a design game where designers place visually identical keys on trays to help a user infer which keys unlock which doors in grid-world layouts. We find that pragmatic designer and user models better match human judgments than non-mentalizing literal baselines.

Problem

• pragmatic reasoning
• design communication
• affordances
• causal structure
• human-artifact interaction

Innovation

• pragmatic reasoning
• recursive mentalizing
• cooperative design
• affordance inference
• RSA model