In the book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. The researcher proposed that the basic colour terms in a culture, such as black, brown or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow/green. As they found this hint of a universal pattern, it suggested that, as languages developed, they created color names in a certain order. This question of how colors are named had a revolutionary result through their findings.

Hence the question further arises as to why such a pattern exist? Why would the word for red come before other colours? Some speculations are that these stages of identifying colours correspond to the colour in the natural environment. Red is found in blood and in soil, whereas other distinctive colours became more prominent only after industrialization took hold.

Well, this finding tells us how despite living and growing up demographically separated from each other and difference in culture and societies there is something universal about how humans try to make sense of the world.

Paul Kay, working with Chad McDaniel (Kay & McDaniel, 1978), observed that colour terms name colours, and that colours do not exist in the external world independent of bodies. Colours have external requirements like wavelength, but they do not exist without embodiment: Color cones in the retina and complex neural circuitry connected to those colour cones. Thus, the external world alone cannot account for “green.”

Most thoughts are unconscious hence constrained by certain factors which are how our brain has mapped its neural connections, how the synaptic changes occur, the process our brain uses to best fit the information transfer and the neural reward system like dopamine release ( giving a sense of happiness ). A brain without such a neural circuit is just a body without meaningful thoughts.

And these constraints frames the human conceptual systems. What this means typically as a human one does not just acquire any random behavior, inferences, habit or knowledge, in sort terms a neural circuitry to perform anything. These constraints on the human mind allow us to learn certain ideas which appear to be universal e.g., how to open the door, how to drink water from a bottle etc. no matter which part of the world you live in. This is partly due to the neural connection we are born with and partly due to the same environment we live in.

In other words, the neural structure that allows humans to establish their experiences based on their surroundings is called a frame. And frame generalization is acquired subconsciously and automatically via such constraints of our brain and surrounding. For example, we know the word printer associates with an office desk or an office environment, a waiter with a restaurant. Hence different frames are generalized irrespective of if the person has ever been to such a place or experienced such a thing.

Metaphorically speaking “opening the pandora’s box” is used in the situation of unveiling unknown information about someone or something, yet no one has ever seen the pandora’s box, moving a scheduled meeting ahead, whereas the meeting only moves figuratively. The stock market physically never falls. Many such basic metaphors arise from correlations between co‐occurring embodied experiences.

Now when we have a sense of what shapes our thoughts and understanding, let’s look at a way in which that affects a whole group of people connected demographically, socially and geographically. Overton Window the term named after American policy analyst Joseph P Overton describes politically the acceptance of any policy by the mainstream population at a given time. It’s a window of ideas that the public is willing to accept, everything inside the window is normal and accepted anything outside that frame of thought is radical or unthinkable.

If the window is to be shifted to any direction, the theory indicates to start at the extreme end of ideas, as forcing people to consider an unthinkable idea, even if it’s rejected makes all the less-radical ideas seem more acceptable by comparison.

Though this term is used in political science, it also signifies how humans are affected by what they see and what they observe from their surroundings. Anything falling under the general frame is considered normal, which in a way both advantageous and disadvantageous to design practice.

The advantage comes in the form of user study and understanding the behavior pattern in a group, as the group of people behave more or less similar in a situation with a similar background and environment. But the constraints of the frame creates a restriction on the acceptance of a new idea. Speculation in the ideation stage usually changes drastically while coming to the execution of that idea in a design process.

Another way of looking at the user study in the cognitive lens is the quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person termed as “qualia”, which was introduced into the philosophical literature in its contemporary sense in 1929 by C. I. Lewis in a discussion of sense-data theory. As Lewis used the term, qualia were properties of sense-data themselves. In general usage, the term has been broadened to refer more generally to properties of experience. Some of the examples of experiences with qualia are perceptual experiences and bodily sensations (such as pain, hunger, and itching). Emotions (like anger, envy, or fear) and moods (like euphoria, ennui, or anxiety) are also usually taken to have qualitative aspects. This very notion of how we perceive bodily experiences and process to understand our own emotional experience and experience of others is the nature of embodiment. This can be a crucial key to open many pandora’s boxes of user engagement, empathizing and participatory and collaborative methods in a designer’s toolbox.

This deeper understanding of meaningful thoughts and factors which affect the thoughts can shape a designers tool kit on understanding the most volatile part of a design process, the human behavior. The concept of Cosmo-localism can be fully embraced with a vast pool of global data available and local hands-on fabrication. This way of innovation can be the new norms of design in future, adhering to cultural variation at the local level keeping the universal understanding in mind. As all meaningful thoughts are embodied in us, the neural circuitry playing its role at the local level and absorbing the information from the global surrounding to establish its own frames and intertwining these frames to form a complex structure.