About

Izaias Cavalcanti is a Brazilian product designer, researcher and design engineer with more than 25 years of work where design and engineering meet. Izaias coined the term cognitive distance: the mismatch between the model a system requires and the mental model people actually build. The idea is set out in a free book, From Cognitive Load to Cognitive Distance, measured with the Cognitive Distance Index, and tested in the Everyday Services Study, an open experiment in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Izaias designs, builds and runs products end to end. Recent work includes Via, a queue management product that lets people choose how they wait; Compresso, an open source image compressor that never uploads a file; and the full broadcast stack for Rádio Alvorada TV. From 2021 to 2026 Izaias was Lead Product Designer at Netlex, growing the design team from 2 to 10. Earlier roles include the Visa global authentication redesign, via Hyperativa; Technical Product Manager at Gigster; Business Partner and Executive Producer at UNIT9, opening its Latin American operation; and ten years as founder of the IUQO studio, with work for Google, Citroën and Visa. Izaias studies Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Accessibility at the University of São Paulo and works remotely from São Paulo.