Cognitive Design

Check out the paper, Designing for Doubt, that argues sensor-rich mobile phones can be used to design personal measurement instruments that will enable a powerful new wave of citizen science. Citizen science or “street science” involves the public in the collection and analysis of data to conduct large-scale professional grade scientific work.  With web-based crowdsoucring platforms it has seen considerable growth.  Add to that souped-up cell phones and you might change the game in how some of modern science is done.

 Designing such tools and platforms presents many challenges for the cognitive designer.  Chief among them is to insure the appropriate mental discipline when forming a hypothesis, collecting data, analyzing data and conducting other scientific activities by non-scientifically trained yet highly motivated citizens.

Article in BusinessWeek that describes a new model of innovation, called jugaad (pronounced “joo-gaardh”), emerging from India. The idea is to focus on the immediate needs of customers and rapidly improvise with extremely limited resources. Supposedly this is part of what has driven the success of Tata Motors creators of the Tata Nano. A car concept that is being widely mimicked.

Movies and short films are designed experiences. As such they should be fertile ground for the cognitive designer.  A recent PhD thesis by Gregory Hale explores A Cognitive Schematic Analysis of Films.  As far as a I can tell it is a unique contribution using schema theory from cognitive science to research and provide design insights into short-film experiences.The study reveals some 23 design implications for how film makers can have greater impact via surprise, conflict resolution, interest, causality, intensification, rapid orientation and other effects using schema.  

In addition, the thesis provides some reusable methods (Schematic Analysis Design Method) that might be useful in other domains. I don’t plan on digging any deeper into this but would love to hear from any readers that do.

“unprecedented insight into how digital games can improve players’ health behaviors and outcomes” 

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article outlining recently funded University research into the affect of video games on health. The questions is can we develop video games that help people change behaviors or self-manage chronic illnesses? The Robert Wood Johnson foundation is giving $1.8M to nine teams to find out.

If this research is productive it should throw off many insights into designing for how minds work.  Consider:

“For example, the research teams will delve into the popular dance pad video game Dance Revolution to see how it might help Parkinson’s patients reduce the risk of falling, or how facial recognition games might be designed to help people with autism better identify others’ emotions.

The studies will focus on diverse population groups that vary by race and ethnicity, health status, income level and game-play setting, with age groups ranging from elementary school children to 80-year-olds. The research teams will study participants’ responses to health games played on a variety of platforms, such as video game consoles, computers, mobile phones and robots.”

Hopefully the results will have implications far beyond the use of video games.

Cognitive designers seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel to create specific mental states or a “think-and-feel”. Designing for pleasure, emotion, meaning, pain relief and improved decision making, learning and behavioral self-control are only a few of the application areas.  The goal is to optimize our designs for how minds work. 

Taking a systematic approach to cognitive design requires that we can somehow get between the ears of the people we are designing for and understand inner mental life and how it is shaped by features, functions and forms.

So I am always on the look out for new tools and techniques for modeling mental states and processes. The holy grail is neural decoding or the ability to translate measurable data on brain activity into the meaning of thoughts, emotions and actions. In short, directly reading the mind. The state of the art in neural decoding was discussed at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.  The New Scientist offers an excellence synopsis in Brain Scanner Can Tell What You are Thinking About.

Nothing yet for the designer’s toolkit but some very interesting developments:

“He (Jack Gallant) and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.” 

Being able to accurately and cost effectively translate biometric information from our nervous systems into the corresponding thoughts, feeling, motivations and intentions will be one of the major innovations of the 21st century.  Among other things, it will provide the foundation needed to take an exacting approach to optimizing our designs for how minds really work. Cognitive design unleashed.

Check out the article in Technology Review on Time Travel Through the Brain. It explains how our ability to see inside the brain has evolved over the last 100 years. Included are 10 visualization (one shown below) that just might inspire you to think differently when designing for how minds really work.

A mad dog gamer is my affectionate description of someone who plays between 35 and 45 hours of action video games a week. There is some interest in understanding the cognitive needs of this group and more to the point, how that much gaming impacts their cognition. Found a blog post that nicely summarizes some of the key preliminary findings so far.

Mad dog gamers have:

1. Increased visual processing ability (reaction to rapidly appearing events or objects in the visual field)

2. Normal reactive attention control (engaging attention just in time as event occur).

3. Decreased proactive attention control (managing your own attention to stay engaged in activities or events that are not automatically engaging).

And of course there are the recent studies that suggest a positive correlation between being addicted to game play and ADD but the causation is far from clear.

Finding 3 is very interesting. Some worry that it will make these folks less effective in the classroom and the workplace. On the other hand, their demand for “low mental  load” experiences and products might force us to make a bigger investment in cognitive design.

Students that take my cognitive design class are often surprised to find that we use many techniques straight from cognitive therapy. And why not, a cognitive therapist has to “get inside the mind” of their patients just as a cognitive designer needs to get inside the minds of their clients.   For instances, The New Handbook of Cognitive Therapy Techniques is required reading. We make use of the ABC technique for modeling a person’s environment in terms of antecendents (A) or activating events, the beliefs (B) generated in response to the activating events and consequents (C), that both emotionally and behaviorally flow from the beliefs.  It is a very simple technique but if applied with discipline produces authentic design-relevant ideas nearly every time. I’ve blogged on this before including a link to some slides.

So I am always on the look out for new insights from the cognitive therapist that are relevant to designers that focus on how the mind really works. A new and promising source is the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy. For example, they recently had a special issue devoted to mental control. Here is a sample from one of the articles on Mental Control of Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts:

 ”…analysis revealed that students primarily reported worry-related intrusive thoughts, suppression was used frequently despite limited success, distraction strategies were used most often and “do nothing” least often, and failures in thought control were attributed to personal failures of willpower or strength, or to the importance of the thought.”

Good insights into the cognitive needs and coping strategies for any designer working on a project involving intrusive thoughts.

 Easy to read overview of some recent topics fat with design implications.  Unfortunately, you need to buy a hard copy. Also of interest to cognitive designers is the Mind Brain online section of Discover.

If you have not seen this before check out Sribblenauts.  A recent demo can be found on YouTube here.  Any object you can imagine and type is injected into the game play.  You can then use the object to solve problems, move about and otherwise advance in the game. There are of course limits to the objects the game knows about (20K+) but trying to test those limits is part of the fun.

The game was released today.