Cognitive Design

The February issue of Seed Magazine has five stories of interest to cognitive designers including articles on a statistical theory of mind, using neurofeedback to enhance cognition and the application of behavioral economics to formulating policies to fight poverty. On top of that there are stories on the relationship between design and science and the need to go beyond gut feeling for good decision making.

Unfortunately, you cannot access the material without paying (online or at the newsstand). I will blog on a little longer than usual so you can decide if the issue is worth buying. 

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A little over a year ago, ten scientists proposed a $4B research effort into the nature of the mind, similar to what was done in the 1990s for the Decade of the Brain.  They argue:

“A deep scientific understanding of how the mind perceives, thinks, and acts is within our grasp. Such an understanding will have a revolutionary impact on national interests in science, medicine, economic growth, security, and well-being. It is our belief that paradigm-shifting progress can be made now by establishing a major national research initiative called The Decade of the Mind.”

 I agree. This is a key reason why the time is now to work towards cognitive design or an approach to design based upon how minds (real and artificial) work.  

The research program they call for involves many disciplines and has four primary goals – modeling, understanding, healing and protecting, and enriching the mind.  

Realizing any of these goals will greatly accelerate progress in cognitive design.

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About 20,000 new products will be announced at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES)  that is kicking off in Las Vegas today. It is usually a hotbed of innovation and gadgets with special features and functions to delight our senses (sensorial design) and stimulate our thoughts and feelings (cognitive design). 

The announcement for the Mind Flex Game caught my eye.

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The paper I proposed to the Web Science 2009 Conference, Seeking Mental Energy On-Line, was accepted.  The conference is devoted to explaining “Society On-Line” or  the social behavior of individuals and organizations in cyberspace.  Not surprisingly, I apply the principles of cognitive design to the problem.

“In this paper we argue that to explain social behavior on-line we must understand and model interactions as the conversion of mental energy. Interaction as the conversion of mental energy is the principle that plays a special role in explaining and predicting on-line social behavior. In this context, mental energy involves the amount of cognitive work we must do to engage in an interaction compared to the psychological lift or drag we get out of it. We put energy into interacting on-line by, for example, searching, monitoring, deciding and communicating and we get energy out in terms of  meaning, emotion, triggered cognitions and other ways the interactions make us think and feel. The relationship between the mental energy that goes into the interaction versus what comes out determines the cognitive fit of the experience and our resulting frame of mind.”

I describe a 10-factor model  for mental energy analysis and show it can be used to explain a wide variety of on-line behavior. An extended abstract is available and the full paper will be shortly.

The New Scientist has a thought-provoking article on the emerging field they call Magicology that focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of magic.  Over the last five years, magicians and scientists have found out they have something in common namely, an interest in understanding how the mind works. Cognitive designers also share that interest but seek not to trick audiences or develop scientific theories but instead create artifacts that are optimized for how minds really work. 

The article discusses three strategies – manipulating attention, forcing and false memories that magicians exploit to make it appear as though they can violate the laws of nature.  Seven specific techniques are also discussed that could be adapted by designers.   These include:

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Traditionally philosophers make arguments about issues that cannot be resolved empirically or by checking the facts in the world. It turns out that some of these arguments make testable assumptions about how people think and feel.  An emerging branch of philosophy called experimental philosophy or X-Phil wants to go out and test those assumptions to see what is really going on.  

Philosophers doing empirical work to determine how people think and feel? Sounds like applied cognitive science in the field to me.  No matter, as a cognitive designer I am interested in any field that attempts to better understand how people think and feel.

Having a master’s degree in analytic philosophy I know that the situations experimental philosophers explore will surely be unique and provocative from a designer’s standpoint.  For an example, check out this YouTube video that exposes an important asymmetry (bias) in our moral reasoning.

Cognitive designers may have some important things to learn from experimental philosophers. I will keep you posted.

IBM and five leading universities are pulling out all the stops to create nothing short of a “global brain” based on the latest neuroscience, super computing and nano tech.  

A two-minute video overview of their cognitive computing project (with references) can be found here.

I am sometimes asked – what can cognitive design do for the healthcare industry? 

The field can make big contributions to creating new programs for changing health behaviors, dramatically increasing the level of service excellence in hospitals and clinics, assisting clinicians in making decisions based on best practice and in many other ways I have blogged on before. 

I see another opportunity, a potentially big one that has not be discussed before.  It has been widely recognized for many years that the American healthcare system is broken. 

For a great recap of the facotids rendered in video and music checkout this YouTube post.  The point is we don’t have the policies, infrastructure, incentives, practices, entities and relationships in place to deliver cost effective high quality care to all Americans (and our guests from other countries).  We need to design, implement and refine a “new system”. But how do we discover what that new system should be? How do we design it?

Our current approach, using a combination of the political process augmented by research from think tanks (e.g. the McCain and Obama plans) combined with limited experiments in the free-market (e.g. retail clinics, concierge medicine and consumerism) and institutional attempts (e.g. Medicare pilot programs and the 100K Lives Campaign), may not be enough to produce a good solution.  

Given the stakes involved and that we have other crises in the pipeline, for example social security, we need to take steps to improve our ability to design solutions to social problems.  This is where cognitive design can help.  

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A key principle of cognitive design is that we design for how minds work, with the emphasis on the plural.

There are five general types of minds we can design for – individual, extended (when we think through artifacts), group, emergent ( specific type of group where cognition emerges as in the wisdom of crowds) and machine. 

Considering the needs and role of each type of mind in every design problem (no matter how mundane) is part of what makes cognitive design so unique.

Designing for the machine mind means making smart artifacts that reduce the cognitive load on humans or somehow extend our intellectual and emotional reach.  With recent advances in technology it is now possible to embed a little bit of smarts (crude perception, memory, learning, reasoning, action) in a wide-variety of artifacts to make the so-called cognitive machine.  We have smart phones, watches, calculators, desks, homes, buildings, cars and the like. Similar technologies (rules, data mining, software agents, semantic search) are “smarting up” artifacts at work. We have artifacts (e.g. business processes and computer systems) in the workplace that make decisions, control complex process, find important patterns in data and the like.  The race is on to create the intelligent enterprise. After all we already have the automated factory.

An interesting new development in this area is the transdisciplinary field,  Cognitive Informatics. CI is very ambitious as  it combines the latest thinking with how the minds works, an information processing approach to cognition and a new type of denotational mathematics to formally specify, engineer and ultimately build smart stuff ranging from simple cognitive machines all the way to the next generation of computers that think and feel (AI).

 Some worry that engineering smarts into machines will make human less intelligent. If my calculator does arithmetic I will forget how to do long division. Soon I won’t even teach it in schools. Is this an intended consequence? A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, brought this home in modern terms. Part of what they argue is that Google has dumbed down content allowing me to read just a sound bite rather than an entire article, essay or book.  This allows me to cover more ground faster but do I trade-off real understanding?

     OR…. 

Google, like calculators and other cognitive machines liberate and extend human minds if used properly. They are part of a rapidly growing type of mind known as machine mind.  I say, with an aging society that is growing more complex each day we best design for machine intelligence as quickly as we can.  

Pictures, images and other visualizations have a profound impact on cognition. Imagery if used skillfully, can improve interpretation, recall, decision-making and discovery. The right visualizations can set the course of careers, change lives and even trigger major events.  For example, John Barrow in his book Cosmic Imagery, explains the role of imagery in the history of science.

The study and creation of images in all forms – data visualization, infographics, statistical graphics, scientific visualization, graphic design, visual analytics and other disciplines hold important insights and techniques for cognitive designers.  As I stress with students on every cognitive design project – not only are metaphors, reasoning biases and mental models at work, but so is visualization. If we are not tapping into visualization we are leaving a lot of mental energy on the table.

Some interesting examples of what you can do for the mind with visualization can be found at 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners. 

My favorite is:

This honorable mention winner visualizes the bible with each chapter as a bar graph at the bottom (size determined by the number of verses) and cross references between chapters shown as arcs (color denoting distance between chapters).   One visualization of the word of God.