Cognitive Design

I am always on the lookout for unique approaches to designing for how minds work (cognitive design).  Recently, I recieved a note introducing me to  perception-based engineering at Purdue University.

Definitely an approach to cognitive design and a very rigorous one as you might expect.  Mathematical models of the key design parameters or features of the product are linked to information processing models of perception, memory and decision making and the resulting framework is used to optimize the design based on its impact on cognition. Amazingly, special attention to “human responses” in the form of comfort, pleasure, perception of quality and decisions made are included in the approach.

Purdue coined the phrase perception-based engineering and has granted more that 25 Ph.Ds. in the area and has some notable successes in industrial and automotive design using it.  Perhaps more importantly, Purdue’s program in Healthcare Engineering, sees it as part of the solution for our healthcare crisis:

“The efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery can be enhanced by perception-based engineering- optimal design for the human-interface aspects of machines and environments in engineered healthcare systems. Informed inclusion of cognitive and sensory processes in design of these facilities, instruments, and machines can greatly improve the working environment for healthcare providers and, most importantly, improve the quality of care and patient safety. This mode of engineering compliments the systems analysis and modeling expertise present in the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.”

Perception-based engineering is supported by many departments at Purdue including the Herrick laboratory which just completed an $11M fund raising.  Once renovations are complete, Purdue will be operating one of the foremost perception-based engineering laboratories in the world.  Go Boilermakers!

 Sohrab Vossoughi, founder and president of ZIBA design has an article in BusinessWeek on the role of emotional engagement in design.  His basic argument is that companies that go beyond functionality and usability to create an emotionally engaging experience for customers are succeeding.   

  Cognitive design, with a focus on supporting, enhancing and even creating specific frames of mind is an essential tool for creating customer and employee experiences.

In cognitive design we seek to support, enhance or even create specific mental states (frame of mind) in anyone that uses our designs.   Understanding the neuropsychology of mental states is therefore fundamental to the discipline. Two recent studies shed interesting new light on the link between money, reputation, fairness and food cravings. Quotes and links are given below.

Fairness and sweets (from the SciGuy blog) 

“According to the researchers, who were from UCLA, receiving a fair offer activated the same brain circuitry as when we eat the food we crave, win money or see a beautiful face. Unfair offers engendered disgust.”

 Money and repuation (from the mind & brain blog)

  “Our findings indicate that the social reward of a good reputation in the eyes of others is processed in an anatomically and functionally similar manner to monetary rewards, and these results represent an essential step toward a complete neural understanding of human social behaviors,” concluded Sadato and colleagues.

Pieter Desmet has done important work on modeling product emotions.  A few key ideas from his work:

·        Product experience is made up of three components including aesthetic pleasure, attribution of meaning, and emotional response (follows Hekkert)

·        Individual differences in emotional response to products cannot be explained by age or gender but more by culture (Dutch, Japanese and US were compared in his dissertation) 

·        Individual’s emotional responses to products vary but the process of eliciting emotions is universal so you need to understand context (goals, standards, attitudes of users)

He has developed and successfully used a tool for measuring emotional reactions that queues on 14 different states including: 

Unpleasant: Indignation, Contempt, Disgust, Unpleasant surprise, Dissatisfaction, Disappointment, Boredom and Pleasant: Desire, Pleasant surprise, Inspiration,  Amusement,  Admiration, Satisfaction, Fascination.

Feedback is collected via the use of cartoon/icon expressions of the emotion and reports that you have, somewhat have or do not have that emotion when interacting with the product.

This is one of the few research-based and field tested tools for designing emotions that I have found.  Watch for a review of his book, Designing Emotions, in this blog later in the year.

  Music activates cognition in very powerful ways. It can enhance creativity.  It has long been used as an accelerated learning technique. It invokes memories, stimulates daydreaming and certain songs even become lodged in your head.  Songs that get caught in your head are called “earworms” (yikes). Metaphorically, an earworm is like a biochemical that causes a cognitive itch that you scratch by repeating the song in your head (or even out loud). Of course, the more you scratch the more you itch and the thing gets deeply embedded in your brain. Examples that turn up in the studies include: Who Let the Dogs Out, Queen’s We Will Rock You!, The Mission Impossible Theme and It’s a Small World After All.  

Despite the recent rise of the field of “music cognition” including its own professional societies, journals, academic research labs and PhD programs, little is known about the cognition of earworms.  However, “According to research conducted by University of Cincinnati professor James Kellaris, virtual any song can become an earworm. However, songs that are simple, repetitive, and contain some incongruity – an unexpected twist – are most likely to become stuck.” It’s important to note that the entire song does not get stuck just 10-15 seconds of it. Also songs with lyrics seem to be stronger earworms.

Short, easy-to-repeat and something with a twist – sounds like an idea virus, only one you keep passing to yourself instead of to someone else.  

I have not found anyone claiming they can engineer earworms but there is one company, Earworms Publishing – musical brain trainer, that claims to be using them to help your learn a second language.  I don’t know if their earworm language learning method actually works but it does seem popular.  Their module on Spanish was in the top five iTunes Best Sellers for 2007.

 One question I get about cognitive design is what emotions or mental states should we design for? Should we create service experiences and products that generate pleasure, humor, pride or what?  Of course the answer depends up your goal. Are you designing for customer retention, premium pricing, brand extension or some other impact? Same thing on the employee side – are you designing for retention, improved productivity or quality, increased risk-taking or some other impact? Unfortunately, there is not a lot of research that links mental states to improved business outcomes. There is however some sweet pockets of it, especially in the area of emotional satisfaction.  Check out the work of the folks at Gallup on a concept they call Human Sigma.

They advocate using six sigma principles (systematic data oriented approach to improving the performance of a given metric) to measuring and managing the interaction between employees and customers. They have found that “emotionally satisfied” customers are what counts and to get that you need to engage both employees and customers. They measure (numerically) this combination of customer and employee engagement in what is called the Human Sigma score.  

For example, on the customer side they have isolated the following elements that describe the “emotional nature of the customer’s commitment”  

Confidence – Are the people competent, does the company deliver on its promises?

Integrity – Am I treated the way I should be? If something goes wrong is it fixed?

Pride – positive identification with the company

Passion – is this a company I cannot live with out, is it the perfect fit for me? 

Organizations that score in the upper 20% of customer engagement get a 23% premium in wallet share, profitability and revenue.

This is a huge advantage and gives the cognitive designer strong guidance on what kind of mental states to focus on.

If you combine employee engagement with customer engagement you get business units that are 3.4 times more financially effective (as measured by total sales and revenue; performance to target and year-over-year gain in sales and revenue). 

Being a six-sigma black belt and cognitive designer I am very interested in learning more about Human Sigma.  I will blog my findings but in the meantime you can get free access to an HBR article on Human Sigma, visit the Gallup Management Journal or buy the book.

Check out the on-line encylopedia on interaction-design.org.  Clear writing on some of the cognitive aspects of design. 

Of particular interest is the article on Cognitive Ergonomics.

Cognitive ergonomics (sometimes called cognitive engineering) is focused on understanding and supporting the cognition of work especially when it is complex, time-constrained or related to public safety. The focus is on process or work redesign (e.g. to lower cognitive load), human-machine interfaces, training programs and technologies to augment cognition.

Cognitive ergonomics is about remaking work to better fit the human mind. One of the core pursuit of cognitive design.

In the US, cognitive ergonomics is now flying the flag of cognitive engineering and decision making (CEDM) a large technical interest group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

We will track CEDM in this blog and report on specific findings and tools useful for cognitive designers.

Over the last few years there has been a small flurry of books and papers on the “new science of happiness” – an attempt to use neuropsychology and cognitive science to understand what makes us happy and why. Good stuff for cognitive designers interested in creating artifacts that invoke happiness in users.

Check out the Jan-Feb 2007 issue of Harvard Magazine for recent overview.  It covers all the basics and highlights how Harvard’s class on Happiness 101 (actually titled Positive Psychology) was the most popular in 2006 pulling in over 800 students.

A somewhat dated but still excellent source with findings specific enough to guide design can be found in a Time Magazine article The New Science of Happiness.

So what do you do if you what to design artifacts to put users in the mental state of happiness?  You can include features and functions that:

1. Involve or trigger a remembrance of friends and family.  For example, personalization of your PC desktop with a family or baby photo, discount calling plans for friends and families and adding online social networking features to your software product or content.

2. Allow users to otherwise engage in an acts of kindness or altruistic acts.  Interesting recent examples include XO (the give one get one laptop) and Free Rice (play a vocabulary game and for each word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end World hunger).

3. Naturally limit (but not eliminate) the number of choices the user must make to use the product (too much choice is the enemy of happiness). For example, some financial services companies have adopted the “option packages” strategy from the automotive industry to bundle decisions about many choices into one (lifestage asset allocation funds or feature bundles for life and annuity policies).

4.  Allow users to express their blessings or joys in an authentic and meaningful way. For example, a comfortable way of expressing thankfullness for a spouse or family member in public.

Adding features and functions that stimulate happiness in users is one way to approach cognitive design.

 Augment cognition (AC) is another rapidly emerging field that is a close cousin of cognitive design. Like NeuroErgonomics it is focused on creating artifacts that integrate with human cognition to amplify or accelerate it (5th level of cognitive design). More specifically,  the goal of AC is to develop closed-loop human computer systems that increase cognitive capabilities by an order of magnitude.

There have been four international conferences held on the topic and an International Society has been formed so the field has traction. So far no killer app.

DARPA has a strong interest in AC has has even prepared a video on the future of augmented cognition. Must warn you it is a bit long but they are trying to breath some realism and design detail into the scenario.

We will track AC closely in this blog.

Neuroergonmics is an emerging field intent on combining neuroscience with human factors to design technologies that better fit our brain.  Similar in spirit to cognitive design but more focused on the biological (neuro) then the psychological (cognitive) and narrower in scope (technology versus any artifact).  No matter, it is an important related field and will get coverage in this blog.

The principle text in the field Neuroergonomics: How the brain works, describes the field this way:

 ”It combines two disciplines–neuroscience, the study of brain function, and human factors, the study of how to match technology with the capabilities and limitations of people so they can work effectively and safely.  The goal of merging these two fields is to use the startling discoveries of human brain and physiological functioning both to inform the design of technologies in the workplace and home, and to provide new training methods that enhance performance, expand capabilities, and optimize the fit between people and technology.”

Not surprisingly, most of the methodology involves brain scanning techniques (EEG, ERP fMRI, Optical, trans-cranial Doppler) but there are also chapters on eye movement (link between neuro and cognitive) and most importantly (for cognitive designers) a chapter on “Brains in the wild” or tracking brains outside the lab.

There is an entire section on perception, cognition and emotion as well as a section that covers applications on brain computer interfaces and related devices 

Neuroergonomics, with an emphasis on brain-machine fit lays a scientific foundations for work on the 5th level of cognitive design where the artifact integrates with or mediates human cognition.  

I will provide a more detailed review each section of the book (with emphasis on implications for cognitive designers) later in the year.