Cognitive Design

We are fast becoming a culture of self trackers. We have smart phone apps, widgets, software packages and hundreds of gadgets for monitoring every aspect of daily life.  We measure and track our eating, walking, shopping, sleeping, exercising, socializing, child rearing, medication-taking  and online activities. We measure moods, weight, calories, ounces, blood pressure, heart rate,  time spent on tasks, the number of cups of coffee we drinks, our geographical locations during the day and many other personal variables. According to Wired Magazine we are Living by the Numbers.

Motivations for self-measuring vary but it is exploding because technology is making it easier to do and personal informatics feeds the core cognitive need to know about ourselves over time and how we compare to others.

The cognitive design blog has covered a couple dozen personal informatics tools and gadgets and how they can be used in behavior change. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of some 200 popular tools for collecting and analyzing information about yourself.  My favorite blog on the topic is The Quantified Self.  For a good general overview check out the New York Times article, The Data Driven Life or the piece in the Wall Street Journal, The New Examined Life.

The field of personal analytics and informatics offers significant opportunities for the cognitive designer. There is the challenge of how to collect the most relevant personal data in or near real-time while keeping the cost and cognitive load down.  Also, cognitive designers can contribute to defining products, services and experiences that leverage the personal data that is collected to create value in new ways.

The field appears to be wide open. Very interested to hear from readers that are active in the area and have opinions, lessons or resources relevant to designers.

For some time over 70% of the GDP in the US (and 57% of global GDP) comes from services not products. About half of IBM’s revenue comes from services not computers or software. It turns out that creating, delivering and managing services is very different from doing the same for products. Yet our economic, management and innovation models are nearly all geared towards technology and products not services.  Little wonder IBM is championing the development of a new field they call Service Science, Management and Engineering or SSME.

IBM was instrumental in creating the field of computer science in the 1950s and that turn out to be a genius business move. They hope to repeat that move in the early 21st century but with SSME or service science not computer science.

Services are intangible, require the co-creation of value between the provider and the consumer and are driven by the application of knowledge and skills. This means cognition is a key factor in the “production of services” and cognitive design could play a key role in service system innovation.  More specifically, we should optimize the design of our service systems for how minds naturally work.

Unfortunately, the more traditional fields of management science, industrial engineering, computer science, operations research and the like are lining up to dominate the new discipline.  There is some attention being paid to the role of social sciences (see for example MIT’s Center For Engineering Fundamentals) but that might miss the mark. One exception I found was the chapter, The Psychology of Experience: The Missing Link in Service Science in the book (complete version online),  SSME: Education for the 21st Century (see page 35).  Hopefully there are others.

I am interested to hear from readers working in or considering the field of SSME and how cognitive design can play a role.

The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, Capitalizing on Complexity,  is a must read for any designer that is working on leadership programs.  The study is unique and is based on 1500+  in person interviews with senior leaders in 60 countries and 33 industries.   It identifies the number one unmet cognitive need for this group – dealing with accelerating complexity – and identifies creativity as the number one leadership attribute. To quote:

“Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.”

Many of the leaders interviewed do no believe they are prepared to navigate the complexity ahead.  Creativity is not the only cognitive leadership attribute near the top of the list, global thinking was ranked number three.

In addition to creative leadership, the report identifies two other factors for successfully capitalizing on complexity:

“1. Reinventing customer relationships – with the Internet, new channels and globalising customers, organisations have to rethink approaches to better understand, interact with and serve their customers and citizens

2. Building operating dexterity – while rising complexity may sound threatening at first, reframing that initial reaction is fundamentally important. Successful CEOs refashion their organisations, making them faster, more flexible and capable of using complexity to their advantage.”

Developing creative global thinking leaders,  robust customer interactions and operating dexterity all require top shelf cognitive designs.

There is no way to tame and ultimately capitalize on complexity unless the systems and solutions we put in place are optimized for how minds naturally work.

The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago includes a Center for Decision Research. The work they do is cutting edge and full of designable insights.  To see what I mean browse the papers in the Behavioral Science Workshop Section.

For example, there are many insightful articles on behavior and habit change.  Consider the general conclusion of Can’t Control Yourself:

“Are people stuck hopelessly repeating their bad habits? Our answer, from research on what people do in their everyday lives when trying to change their responses, is not necessarily. Participants in our studies were reasonably successful at exerting control over unwanted responses when they used self-control strategies that are tailored to the specific cuing mechanisms that produced the response (i.e., temptations vs. habits). Thus, as suggested in earlier research on delay of gratification, having sufficient control strength is not a guarantee of successful control. The participants in our diary and laboratory studies were most successful when they exerted control in ways best suited to inhibiting the habit mechanism that activated the unwanted response.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear – emphasize avoidance strategies (staying away from the stimulus that triggers the unwanted behavior) over motivation and self-regulatory strength.

The 28th International Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems or CHI 2010 was held in Atlanta this April.  The proceedings are filled will provocative innovations will strong cognitive design implications. Three examples are given below.

1. Emotichair which allows you to directly feel the emotional content of music.

2. Skinput a new interface technology that turns your hand, arm or other parts of your body into an input device!

3. Using Health IT to help construct identities through storytelling and improve diabetes management.

Interested to hear from readers than attended or just know about cognitive-design relevant findings from CHI 2010.

I recently found the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.  Access to full content is free.  It covers many practical aspects of decision-making and provides designable insights. For example, in the new article, You Don’t Want to Know What You are Missing, the authors clearly demonstrate that when making a decision the more information we have about near-term benefits the less like we are to chose an alternative with the greatest long-term benefits. They put a sharper point to it:

“The present study reveals that, under the circumstances observed here, withholding information about local rewards from decision-makers can actually facilitate long-term optimal choice. “

Withholding information of course is just one option and might not be the best. Delaying it until longer-term options have been examined is an alternative.  No matter, this is just the type of insights cognitive designers seek and the journal appears to be full of them!

The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

Many studies have shown that we may tend toward lying, cheating or other unethical behaviors if we believe our identities are hidden. Being anonymous can have a big impact on behavior. A new study, Good Lamps are the Best Police, show that darkness encourages self-interested or unethical behavior even when it does not hide our identity. You can find a PDF version of the study in draft form (for free) here.

The researchers suggest that the perception of darkness creates the illusion of anonymity in our minds even when we consciously know are identity will be known.

“Departing from this body of work, we suggest that darkness does more than simply produce conditions of actual anonymity. We contend that darkness may create a sense of illusory anonymity that disinhibits self-interested and unethical behaviors. Individuals in a room with slightly dimmed lighting or people who have donned a pair of sunglasses may feel anonymous not because the associated darkness significantly reduces others’ ability to see or identify them, but because they are anchored on their own phenomenological experience of darkness. When individuals in such circumstances experience darkness and, consequently, impaired vision, they generalize that experience to others, expecting that others will conversely have difficulty perceiving or seeing them.” 

Clear implications for the cognitive designer interesting in leveraging the effects of lighting and other devices that can create a false sense of anonymity.

The PEW Research Center just released a major study on how Americans consume news. The findings show that the cognition involved definitely involves  opportunistic information foragaging across multiple sources.

“Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.” 

Also of interest to cognitive designers is the finding that consumer do participate in the creation of the news but typically fall far short of citizen journalism. They create content by comments and reposting.

 ”37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.”

The report is loaded with findings on the psychographics of newsies.  See for example, top reasons people follow the news.  If you read the report and find other results relevant to cognitive design, please post a comment.

In cognitive design we focus on creating a specific think-and-feel for artifacts.   Every interaction with a product or service generates thoughts and feelings and collectively those makeup experience.   Designing a specific experience especially one that differentiates a product or service is still very much an emerging practice but something executives want.  Or so argues Bruce Tempkin in a recent post, The State of Customer Experience 2010.

Bruce is a thought-leader for Forrester Research and I have blogged on several of his reports in the past.   His state of the customer experience research is based on interviews with 141 executives. Findings include: 90% see customer experience as an important strategy for 2010 but only 11% have a disciplined approach in place. More importantly for the cognitive designer, 80% want to use it for strategic differentiation.