Cognitive Design

Imagine being able to measure the cognitive impact of a workspace or building design before you built it.  A group of architects and academic researchers is doing just that in California as they monitor the brainwaves (EEG) of users as they interact with a proposed design in a virtual reality (VR) environment. 

Not only do they expect to avoid costly design errors,  make way-finding easier and otherwise optimize designs for how our minds work but they expect to gain scientific insight into how we form “cognitive maps” as we navigate.  This is doing cognitive design and some applied cognitive science at the same time.

The project is described well in a post on MSNBC, Get Lost and Get Better Architecture. The end of the article is most interesting to cognitive designers. Berns a Neuroscientist at Emory University speculates that ”the relative mobility of EEG technology could lend itself to poring over the brain waves of people in existing buildings as well”.   This might open up a new level of rigor for the cognitive design of spaces.

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.

When we interact with anything – a product, a computer or other people – we burn mental energy. Interaction requires making choices, figuring things out and behavioral self control.  Literally, glucose in the brain’s blood is burned or converted into mental task energy to consciously think, decide, learn and self regulate.   

And we have a limited supply of this type of mental energy. Depleting it can lead to poor cognitive performance.  A recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, (all articles free online) reviews the latest findings on these effects as they related to buying behaviors.  One key finding:

“The capacity for self-control and intelligent decision making involves a common, limited resource that uses the body’s basic energy supply.  When this resource is depleted, self control fails and decision making is impaired.” 

Interactions also lead to the production of mental energy through stimulating emotions, meaning, metaphors, automatic inferences and the like. These effects can also burn glucose but rather than resulting in depletion or fatigue they give rise to a feeling of energy that can in some circumstances improve performance. This feeling of energy is subjective because it does not generate glucose but it is functional (real outcome) because it can improve performance.  For example, consider the impact of increased confidence, emotional pride or excitement on performance.

Complex interactions can be understood as a series of events that burn or produce mental energy at two levels – the biological level (glucose in the brain’s blood) and the psychological or cognitive level (deciding, learning, emotion, meaning, etc.). This is why it is important in cognitive to design to model user-artifact interaction as the conversion of mental energy.   

When applying cognitive design to organizational problems we approach change efforts, optimize work flows, implement benefit programs, facilitate decision-making meetings, plan team-building events and offer rewards and the like on the basis of how minds really work.

A classical example is the application of Kübler-Ross’s five-stage grief model to managing organizational change. Kübler-Ross observed terminally ill patients and argued that they went through five stages of grief including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 

[image source: Scientific American] 

Organizational theorists and management consultants picked this up and crafted models for employees that were doing something akin to grieving as they had to navigate a fundamental change/loss at work.  

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In cognitive design we seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel (feel in the tactile sense) to focus on creating a specific think-and-feel (feel in the emotional sense).  Cognitive design is concerned with tuning (adding, deleting, tweaking) the features and functions of products so that customers have specific thoughts and emotions (mental states).

Excellence in cognitive design is clearly important when you are designing something to change behaviors or enhance mental processes (e.g. make better decisions) but it can also be applied to differentiate even the most mundane products.

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 A recent issue of the Design Management Review (DMR) is focused on The Future of Design Leadership.   You can access some of the content for free or read a review in BusinessWeek on Desgining the Future of Business. 

One basic point is that design is beginning to play a much broader and long overdue role in business.  Design is starting to be seen as a general approach to innovation, an important tool for managerial problem solving and even an essential element of leadership in the 21st century. 

The DMR claims “Perhaps the ultimate leadership strategy, though, is to instill a design culture that pervades all dimensions of a business.”

We are moving from understanding design as a technique or speciality (e.g. graphic design) to a view of design as a mode of thinking – design thinking. 

Cognitive design provides an important foundation for the emergence of design thinking.

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According to a recent study  by scientists at Yale and the University of Colorado, how we rate a stranger’s personality can be influenced by the temperature of a cup of coffee (or other beverage) we are holding. Warm coffee means I will tend to be trusting and see the person as warm. Ice or cold coffee has the opposite effect.

 The temperature of the coffee is priming my emotions, not too surprising given the embodied nature of cognition.   Now we know why warm cookies, heated car seats, hot cocoa and a warm glass of milk all seem to be more than physically comforting. 

This finding offers tentative guidance for the cognitive designer intent on creating artifacts that generate a sense of trust, emotional warmth and soothingness:

Heat them up!

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.