Cognitive Design

The Rotman School of Management  is a world-class business school in Toronto. In my opinion they do more to understand how the mind really works and what that means for business than most of their competitors.

For a good taste of thier thinking about thinking and what it means for business, check out the Winter 2008 Issue of their management magazine (warning this is a 128 pg, 6.5mb PDF). 

In this issue they call for the extension of the dominant logic/analytic approach to thinking in business to include perceptual, integrative and design thinking in a much larger doses.

The issue is packed with big implications for any cognitive designer looking to use the latest insights into how minds work to improve organizational innovation processes and managerial decision making.

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!

Our minds have two modes – automatic and manual.

In automatic mode we make instant decisions, take frequent and sometimes dangerous mental short cuts (cognitive biases) and run intuitively with very little conscious awareness and control.  Manual mode on the other hand requires attention and conscious mental effort to exert behavioral control, weight options, manage emotions and the like.

As Blink and other recent best sellers on the nature of thinking have pointed out, we pretty much live in automatic mode.  But as David Meyer’s claims in his book, Intuition: Its Power and Perils, we generally don’t believe that:

“The big idea of contemporary psychological science is that most of our everyday thinking, feeling and acting operate outside of conscious awareness is hard for people to accept…”   

For a good summary of the book look here. 

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Just completed the 4th year of teaching a graduate course in cognitive design at Northwestern University.  It is an elective in the Masters of Learning and Organizational Change program.

I am posting the syllabus and presentation slides on fundamental principles and a draft article introducing the technique of modeling intereaction as the conversion of mental energy.  

I’ll blog on the students projects a bit later in the summer.

Services, unlike most products, are hard for customers and employees to see, touch and explain. Services are a set of activities that we can experience but they are fleeting and don’t seem to have the clearly defined and mostly static features and functions that products do. It is hard to give a demo of a service.  Further, customer don’t own services like they do products.

It is little wonder that it is challenging to explain and sell complex services.  Doing so requires solid cognitive design both of the service itself (to eliminate unneeded complexity and reward necessary complexity with a boost of mental energy) and the design of the communications about the service.

An excellent resource for tips on how to design effective communications about complex services is Joshua Porter’s book, Designing for the Social Web.  One example he presents is an explanation of Netflix’s service:

 You might complain that this is not a good example because the Netflix service is not complex. But of course that it exactly the point. It is not complex because they made it so darn easy to understand.

Although focused on the web the examples and principles can be applied to all services.  Also check out Mr. Porter’s blog.

I have argued many times in this blog that design thinking is not only an innovation method but also a powerful general purpose management method.

Jeneanne Rae in a recent post on design thinking in BusinessWeek, talks about the success P&G is having with this approach as a management model. To quote: 

In his new book, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: “Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

For the cognitive designer then the question is how do we rethink leadership programs, management processes and other aspects of organizational design to support or even inspire abductive inference?

What happens when we move the design function forward in the innovation process and use it as a way to  empathetically understand deep customer needs and collaboratively test ideas via inexpensive prototypes? The answer, according to Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) in a recent HBR article is that you “transform the way you develop products, services, processes and even strategy”.

Designing to create a particular frame of mind (thoughts and feelings) in users can have a big impact of the success of your product or service.  Hard evidence for this claim can be found in Colin Shaw’s recent book, The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value.

For an interesting recap, check out this post.

Collin identifies four cluster of emotions and their business impacts on the customer experience:

For the cognitive designer this framework provides some insight into which mental states are likely produce what type of business outcome.

The concept of mental energy plays a central role in cognitive design. We want to create artifacts that “lift users up” or generate and release more mental energy then they require to use. This means keeping cognitive load low and triggering a cascade of associations, meaning, emotions and other mental processes with a positive valence.

Until recently, there has been very little scientific investigation into the concept of mental energy. The North American Branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has published a nice over of some of the most important work to date in  Mental Energy: Defining the Science.  Here is a brief summary that I wrote elsewhere:

“The ILSI defines mental energy in terms of three components or as “the ability to perform mental tasks, the intensity of feelings about energy/fatigue, and the motivation to accomplish mental and physical tasks.”   The first component or ability to perform mental tasks or cognition (in the narrow sense) includes attention, memory and speed of processing.  The second component is highly subjective and is based on how energetic we feel. It is transient and makes of the “mood of mental energy”.  The third component is motivation which is a measure of our enthusiasm and determination.”

So mental energy plays a fundamental role in cognitive design. We need to pay special attention to any features or functions that impact its use or production. Indeed, we can model and understand the interactions between a user and an artifact as the conversion of mental energy.   

  When we interact with an artifact (anything that has been designed) we can experience five distinct frames of mind including: agitation, tolerance, resonance, acceleration and integration.  So something either irritates me, bores me, really clicks with me, speeds up my thinking and emotions or literately makes the thoughts and emotions I am having possible in the first place.  This last state – integration, implies a profound coupling between the functionality of the artifact and the cognition of the user.  For example, a brain-computer interface may let me move a cursor on a computer screen by thought alone. Without the brain-computer interface (artifact) I cannot have the cognition to move the cursor on the computer screen. It is the two things working together in an integrated system that give rise to the cognition.  In this way, cognition is actually extended beyond the skull to include the artifact and aspects of the environment. 

 Designing to achieve this fifth or extended state of mind – integration between user and artifact – may seem exotic (how many of us use brain-computer interfaces) but an emerging position in the philosophy of mind argues it may be more common place than we think. 

   Andy Clark, a philosopher has an exciting new book coming out, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension,  where he argues that certain forms of cognition are so entangled with artifacts in the environment that we need to think of mind as extended not “brain bound”.  That is the mind extends beyond the brain and the body into the environment by the way it is tightly coupled to objects and events.  For example, a scientist who uses pen and paper to write, think and develop insights into nature.  Pen and paper are far more mundane than brain-computer interfaces but in the rights hands may in fact generate an extended frame of mind.  

   In my cognitive design class I challenge students to come up with examples of how this extended state of mind works in our everyday world.  Common responses include thinking in the shower or while listening to music.  Does the flowing water or sound actually integrate with and extend cognition beyond the body?  I’m not sure but I hope Andy Clark’s new book will help me figure that out.  In the meantime,  I must agree with the publisher’s write up: 

“The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.”