Cognitive Design

In my leadership class at Northwestern we examine the latest thinking on how to leverage and manage corporate culture.   One stream of thought that works extremely well in practice is to focus on small but key behaviors first. Indeed, the idea is not to try and change culture at all but design experiences where people see, try, hear stories about or receive rewards for new behaviors.  If the new behaviors are cleverly linked to powerful outcomes then they will lead to a cascade of change, new mental models, attitudes and culture.  The key is to uncover these vital behaviors and use cognitive design to create experiences around them that move hearts and minds.

A new article in Strategy+Business, Stop Blaming Culture, provides an excellent overview of the theoretical foundation behind this approach.  The authors emphasize:

“… if you are seeking more accountability (for example), identify the types of ongoing behavior that embody that value. You might have to be specific: “I expect you to read, record, and respond to every customer complaint — and I will reward or penalize you accordingly.”

Being specific and behavioral is the key – read, record, respond to every… no ambiguity in that.  Habituating such behaviors leads to more interaction and empathy with the customer, new ways of dealing with or avoiding customer complaints,  up-selling,  improved retention and so on.  Over time, the new behaviors will generate a new culture if they are tied to key drivers of value in your business system.

What to change a culture? Find small new behaviors that drive big changes in value and design experiences that make it natural, fun, exciting and rewarding to try them out.

Successful innovations offer features we really want in an easy to use package that also delight the senses.  Wildly successful innovations go beyond core functionality, usability and sensorial design to inspire, enlighten and energize by moving our hearts and minds. But how do we understand the hearts and minds of others in order to successfully innovate?  One way is to use the science of character strengths.

Character strengths, for example humility, curiosity or bravery not only help define who we are but are windows into what is most likely to move our hearts and minds.   Fortunately, we can cost effectively measure character strengths in sufficient detail to inform a design or innovation process. The best resource I have found (and have blogged on them before) is the VIA Institute of Character.  Their model includes six main categories (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence) with 24 specific strengths.

In about 30-40 minutes you can take a personal survey online for free.  It identifies your signature character strengths or the keys to getting your heart and mind going.  You can use the instrument with your clients or employees (approx $40 per survey). They also offer plenty of training and support options for learning to use the instrument.

I have used this framework to successfully deconstruct popular designs and forward engineer applications several times.   My work is still in the early stages.  I would like to hear from readers interested or experienced in using a character-based approach to defining needs and features for cognitive design.

Image Source: Strengths Picture 

In my philosophy of business workshop I argue that the most costly philosophical mistake management scholars and practitioners in the West make is differentiating thought and action.  It is true that an artificial distinction between thinking and doing enhanced management control and predictability in the industrial era.  But things have changed and we forgot the distinction is artificial.  Now that knowledge and creativity are key the distinction leads to poor decision-making about job design, planned organizational change and innovation to name just a few areas.   And it runs deep – plan versus implement, strategy versus operations, design versus construction, research versus manufacture and thinkers versus doers. 

When we try to learn or innovate, the current distinction between thinking and doing is most harmful. This is why techniques such as prototyping and ethnographic study in design or constructionism in education produce interesting results. They combine thinking, making and observing in deep and natural ways.

John Maeda, the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design and former head of MIT’s media lab, made a related point recently in Seed Magazine.

“After two decades as a student and faculty member at MIT, my newest experience at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has reawakened me to the world of physical creation. RISD represents the ultimate culture of makers. There is no greater integrity, no greater goal achieved, than an idea articulately expressed through something made with your hands. We call this constant dialogue between eye, mind, and hand “critical thinking—critical making.” It’s an education in getting your hands dirty, in understanding why you made what you made, and owning the impact of the work in the world. It’s what artists and designers do. ”

He is making a broader argument for injecting art and design into science education to take the engine of innovation in the US to the next level. The idea is to go beyond our technology-centric approach to innovation by adding art, emotion and intuition into the process.  To do this we must integrate thinking and making.  

Critical (Thinking + Making) = Innovation Squared because it is one way to smash the artificial distinction between thinking and doing.

Image Source: Blogging Innovation

The US federal government has embraced open innovation. The goal is to accelerate innovation, resolution of tough problems and an agency’s core mission by offering cash prizes to all comers.

Challenge.gov has 56 challenges from 27 organization so it appears to be getting traction. Most of the prizes are a few thousand dollars but I did see one for $50K.

Some of the challenges definitely involve cognitive design. For example check out, the Healthy People 2020 contest. They are looking applications that help professionals participate in our national agenda for disease prevention and health promotion. Contests in the education and health category tend to have a cognitive design element.

Interested to hear from readers that are participating in Challenge.gov.

Five graduate students at IIT’s Institute of Design working with Wheelwell want to design and take to market a new wheelchair. They are raising money for the effort on the Pepsi Refresh Challenge Site. Check them out and cast some votes. The goal is to design an affordable power-assisted (combines electric and manual modes) chair for people with spinal cord injuries. They are looking for $250K to research, engineer, design and test 3 prototype hybrid chairs. Pepsi will provide the money if they get enough votes.

Cigarettes have been characterized as a nicotine delivery system. There are over a billion people that smoke them worldwide.  It is increasing. The World Bank Group estimates that between 80,000 – 100,000 young people take up smoking cigarettes per day. According to the American Heart Association about 49 million adults in the US smoke them.

A new type of cigarette, called the electronic cigarette, e-cigarette or just the e-cig, has hit the market. It is smokeless. Instead of burning tobacco you use a battery to vaporize and inhale a nicotine solution.   It is unregulated. It can in theory be consumed where smoking is banned.

These new electronic nicotine delivery systems are just now being studied. I found some research on EurekAlert! that is sounding an alarm:

To address this question, researchers at the University of California, Riverside evaluated five e-cigarette brands and found design flaws, lack of adequate labeling, and several concerns about quality control and health issues. They conclude that e-cigarettes are potentially harmful and urge regulators to consider removing e-cigarettes from the market until their safety is adequately evaluated.”

There are more than five brands on the market. Although I could not find a formal market study, there are newspaper articles that claim the market is growing fast. Ironically, the high price of traditional cigarettes have made the e-cig technology affordable.

According to Smoke Power here is how they work:

 ”… the user inhales on the electronic cigarette, this causes an air flow sensor to signal to the inbuilt microprocessor, that in turn activates the atomizer. The atomizer converts the liquid nicotine in the cartridge into a vapour (by atomization), which is digested by the user. Simultaneously, a vapor is released from the glycol by the atomizer to resemble ‘smoke’. “

They include tobacco flavoring, look like a cigarette and produce vapor like smoke so they are trying to meet the cognitive needs of smokers with the design.

Interested to hear from readers that have used e-cigs or that have strong opinions about them.

Source of Image: Electronic Cigarette Comparison

Nature has solved some exceptionally hard engineering and design problems in ways that are not only optimal but stunningly beautiful. This is one reason why biomimicry – or emulating nature’s design strategies and patterns – is catching fire.  Another reason is because of the excellent work of organizations such as the Biomimicry Institute. Check out their AskNature project and you will find a taxonomy of over 1200 of nature’s design patterns. Each pattern or strategy is summarized and examples of how it is or could be used are given, along with images and comments. You can even contribute new patterns.

This could be an important resource for cognitive designers. While there are likely no patterns that illustrate how to optimize functionality for psychological needs, there could be many that suggest new ways to organize, communicate and adapt that are useful for solving cognitive design problems.

Interested to hear from readers with ideas for how we can use biomimicry in cognitive design.

The challenge is to create a tweet, story, essay, poster, public art, Guerrilla marketing effort, video or some other communication artifact to show the world:

“… that the lack of basic sanitation is one of the most critical issues facing the developing world today.”

Entries to the Sanitation is Sexy contest are due November 21st.

The psychological need to share is a powerful force, especially when it involves trust.   Cognitive designers that are able to create new ways of sharing or more shareable products, services and experiences are achieving success.  To see how this is working in some detail check out the new book and website, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.The book illustrates a mega shift from hyper consumption to collaborative consumption driven by peer-to-peer sharing networks enabled by the Internet. We can now efficiently share everything:

“From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa) and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.

New marketplaces such as Swap.com, Zilok, Bartercard, AirBnb, and thredUP are enabling “peer-to-peer” to become the default way people exchange — whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world.”

We have looked at many of these sites on the Cognitive Design Blog before but not as an emerging design pattern.   Designing for shareability (collaborative consumption) not only satisfies deep cognitive needs it is a powerful way to tap underutilized capacity, dramatically lower costs, shift behavior patterns and bring people closer together.

Very interested to hear from readers that have insight into how we can transform traditional products and assets into something that is collaboratively consumable.

In an earlier post, we explored PatientsLikeMe, a unique site for crowdsourcing patient data in great quantitative detail.  The idea is that patients share tons of personal health data by tracking symptoms, lab results, interventions and the outcomes produced in quantitative form. This creates a river of data for helping each other and is invaluable for researchers, insurers, drug companies and medical device companies looking to develop better health solutions.   An exciting and potential disruptive way to crowdsource health innovations.

But will an open source approach to clinical research catch on, especially will all the concerns about privacy?  It looks like it is. Check out CureTogether. They have 13,000 members in 112 countries contributing 1.2 million data points on 600 conditions.  All the data is supplied by patients. They are actively leveraging that it in 6 university-based studies. It is interesting to note that the most active area is anxiety with some 2000 members.

Patient sourcing (patients working on cures through a crowdsourcing model), especially when it is quantitative can change the time, cost and quality of clinical research by a factor of 10. As they point out on the website capturing quantitative is the key:

“CureTogether is about quantifying the collective patient experience. While most other patient support sites have focused on stories or information from experts, we focus on quantitative data across over 600 patient-contributed conditions. Individual data is kept private, but the anonymized aggregate data is shared openly to maximize discoveries that can be made.”

Obviously this involves considerable work for patients.  But the return on effort is outstanding.  Members get unique advice, daily encouragement and the opportunity to contribute to something of major importance. Powerful cognitive design.