Cognitive Design

I received a lot of email on the Frugal Engineering post. Many excellent comments and observations. One stands out: Frugal engineering for emerging markets can create intangible value for the designers.  Do good and make money by solving social problems. They also shared a URL to Design for the Other 90% . 

 This community is based on an important insight and has powerful purpose:

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.” 

The site covers a range of designs that have been implemented in health, water, shelter, transport, energy and education. A great feature is Tweets containing updates from the field.

BTW, I receive a ton of blog spam daily so the best way to communicate with me is via email. For those readers that may not know how to reach me I created an About Me page.

Waste, massive waste, is built into everything we do. This waste hurts the environment, increases cost and drains our mental energy (high cognitive load).  I am especially interested in the cognitive load associated with waste.  If we are to optimize our designs for how minds work we must eliminate waste.

I am not talking lean here but a much newer and I believe more basic movement called frugal engineering.   Strategy + Business just published an excellent article on The Importance of Frugal Engineering.

Born from the idea of remaking products and services for emerging markets, or folks at the so-called “bottom of the pyramid”, frugal engineering calls for a 10x reduction in cost and a focus on essential features.  A $16 cell phone, $50 refrigerator, $2000 car, $7000 tractor and an x-ray machine that costs just 1/20th of its normal price are all examples. Indeed, the $16 Nokia 1100 cell phone does nothing but make calls and is the best selling phone of all time.  These innovations migrate back up to the “top of the pyramid.”

                          [ChotuKool a $50 Fridge]

Frugal designs necessarily lower cognitive load because they eliminate functionality that is not essential to what the customer naturally needs.  Less complexity, frustration, learning, decisioning and error all lower the mental effort needed to make the most of the functionality.   How disruptive will frugal engineering be?

Or at least that is the consensus view of organizational scientists that contributed to the important new volume, Worker Engagement: A Handbook of Essential Theory and Research.

This is no surprise to cognitive designers. The entire field turns on the assumption that interaction can be modeled as the exchange of mental energy.  To oversimplify, I put mental effort and energy into my work and I get some out. If in general I get more out than I put in, I an invigorated and experience engagement. If on average I get less mental energy out than I put in, I am headed towards burnout and potential exhaustion.

The concept of energy appears throughout the book but gets the most advanced treatment in chapter six, Feeling energetic at work: On Vigor’s antecedents. To quote:

“Vigor refers to individuals’ feelings that they possess physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness, a set of interrelated affective states experienced at work.”

Vigor and the mental energy that drives it plays a key role in the job demands and resources (JD-R) model of worker engagement, the theoretical centerpiece of the handbook.

Design thinking  is critical for interventions that drive higher levels of worker engagement. As the author points out:

“I argue that people feel ongoing changes in the physical, cognitive and emotional energy levels that they posses and these changes are related to specific positive features of their work environment and specific characteristics of their jobs.”

Cognitive design can contribute to tuning these features as we have work hard to define the factors and variables that characterize the use and generation of mental energy. See for example an excerpt on mental energy analysis from a workshop I gave at the 2009 Design Research Conference. Said more directly, the JD-R model puts cognitive design in the center of our efforts to improve worker engagement.

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago has issued a final call for the 2010 Whiteboard Challenge. You have to submit an idea online (max 400 words) by April 23rd 5pm CT. The finalists give a 5-minute whiteboard presentation. Prizes are $3K, $1.5K and $0.5K but the intangible value is far higher.

2009 winning ideas included:

1ST: System that gives cerebral palsy patients an incentive to stand up straight.  2ND: Necklace and online social networking website for Tweens. 3RD: Portion-controlled dinnerware for diabetics and the health conscious.

Go here  for a blog post detailing the 2009 event.

Your iPhone, Android, Blackberry or other Smart Phone can be a powerful tool for doing design research, prototype testing and other fieldwork in cognitive design.   Besides basic mobile communication, video capture and GPS functionality new apps are creating some intriguing possibilities.

Take for example, Stickybits.  Here is what you do:

1. Download the free app and turn your smart phone into a bar code scanner.

2. Buy some labels – about 30 to 50 cents apiece depending upon how many you buy.

3. Associate digital content (photos, music, documents, videos, URLs, etc.) with your label.

4. Attach the label to some object.

Anytime someone scans the label they see your digital content! Example applications mentioned on the website include: Attaching a video to a birthday card, a resume to a business card and recipes to a cereal box.

A very creative app ripe with implications for designers. I am going to challenge Northwestern students in my Cognitive Design class this summer to use Stickybits in the design process.

Last year I gave a 2-hour workshop at the annual Design Research Conference (DRC) hosted by the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  It was a great event. A combination of 20-minute TED-like talks, 5-minute speed talks, longer keynotes and workshops delivered by folks with great experience working on the cutting-edge.  My workshop explained how to model user interactions as the conversion of mental energy.

DRC 2010 is scheduled for May 10-12 and will be held in Chicago.   Strongly recommended it for cognitive designers. Of special note is Don Norman’s opening remarks. He has generated a lot of buzz recently by taking the position (which I strongly agree with):  

“design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs”  

Managing diabetes often calls for significant lifestyle and behavior change. Creating programs to help patients and family members make these changes requires a sophisticated understanding of how minds actually work.   Diabetes management is a major cognitive design challenge so I am always on the look our for fact-based insights into how the minds of diabetics work.

Late last year the IIT Institute of Design held a Diabetes Innovation Fair including three sessions on platform strategies, persuasive technologies and wellness experience research. They just released videos of each session.

All three sessions offering valuable insights for cognitive designers.

Be sure to read Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience and Brand Value.  It is an edited collection focused on service and experiential design. It offers keen insights and practical tools. Unfortunately, it is lacks the introduction to applied cognitive science for designers that I believe is necessary to really crack the code in service and experiential design efforts.

I especially like the definition they offer of design thinking:

“.. is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. “

Chapter 20: Will Meaningful Brand Experiences Disrupt Your Market? is of special interest to cognitive designers. The author David Norton shows how firms such as Dyson, Linux and Whole Foods are disrupting their respective industries by delivering powerful customer experiences by clearly standing for something.  A good example of how meaning produces significant and sustained economic returns.

As the author states: “The opportunity for design today is to go beyond making things convenient for people and start making experiences people care about.”

And to do that in a systematic and repeatable way we first must understand how their minds work.

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in  New York City is offering a six-week Summer intensive for experienced designers interested in creating social change.  The SVA is well known for being on the cutting edge yet having a practical focus. This is a unique opportunity to develop as a design activist.

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe may be helping to popularize a key concept in cognitive design. In the article, Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become the next supermodel, he reviews what has recently been learned about how cognitive load/fit strongly influences choice, perception, learning and other mental activities.

The key points made will be nothing new to readers of this blog. For example:

“Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.” 

My hope is that his journalistic reporting will help accelerate understanding and interest in the basics of cognitive design. Specifically, the concept of “cognitive fluency” may resonate much better than “cognitive load” or worse yet “cognitive ergonomics”. The New York Times has picked it up as an Idea of the Day.