BusinessWeek has a special report on the value of design. It covers a wide-range of topics including for example, designs importance for start-ups, the four basic roles design plays in value creation and even the role for design in curing our healthcare woes. The concept of design used in the study is pretty conventional but it is worth a quick read if you are interested in a refresher on the business basics of design.
How we perceive the world, learn, think, plan, emote, imagine the future and perform other mental activities is strongly influenced by our physical bodies. In short, cognition is embodied and as designers we need to factor that into our work.
The Association for Psychological Sciences has an excellent article on their site, The Body of Knowledge: Understanding Embodied Cognition that is written in a designer friendly way. There are a number of scientific insights loaded with design implications including how:
And many more. Seemingly small bodily effects with big mental impact. Just the stuff a cognitive designer wants to leverage.
As citizens we make a lot of common sense assumptions about how minds work. There are so-called folk psychological explanations for how we learn, make decisions, solve problems, manage emotions, remember things and so on. Such assumption, especially since they are based on common sense, play an important role in social interactions but are in fact false or misleading. As cognitive designers seeking to optimize artifacts for how minds actually work, we don’t have the luxury of taking folk psychology at face value. We must be very careful to challenge folk psychological assumptions.
The PsyBlog has a recent post, Our Minds are Black Boxes - Even to Ourselves, that illustrate this point very well. They reviewed a study from 1977 designed to test assumptions about intelligence, flexibility in problem, likeability and sympathy. The study found that subjects had exceptionally poor judgment about how minds work when it comes to flexibility, likeabilty and sympathy but were reasonable accurate when it comes to intelligence.
I believe this is one of the reasons we need cognitive design so badly today. Our organizations, management practices, products and services have been designed using natural but faulty assumptions about how minds work. This would be similar to using cartoon physics in the design of bridges. It would work for many things but unfortunately fail fatally for others.
On Core77, Ken Fry, a Director at Artefact, discusses 10 ways to accelerate the remaking of industrial design into experience design. Some of his remarks point towards designing for how minds really work (cognitive design). There is a call for a focus on emotion, user motivations, the meaning behind the artifact, low cognitive load (keep it simple) and so on. A sample:
”1. Design beautiful experiences, not beautiful artifacts
History is littered with beautiful objects that are culturally offensive, socially anemic, environmentally irresponsible, useless, or unusable. Consider all of the contexts of the artifact that you create: How is the product used over time? Where does it live? Who uses it? How does it fulfill the practical needs of the person using it? And consider all of the meanings behind the artifact: What are the emotional, cultural, social, and environmental impacts of the product? The physical artifact will be trivial without considering these larger contexts and meanings; indeed, they are what define the experience. Think beyond the object and consider all of these contexts of use. Apply a design process that helps you learn about these contexts and experiences. Work toward an experience-oriented solution instead of an object-based result.”
In cognitive design, we view an experience as a themed set of mental states that may be private or shared. The goal is to design to achieve a specific set of mental states throughout the life cycle of the artifact. So there is some common ground between cognitive and experience design.
Cognitive designers seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel to create specific mental states or a “think-and-feel”. Designing for pleasure, emotion, meaning, pain relief and improved decision making, learning and behavioral self-control are only a few of the application areas. The goal is to optimize our designs for how minds work.
Taking a systematic approach to cognitive design requires that we can somehow get between the ears of the people we are designing for and understand inner mental life and how it is shaped by features, functions and forms.
So I am always on the look out for new tools and techniques for modeling mental states and processes. The holy grail is neural decoding or the ability to translate measurable data on brain activity into the meaning of thoughts, emotions and actions. In short, directly reading the mind. The state of the art in neural decoding was discussed at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. The New Scientist offers an excellence synopsis in Brain Scanner Can Tell What You are Thinking About.
Nothing yet for the designer’s toolkit but some very interesting developments:
“He (Jack Gallant) and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.”
Being able to accurately and cost effectively translate biometric information from our nervous systems into the corresponding thoughts, feeling, motivations and intentions will be one of the major innovations of the 21st century. Among other things, it will provide the foundation needed to take an exacting approach to optimizing our designs for how minds really work. Cognitive design unleashed.
A New York Times journalist interviewed 200 design experts and wrote a book on design thinking, titled Glimmer: How design thinking can transform your life, and maybe even the world. It is an interesting piece of work that is distilled into 10 design thinking principles. Check them out. I have used variations of all of them in many settings. They work.
Although design thinking is certainty entering its hype phase, it won’t get any real traction as a management problem solving or innovation tool until there is a simple, proven and differentiated methodology to make it go. This is how lean, six sigma, process re-engineering and other management innovations got traction. The lack of such a methodology is why other management innovations such as knowledge management and systemic thinking failed. Where is the DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve, control) for design thinkers?
Brainwaves has a post offering an interesting hypothetical scenario where the president signs, in 2019, a Neuro Information Nondiscrimination Act (NINA) that might contain the following provisions:
“- Explicit right to cognitive liberty, brain privacy
-Bans discrimination in hiring based on neuroimaging profile
-Bans all local, state ‘drug vaccine’ programs
-Bans ‘neuroprofiling’ for travel and attendance at public events
-Subsidizes accelerated learning with neuroenablement technologies
-Legalizes use of neuroenablers
-Bans denial of health coverage based on neuroprofile
-Bans cosmetic memory erasure”
The more effective cognitive design becomes the more likely it will be regulated.
This may seem far fetched to some readers, but check out the worry stream about in implications of neuroimaging in the recent Forbes article, Is My Mind Mine?
BusinessWeek has a report out on Design Thinking. It covers the debate over how to teach it, 30-top programs, 21 leading design thinkers, Asia’s play in design thinking and how business is using it. The only top program to emphasize cognitive design appears to be the MBA program in emotional design in Brazil. It includes courses titled “Cognition and Emotion in Design”.
The Mayo Clinic recently sponsored the symposium, Transform: On Innovation in Healthcare experience and delivery. Videos of the talks given by leading lights in design thinking (Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO) and innovation (Clayton Christensen author of Disruptive Innovation and the Innovation Prescription) are available. No breakthroughs but a good overview of some of the latest thinking.
Looking to pitch a hard design challenge to an interested audience, work on a hard design challenge for $$ or pledge prize money to stimulate work on a cool design challenge? If so check out ChallengePost. The site offers an interesting implementation of the crowdsourcing approach to problem solving and innovation.
The site is new so still developing (only about 37 challenges) but some have a strong cognitive design element. For example, Newt Gingrich has posted one that challenges us to “Create a method to teach math and science that kids like, and that enables us to leapfrog India and China”. Rock and roll.
