Cognitive Design

Quick, how many tables do you have in your house? How many tables do you interact with throughout the day? For most of us the answer is lots. Desks, kitchen tables, restaurant tables, work tables, benches, coffee tables, bars and so on. The fact is you spend a lot of time “at the table” and more to the point of this blog, a lot of your cognition (perceiving, remembering, thinking, deciding, feeling, interrelating, etc.) happens at a table.  

Yet, with the rare exception, tables have been left out of the cognitive design revolution. They are functional, easy to use and delight our senses but we have not taken the next step to design tables that enhance how we think and feel.

What an opportunity!

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Check out the 1 Hour Design Challenge: Business Card Hacks. The idea is to design a new use for a business card that is 3D and can be constructed in an hour.   A most interesting entry is the seed card that lets your business card transform into a plant. 

(image source: Core77)

The contest is open until April 26 so you have time to make an entry.  I wonder how we can remake a business card into something that enhances cognition (how we think and feel)? 

A good overview of the emerging field of emotional design can be found here. The author looks at the concepts, arguments, tools and current issues associated with designing emotional responses, experiences and relationships.

Of special interest to cognitive designers are some of the tools including mood boards, inspirational activity cards, photo diaries, IDEO method cards, the sensorial quality assessment method, Kansei engineering and Premo.

The massive investment we are making via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act presents an ideal opportunity for the design community to demonstrate the value of technical design in numerous disciplines.  It is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to demonstrate the national importance of  broader design thinking. We need to step up!

I took a run at that in an earlier post showing how we can use cognitive design to get the most out of the $19B being invested in electronic medical records.  Obviously only a tiny part of what designers can do for the overall stimulus. I did receive some very good feedback, thank you.  

In response to some of the feedback I have created a 10-slide overview of EMR 2.0, the cognitive redesign I am proposing  for electronic medical record software. 

Let me know what you think.  

1.  A fast user experience above all else.

2. Obey the laws of cognitive science. Yes!

3. Information density over aesthetic enhancement. 

Or that’s my paraphrase of a recent interview with Irene Au, Google’s Director of User Experience.   

Calling all cognitive designers… gear up for The 2009 DiabetesMine Design Challenge

Design an innovation to improve the lives of those with diabetes, document (by May 1, 2009) your idea in a two-minute YouTube video or 2-3 page elevator pitch, win $10K (or other prizes), enhance your reputation as a designer and perhaps, help millions of people with diabetes!

Entries will be judged on how well they solve a problem for people with diabetes, clinical efficacy (make sense medically) and aesthetics or look and feel.   Rules can be found here.

Don’t let the product focus limit your thinking, this is really about cognition, experience and service.

Innovators retain intellectual property rights. The competition is sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, endorsed by medgadget.com and supported by IDEO.   You can check out more details including entries from last year HERE.

Click here to get some.  

Peer into the minds of students HERE. 

There is a US national design policy initiative that is making a 10 point pitch to Congress to elevate design to the national agenda. Among other things they are calling for the creation of a position in the department of commerce focused on design and innovation, establishing grants for design research and commissioning a study to better understand the impact of design on the economy. All 10 proposals are discussed in a paper, Redesigning America’s Future, that opens with the position that America is in need of a redesign.  

I agree with the timing and spirit of this initiative. Indeed, I don’t see how we can deal problems like healthcare costs without embracing design thinking.

Thanks to Jessie Blank for sending this link.  

One of the major causes of unwanted behaviors (unhealthy habits, over consumption, unsafe practices, corruptions, etc.) is that the artifacts we define to manage them – everything from weight loss programs, workplace incentives and government policies – don’t reflect how our minds actually work.  They operate in a way that fails to respect the importance of  low cognitive load, support for the psychology of self-regulation,  emotional energy in behavior change or the non-rational calculus of visceral factors (meanings, urges, cravings, etc.) that strongly shape our cognition.  

Ignoring how the mind works in the design of your artifact for behavior change is a fatal flaw.  Indeed, designs that change behavior put cognition first.    

The recent issue of Science Magazine focused on Education & Technology offers some insight into this point. They discuss why innovations such as using video game effects to design educational programs have not taken off.    Education is an important element of many behavior change efforts and video games have proven to be one of the most naturally powerful devices for accelerating cognition.  Yet the attempt to develop serious games, or games designed to teach and change behaviors rather than just entertain, have not scaled up.  

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