Cognitive Design

Designers make a contribution to society by translating the great revolutions in science into artifacts for all to use. This is the theme of a wonderful exhibit in 2008 on Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  You can listen to an interview with the senior curator here or better, navigate the exhibit itself here.  

In many ways, the entire exhibit is focused on how design impacts our cognition.  The key theme is how designers help us adapt to change (or not) via the artifacts they create. Another dimension, more germane to the purpose of this blog, is how  designers have translated the revolution in cognitive science into artifacts we can all use. Browse the catalog and let me know what you think.

Are there artifacts in the exhibit that clearly showcase the recent revolution in cognitive science? 

Instant messaging (IM) on computers and text messaging on phones is now an important form of communication. It happens everywhere and often concurrently or while people are doing other things such as studying, readings, attending a class, attending a meeting at work, driving a car or watching TV. This raises an important cognitive design question:

Should we redesign experiences to better support concurrent instant messaging, and if so, what do the new experiences look like?

For example, rather than banning IM in the classroom or corporate meeting room, should we rethink these activities to directly integrate IM? 

To take a cognitive approach to this question we need to understand what psychological needs IM meets and how it otherwise impacts perception, memory, thinking, learning, mood and interaction.  

I’ve been collecting research on this issue for sometime and just found an interesting article in the February issue of Cyberpsychology & Behavior on Distractions, Distractions: Does Instant Messaging Affect College Students’ Performance on a Concurrent Reading Comprehension Task?

The authors found that IM while reading slows you down but does not interfere with reading comprehension unless you really do a lot of it.

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The modern designer has challenges at four levels. She must design things that work (engineering design), are easy to use (usability), delight our senses (sensorial design) and move our hearts and minds (cognitive design).   For example, you can design a:   

1.      Multi-function office chair

2.      Multi-function office chair that I can adjust with ease

3.      Multi-function office chair that I can adjust with ease and is beautiful to look at

4.      Multi-function office chair that I can adjust with ease, is beautiful to look at and makes me feel like a “master of the universe” and stimulates bold thinking.

All four of these levels overlap, especially when it comes to

sensorial and cognitive design. After all, perception is a

cognitive process.  A solid scientific understanding of

perception is essential for excellence in cognitive design.

The book I have recommended in the past to students that are very serious about gaining a scientific level (physics, chemistry, physiology, biology) on this topic, Foundations of Sensation and Perception, has just come out with in a second addition.   There is a free sample chapter on the website for the book that clearly illustrates how the author treats the subject.

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Check out the story in Wired.  

IDEO has launched an interesting blog that reveals some of the details of a design deep dive. 

“Welcome to the blog for an open project between Bug Labs and IDEO! Whether you’re a prototyping professional or amateur gadget enthusiast you’ve probably heard about the BUG hardware platform. We’re thrilled to be working with Bug Labs to make this great product even better. We are also prototyping a new, open way of working that we hope will combine the expertise of Bug Labs engineers, IDEO designers, and the BUG community throughout the design process.” 

To learn from it I suggest you learn a bit about BUGbase and then go to the first blog post and work your way forward.

In my course on Designing for How Minds Work at Northwestern University, I draw on the concepts, tools and interventions of cognitive therapy. The New Handbook of Cognitive Therapy Techniques is a great introduction and a required course reading.  Who better to help us understand how minds work than a therapist focused on how thoughts and emotions cause behavior?

For example, it turns out that the Antecedent, Belief, Consequent or ABC therapy technique is a powerful tool for mapping interactions, rapid prototyping and discovering unmet cognitive needs especially in service design.  Check out these slides for more more detail. 

Cognitive behavioral interventions (CBI) are especially useful for designers interested in creating features and functions that assist users in thinking differently, changing behaviors, managing emotions and the like. Importantly, there is literature on the effectiveness of the various techniques. For example, a recent study on the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral training  in the journal Personality and Individual Differences demonstrated that CBI is able to show:

“Significant improvements resulted in employees’ attributional style, job satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological well-being and general productivity.” 

The intervention was a cognitive-behavioral training program delivered to financial services sales agents.

The bottom line for designers:  Want to create artifacts that move the hearts and minds of your customers?  Best study the tools, ways and insights of cognitive behavioral therapists!

Had an interesting conversation with a healthcare executive recently.  She is working hard to build a new hospital.  The design team is arguing about seemingly small things like how to decorate the lobby. Should we make it look like a library, should there be a piano, large fish tank, silent waterfall and so on? All of this cost money and in a time of great concern over the cost of healthcare does it even make sense?

This is a good question to ask especially as health systems around the US are trying to build facilities that are more like five-star hotels or luxury malls than traditional hospitals.  

We did some design thinking to explore the issue. Specifically I asked questions about the four levels of functional impact every artifact, including a new hospital, has including:

1.      Utility or core functionality (engineering)

2.      Usability or how easy the artifact is to use (human factors)

3.      Look-and-feel or how the artifact impacts the five senses (sensorial design)

4.      Think-and-Feel or how the artifact impacts the thoughts, emotions and frame of mind (cognitive design).

A  shortened and somewhat fictionalized synopsis of the conversation follows. It holds a couple of lessons for any complex design project.

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Bruce Nussbaum has started an excellent thread on the importance of design thinking and how we may need to apply it to generate transformations rather than just innovations. Transformational impacts rather than incremental innovations are required in order to meet the dire challenges we face in healthcare, management, education,  global warming and other areas running on broken models.  And design thinking is the key!

For me, designs that look beyond usability and sensory delight to probe deeper into how our minds naturally work to create a specific “think-and-feel” (cognition) offer one approach to transformation.  

More boldly, designs that are optimized for how minds (people and machines) really work offer the best hope for transforming healthcare, management, education and our approach to global warming.  

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The New Scientist has a thought-provoking article on the emerging field they call Magicology that focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of magic.  Over the last five years, magicians and scientists have found out they have something in common namely, an interest in understanding how the mind works. Cognitive designers also share that interest but seek not to trick audiences or develop scientific theories but instead create artifacts that are optimized for how minds really work. 

The article discusses three strategies – manipulating attention, forcing and false memories that magicians exploit to make it appear as though they can violate the laws of nature.  Seven specific techniques are also discussed that could be adapted by designers.   These include:

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 Doing cognitive design is hard.  We don’t have many guidelines for practitioners that say “add these features and functions to your design to create this-or-that mental state or support this-at-that cognitive process”.  On the flip side, sometimes we have too many guidelines but they are grounded in strongly-held opinions rather than peer-reviewed cognitive science.

Cognitive designers must often go to the science of how minds work and translate it into a hypothesis or candidate guideline that can be tested and refined through the design project.  This makes almost every cognitive design project a research effort. Exciting but very hard to justify in a commercial design environment.  Cognitive design is clearly still an emerging field rather than an established design discipline.

 To be most effective the practicing cognitive designer must be able to get to quality science about how the mind works that is “design ready” or easy to translate into a specific and testable feature-function level guideline.

One world class source that is free on the web is the OpenCourseWare available from MIT. Of particular use are the courses in the Media Arts and Sciences section and of course the Brain and Cognitive Science section.  You get the syllabus, course notes and lectures, readings – many online, completed projects from other students and even exams but no access to MIT professors.

These courses represent the cutting edge of what world class cognitive scientists are sharing with their students.  A very good stream for cognitive designers to drink from.