Cognitive Design

While we constantly call for new ideas and creative approaches to persistent problems we dislike the uncertainty. We dislike the uncertainty we feel about our ability to come up with a creative idea (especially in a group) and we dislike the uncertainty associated with trying to act on a creative idea. According to new research reported in Association for Psychological Science, this uncertainty may be so strong it signals a hidden bias against creativity.

I have seen this bias in action for many years.  From a cognitive design standpoint, we need to ask if there are better ways for organizations to manage the psychology of creativity as it relates to uncertainty.  How can we maintain expansive thinking and action even in the face of risk?   Trying to artificially reduce uncertainty by saying such things as “we tolerate failure” does not appear to address the need.

Forbes ran an interesting article about AT&T’s plans to sell a line of clothing that will automatically record heart rate, body temperature and other vitals and beam the data to a secure web site.   AT&T like other wireless providers wants to leverage their technology and networks to get into personal informatics and e-health.

Rather than a wristband or body wrap, the AT&T clothes will include a sensor pack you can remove before washing.  This could have mass market appeal and take personal informatics to a much broader audience. The clothes are not on the market yet. There is plenty of time  to start cooking up cognitive designs for how to put them to use.

The work  is being done by AT&T’s emerging device division.  You can partner with them to add wireless capabilities to your products and services.

Interested to hear from readers about how bio-tracking clothes can be used to improve health, play games, share with friends or otherwise create value.

During any 90 minute cycle there are definite windows of time  when it is best to wake up.   These correspond to times when we are easy to arouse and will awaken refreshed rather than feeling groggy.   Fortunately, we can measure these optimal times to awake using an EEG.  A team of researcher have used this fact to create an alarm clock that uses sleep analysis:

“Using known scientific knowledge of the human sleep cycle and its characteristic brain activity, the clock sounds its alarm when the user is in an easily aroused state within a time period set by the user.”

Awakening more refreshed can have a big impact on your day. The clock is still in the experimental stage making use of an awkward EEG hookup.  A more commercial version would use a simple headband with wireless sensors and collect additional information about your sleep state.

A brain-optimized alarm clock would be high on any cognitive designer’s holiday gift list.

Anxiety during math exams hurts performance. Doing poorly on math exams can increase anxiety. This vicious cycle can push people away from math. How can we use a little cognitive design to change that?

A new study by psychologists at the University Chicago suggests an answer. They did brain scans of highly anxious math students and found that simple warm up tasks (doing easy math problems)  distracts the brain regions generating the anxiety and improved performance on an exam. The key is to interrupt the anticipation phase when negative emotions generate a cascade that closes down  our brain’s ability to do math.

Adding anxiety reducing warm-up activities is something we can easily do to improve not only test performance but learning and teaching.

In many ways traditional approaches to teaching math, especially to younger students, push against how our minds naturally work. Symbols, equations and abstract concepts do not naturally resonate with brains that run on sensory data, metaphors, emotion and action.

So what would happen if we tried to apply the latest thinking in neuroscience to the teaching of math?

One answer is to initially learn math using a spatial-temporal (ST) approach rather than a linguistic-abstract approach. Learning math visually resonates much better with how our minds work.  The MIND research institute has implement an ST approach to learning math on a computer-based platform that includes a bit of game dynamics.  To see it in action watch Ji Ji, the penguin, teach you how to solve linear equations using a visual method.

The fact that the student can work on their own, have a little fun, quickly try alternative solutions and not even know they are working on math further strengthens the cognitive design.

Happily, schools that use the program show significant improvement on standardized tests.  Innovating by emphasizing cognitive fit does produce results.

In the last presidential election we saw how important the use of social media was.  In the 2012 election we may see how the web can be used to level the playing field for third party candidates.  Checkout Americans Elect 2012. They literally reinvent the nomination process by allowing you to prioritize the issues, nominate someone, become a candidate and select the candidate that best meets your interests.  Here is the most impressive part:

The winner of this on-line nomination process will be on the ballot in all 50 states. 

And yes there will be a convention:

“In our secure online convention next June, American voters will choose our first directly-nominated presidential ticket. Your voice, your choice.”

This could transform our political decision-making process, opening the way to less  partisan thinking and more solutions-based thinking.

Outstanding cognitive design. They are meeting deeply felt and long neglected psychological (cognitive, emotional, motivational and volitional) needs many American’s have concerning the political decision making process.

The process and site is still under development but they are real. They have 1.7M signatures towards getting on the state ballots and some 5.5M answers to questions about national priorities.

Smart phones are a new frontier for cognitive designers. Jobs, consulting and even R&D opportunities abound.  Figuring out how our minds work on mobile platforms and remaking services to better meet our cognitive, emotional, motivational and volitional needs is big business.  Using smart phones to learn, make more effective decisions, change unwanted behaviors and increase situational awareness are obvious opportunities for cognitive designers.   Less obvious are the challenges of figuring out psychological optimal ways of presenting ads (yikes!) and leveraging the unique properties of smart phones to act as sources of on-demand mental energy for managing stress (yea!).

I am always on the lookout for good research into the actual use and cognitive science of cell phones.  Take for example, a recent article in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing entitled, Habits Make Smart Phone Use More Pervasive.  The authors use designed-focused ethnographic techniques to peer into the lives of smart phone users.   They found people spending 2-2.5 hours on their phones each day in 90 second bursts (median time) exercising a checking habit and seeking information rewards.

“Checking habit: brief, repetitive inspection of dynamic content quickly accessible on the device”

Some interactions were even shorter (few seconds) as people turned on their phone’s screen to check notification icons or the time.

Just as we naturally scan the physical environment seeking interesting things to see, hear, touch, smell or taste we are now regularly checking cyberspace for interesting things to see and hear. A new innovation frontier for cognitive design is open wide!

Changing behaviors takes considerable time and mental energy. Often we need help. Someone to guide or advise us through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience in a way that makes them stick. A guide provides motivation, helps us break through rationalizations and faulty beliefs, suggests new techniques when the ones we are using fail and provides perspective on progress and goals.  Guides take many forms – a formal sponsor in a change program, friend, family member, therapist, community pharmacist, teacher, mentor at work, life coach or just someone else who has made it through the change and wants to help.

Without guides most of us (approximately 70%) will not be able to achieve lasting changes to our health, financial, relationship and other essential personal an professional behaviors. Technology can be a guide too.  Indeed, technology is amplifying and redesigning how human behavior-change guides do their work. Smart phones, social networks, special purpose web sites, virtual humans, video games and simulations all promise to revolutionize how we change behaviors.

Technology-enabled behavior change has grown explosively over the last 10 years and is emerging as a new academic discipline. Conferences, journals, rigorously research books and interdisciplinary centers are sprouting up.  For example,  I received two emails just today on the topic. One announced a new book from Psychology Press, The Social Cure, that argues ” A growing body of evidence shows that social networks and identities have a profound impact on mental and physical health.”   The second announced a new interdisciplinary research and education center being launched at Northwestern University dedicated to becoming a world leader in behavioral intervention technology (BIT).

They are looking at how a range of technologies from the web to the smart phone and virtual humans can enable preventative medicine, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychotherapy and other science-based behavior change interventions.  Of special interest is purple, a platform the Center developed for building BIT applications. Purple is a tool for building new BIT applications faster, better and cheaper.

Clearly technology-enabled behavior change is hot.

To be successful such technology efforts will have to maintain a laser-like focus on what they are trying to enable, namely the social cognitive psychology of how humans make lasting behavior change.

Now, how does that work again?

Every successful innovator or leader I have met is always trying very hard to figure something out. Asking questions, learning, testing concepts and talking with others about new ideas.  That simple observation is at the heart of two new books on innovation.

The Innovator’s DNA focuses on five skills of disruptive innovators including asking questions, observing, networking with people for new ideas, making associations and experimenting to uncover insights. Of course you need a the traditional willingness to take risks and challenge the status quo. Likewise in yet to be released book, The Lean Startup,  sees successful entrepreneurs are those that systematically experiment with all aspects of their vision – product, distribution, business model – and quickly figure out how to build a sustainable business.

Fuzzy notions of creativity are replaced by crisper notions and even disciplined methods (e.g. validated learning) for figuring things out. Readers of the cognitive design blog will see at the core of both books the psychology of  the experiential learning loop where we take action, reflect on the action, conceptualize or build up an understanding of what might be going on, take another action to test that understanding and repeat until you give up or have figured things out.

Moving through the loop, fast, cheap and deep requires considerable skill and motivation but nothing mysterious.   Much like a diet or other forms of self improvement, innovation does not involve rocket science just the hard but enjoyable work of figuring things out.

What are you trying hard to figure out? How fast, cheap and deep are you moving through the experiential learning loop to do it?

Mathematics education needs more cognitive design.  A lot more and fast.

Most math is presented in a way that grates against how our minds really work and leads to student frustration and failure.  The clearest signal of this is that students often ask “how does this relate to the real world” and claim they just don’t get math or even hate it.  The world runs on math and hate is a strong emotion.

And it is not just math.  STEM or science, technology, engineering and math education is under intense scrutiny in the US right now.   STEM education is linked to US competitiveness and appears to be failing by many measures especially in K-12. Without a large and creative STEM knowledge base it will be very hard to be a major economic player in the 21st century.

So I am also on the look out for new points of view on STEM education, especially those that are optimized for how our minds really work.   For example,  the New York Times has a recent OP-ED piece,  How to Fix our Math Education, that presents such a view.  They point out that our current approach to teaching math is very theoretical and that we should consider the development of quantitative literacy or reasoning.   To quote:

“Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.”

Our minds do naturally reason quantitatively.  Leveraging that to teach the abstract principles and reasoning of math is good cognitive design.   There is great power in mathematical understanding and quantitative reasoning. What we need to do is design experiences where students feel that power in their gut.