Cognitive Design

In cognitive design we seek to understand deeply felt but unmet psychological needs and then create or remake artifacts to meet them.  The TQM journal has an interesting article on Affective Design of Waiting Areas in Primary Healthcare that presents a good example. The researchers used the Kansei engineering method to uncover the psychology need to “feel calm” and…

“The core design attributes contributing to this feeling are privacy, colours, child play-areas and green plants. Good design of lighting, seating arrangements and a low sound level are also important design attributes to give a more complete design solution.”

A useful finding for cognitive designers working on servicecapes that call for calm.

Achieving lasting behavior change when it comes to the way we eat, get physical activity, use drugs (prescribed or not), manage stress and deal with the chronic health conditions we may have is a major social and economic priority in the US.   As traditional approaches have failed, innovative behavior change services are emerging. Many are based on good cognitive design.

Take for example, Keas. They have built an employee wellness program around a social game that uses direct incentives, positive reinforcement, team competition and friendly but real peer pressure to drive health behavior change.  Importantly, they avoid lecturing and negative reinforcement. Check out this short two minute video on the psychology behind Keas.

Clearly it is designed for how our hearts-and-minds really work. No super science and no special diet.  Keas demonstrates that we already have the understanding we need to make behavior change.  What is lacking are the designs and innovations that translate that understanding into outcome producing practices, products and services.

Interested to hear from readers about other service innovations that reflect good cognitive design and deliver behavior changes. One reader suggested this post on 11 wellness platforms from the Mobile Health News Blog.

Adding a specific think-and-feel experience to a product for customers or an internal service for employees is one way to use cognitive design to differentiate an offering.  You provide the same core functionality as a competitor but you differentiate by delivering it in a way that meets a deeply felt psychological need. For example, a product or service that makes a donation to a worthy cause when purchased. That delivers a small but potent “feel-good” by doing good experience for the shopper.

According to The Integer Group, how you make the donation can have a big impact. In a recent research study they found:

“When choosing between two brands that benefit a cause, 43 percent of women say they choose the brand that donates with every purchase over a brand that donates a set amount.” 

They also found that causes with an emotional message devoted to disease prevention generated a more intense feel-good for women.

These psychographic findings have clear implications for cognitive designers working in product and service innovation.

Deadline for submission is August 3, 2011 by 5pm EDT 

STEM or science, technology, engineering and mathematics is a big driver of innovation and economic progress in the US. Providing high-quality public education in STEM is therefore vital to growing the US economy.  Our global rankings in STEM education have been slipping and elective enrollment in STEM areas has been falling.  The old model of STEM fails to meet the psychological needs and demands of 21st century students in the US.

Teaching and learning STEM involves all dimensions of our minds – intellectual, emotional, motivational and volitional and therefore retooling it is a major cognitive design challenge.   Making real progress in public STEM education requires designing new learning processes optimized for how the minds of US students really work.

One approach to improve STEM education is to more deeply involve professionals, companies and other community resources with STEM expertise in the learning process. To help bring focus to this approach, Changemakers working with the Carnegie Corporation and The Opportunity Equation has launched a STEM competition around the theme:

“Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science + Technology + Engineering + Math Education, an online collaborative competition, will spur creative ways for companies, universities, and other organizations with expertise in the STEM fields to partner with the public schools that need their talent. We are looking for models that bring STEM expertise into public schools, thereby using resources from the private and not-for-profit sectors in new ways to further student learning designed with a “long term, part time” approach (see visual below)”

As of this post there are a 101 entries. The deadline for submission is 5pm ET on August 3rd.  While there are several cash prizes to win, the real value might be in the community-based feedback you received on your proposal.

Technology review has a provocative article on Lovotics (Love + Robotics) that introduces the “new science of engineering human, robot love.”  Looking beyond industrial, service and social robots, we have lovotics or devices designed for the emotion of love.   One is pictured below.

Check out this two minute video on its design and operation. Even if this may be a bit extreme, there is little doubt that robotic devices on many types are evoking emotional states in people. Human-robot relationship management is on the rise.

Interested to hear from readers on the cognitive design of human-robot emotional relationships.

The mismanagement of cognitive dissonance is a root cause of many of our toughest problems in the workplace.  It has to do with what we think and do when confronted with two or more conflicting beliefs.  For example, we all make mistakes and therefore have to confront the conflict – I am a good person but I did a bad thing. And we get plenty of mixed signals – I should take more creative risks but I don’t think I will succeed.

Cognitive dissonance is especially powerful (makes us feel very uncomfortable) when the conflicting beliefs are about ourselves. To relieve the discomfort we may self justify or rationalize, for example making excuses for our bad behavior rather than owning up. This is a slippery slope and can lead to good people falling into unethical or unwanted behavior patterns.

As cognitive designer we need to be able to spot when cognitive dissonance sits at the root of organizational problems and then find productive ways to vent the discomfort associated with it.

The confessional is an excellent example of how religion has institutionalized one way of managing cognitive dissonance that appears to block the cycle of self justification.

The general idea is to promote takening healthy ownership of mistakes, giving people a constructive way to discharge the discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance and advocating apologizing as a virtue not a weakness. Figuring out how to do this is essential for a wide-range of workplace programs as diverse as ethics and innovation.

For background and practical insights into the nature of cognitive dissonance and self justification check out, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).  Suggest you start here for a good 10 minute overview but if you are serious about cognitive design study the book.

Interested to hear from readers that have factored cognitive dissonance into the design of workplace improvements and employee development.

The number one entrepreneurial opportunity in advanced countries around the world today is developing new services and experiences that produce lasting behavior change!

With rampant obesity, chronic illness, drug use, over spending, pollution, ethical lapses, wasteful energy use, poor educational outcomes and so on there is an unparalleled demand for solutions that produce positive and lasting behavior change for individuals and groups. The economic and social value associated with behavior change innovations easily swamps all the technology, life science and other sector innovation opportunities combined.

Behavior change innovations won’t come from computer programming, electrical engineering, physics or other atom-based sciences that have so successfully driven garage-based entrepreneurs. If they come from science it will be the neuron-based sciences such as cognitive psychology, behavioral science and neuroscience.  But we likely don’t need any new science, or perhaps no science at all, to develop the innovations necessary to make the lasting behavior changes we want.

Many ordinary people have successfully regained their behavioral balance – lost weight, learned to control their spending, take medications as prescribed, save energy and so on.  Not only can they positively influence behavior change in themselves but they guide similar changes in their family, friends, team members and sometimes communities.  They do this without making any grand scale changes to the healthcare system, environmental law or other institutions.  They work hard, learn from trial-and-error experience and persist until they find practical solutions for stopping, changing and avoiding behaviors.  Sometimes these solutions scale into new businesses that help millions of other people. The Weight Watchers and 12-step programs started this way.

Behavior change innovations are not born of technical or scientific work and built into businesses by entrepreneurs working in a garage. They come from folk psychological insights and learning from experience and are built into business by entrepreneurs working in their living room.

It is likely that ordinary people have already cracked the code on many of our toughest behavior change challenges.  They have reaped the rewards that millions of others need. It is tempting to think about doing  a study to figure out what makes them successful and design programs to replicate their practices. This has been done many times with limited success. It fails to work (as many best practice transfer programs do) because it leaves behind the mental models, tacit knowledge and hard won passion and pride that is so essential to producing the change. What we need to do is enable such folks to become living room entrepreneurs so that they can infect others with the energy and tacit learning that holds the key to lasting behavior change.

How can we foster living-room entrepreneurship to drive the behavior change service innovation we so urgently need?

Organizations and individuals around the world are interested in increasing their capacity to innovate. New methods for innovation (or innovating innovation) abound and include for example, translational science, open innovation marketplaces, design thinking applied to business, citizen science and new financing mechanisms such as crowdfunding.

Our interest in innovation is long standing. One can see that by looking at the impressive history of best selling books with innovation in the title and by doing a Google trend search on the word innovation.  Innovating is very much a cognitive design challenge. Our ability to do it turns on understanding and supporting the skills, mental models and deeply felt psychological needs of innovators. Interestingly, most studies of innovation, especially at the organizational level, fail to take that into account. So I am always our the look out for well researched exceptions.

Take for example, the outstanding book, The Innovator’s Way (MIT Press 2010).  The authors define innovation as the adoption of a value-creating practice by a community. They review and debunk many current models and propose an approach based on eight essential practices.  They derived these practices from a study of cases of innovation in a wide variety of contexts including technology, product, organizational and social. It is easy and instructive to compare your own personal approach to the eight practices.

What is best from a cognitive design standpoint is that they emphasize individual skills, attentional factors, and the key conversations and decisions that drive innovation in the trenches.

This offers a treasure trove of insights for the cognitive designer looking for ways to support and accelerate innovation.

There is a lot of attention on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM education in the US these days. Declining US student enrollment and performance in STEM disciplines spells a decline in the nation’s technology-oriented innovation capability.

Reversing these trends requires a heavy dose of cognitive engineering and design.

We need to modernize the infrastructure, pedagogy and practices used to teach and learn STEM. So I am also on the look out for new models based on insights into the cognition of learning STEM.

For example, Seed Magazine has a recent article highlighting Globaloria’s STEM Games competition. The idea is that students learn STEM by developing their own video games.   This is an example of a broader trend of infusing art and design into STEM education to make it more exciting and naturally enhance innovation skills.  Here is a snapshot:

“Participants have research various STEM topics, blog about what they’ve learned, work in teams, produce video presentations, draw paper prototypes, design sample screens and graphics for game demos, and program webgames that teach others about science issues or mathematics concepts.  This year, 411 students signed up for the competition, and the games they created illustrate the power of CS-STEAM learning. These students never programmed before. But this method of combining art and design with science and computer science generated impressive results.”

Learning by constructing a video game and competing in a contest, that is outstanding cognitive design.  Note too that the learning goes far beyond domain knowledge in a technical field to include teamwork (virtual and on site), writing, drawing, project management and social media skills. All good stuff for success in the 21st century.

We behave differently when being watched.  When watched most people will more consciously follow expected social norms.  This ranges from not littering and begin polite to working harder on a production line.  Now, according to research reported in the Scientific Amercian, this effect is induced when we are watched by eyes staring at us from a poster.  

“A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.” 

They put the posters in a cafeteria and found that they caused twice as many people to bus thier own trays and otherwise clean up after themselves.  This is a statistically significant effect with strong implications for designers.

Source of Image: Sky News