Cognitive Design

The scientific study of happiness has had a big uptick over the last 3-5 years. This has been good for cognitive designers interested in trying to create a happy “think-and-feel” in their artifacts.  Tough going to be sure so I am always on the look out  for science-based work with design hints.

Check on the post on EurekAlert! covering happiness research in the US. It is statistically robust and it maps happiness to US states.  Digging into the causes and correlations could reveal many hints for designers looking to create artifacts that make us happy.  Rankings are shown below.

 Andrew Oswald/ Wu ranking of happiness levels by US State

1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine
11. Alaska
12. North Carolina
13. Wyoming
14. Idaho
15. South Dakota
16. Texas
17. Arkansas
18. Vermont
19. Georgia
20. Oklahoma
21. Colorado
22. Delaware
23. Utah
24. New Mexico
25. North Dakota
26. Minnesota
27. New Hampshire
28. Virginia
29. Wisconsin
30. Oregon
31. Iowa
32. Kansas
33. Nebraska
34. West Virginia
35. Kentucky
36. Washington
37. District of Columbia
38. Missouri
39. Nevada
40. Maryland
41. Pennsylvania
42. Rhode Island
43. Massachusetts
44. Ohio
45. Illinois
46. California
47. Indiana
48. Michigan
49. New Jersey
50. Connecticut
51. New York

 Where do you live? Are you that happy?

Artifacts that work by creating and sustaining hope in people represent some of the most powerful cognitive designs on the planet. Consider for example the holy cross and the lottery ticket.  Examples of hope-generating designs span a tremendous range precisely because there are many flavors of hope. To see this check out the post on PsyCentral on The 7 Kinds of Hope. The kinds include inborn, chosen, borrowed, bargainer’s, unrealistic, false and mature.  

First step in the cognitive design of a hope-generating artifact? Pick your flavor.

If you are faced with designing products, services, communications, events or other artifacts for those that are grieving it especially important to take a cognitive approach.  Your goal may be to help them make sense of a loss, find hope in the future or otherwise cope but the key is to understand the cognition of the grieving process.  Susan Berger has a new book that goes beyond the typical treatment (3-stages of grieving) and introduces types of grievers including the Nomad, Memorialist, Normalizer, Activist and the Seeker.  Each type has a specific set of cognitive needs or psychographic profile.  You can get more information from an interview she did for PsyCentral or check out her book, The Five Ways We Grieve.

I have yet to apply her theory to a design problem but will have a chance to shortly. I will blog what I find.

Philip’s and ABM AMRO collaborated to create a unique way of displaying emotions in your home. The Rationalizer consists of a bracelet (EmoBracelet) that measures galvanic skin response (arousal level) and lights up a display on the bracelet as well as one on the surface of a bowl called the EmoBowl.

The number and color of graphical elements changes as your arousal levels increases or decreases. The initial application was designed for making online investment decisions at home. From a cognitive design standpoint, many other uses for this emotion sensing technology are possible.

The EmoBracelet+Bowl are meant as prototype concepts (versus commercial products) so the companies can learn more about the domain of sensing emotions.

Check out a high resolution imagine of the bowl and bracelet here.

The journal article, Age of Reason, is full of interesting data on age-related cognitive decline and performance. The primary focus is on personal financial decision making.  The authors found a “U shaped” relationship between age and the quality of financial decision making involving the cost of credit (e.g. home equity loans and credit cards). Peak performance happens around age 53.

Of special interest to cognitive designers is the section that looks at how various policies can help mitigate sub-optimal decision making.  The article is worth a look by anyone designing to support consumer cognition in the use, purchase or understanding of financial products.

Why do we make the choices we do?  Part of the answer has to do with dopamine or so argues an online article published in Trends in Cell Biology and reported on here.

“We found dopamine seems to have a role in determining the expected pleasure we will receive if we make a certain choice. We then use that information to make our choices.”

Dopamine is an import source of “mental energy” and as such this article supports the idea that we tend to act in ways to maximize our mental energy.

According to the article this effect lasted at least 24 hours in 80% of the subjects.  A powerful effect indeed which explains why it can sway even the most important life decisions.

Habits spreading like infectious diseases through social networks appear to be all the rage. Catching your eating, smoking, happiness, mood and hygiene habits from those you hang out with is under the microscope. For a quick overview and some interesting reader comments (that challenge) check out Eva Judson’s post in the New York Times on Social Medicine. Please note that is social (as via social networks) not socialized (as via single payer government system) medicine.

I have read the literature around this topic for some time in the hopes of gaining new scientific insight into how we form (or fail to form) habits.  The key question from a cognitive design standpoint is what is the social cognitive psychology behind behavioral contagions?  The answer unfortunately, is not clear.

 ”But then, how does something like obesity get “caught”? That’s not clear. One idea is that people judge their own weight by that of their friends — you think of yourself as thin if you are thinner than the people you know — and eat accordingly. Another is that friends mirror one another’s eating habits. Many studies have found that people tend to eat less when they are eating with someone who is not eating much. Also, people tend to eat more when they eat with friends rather than with strangers. Perhaps, too, a habit of eating, say, dessert when you are with your friends makes you more likely to eat it when you are alone. ”

Perhaps there is a mystery here because we are not looking at the entire picture.

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One way to probe the mind of your customer and surface unmet cognitive needs is through instruments that assess styles. These take the form of questionnaires that can be used to categorize and interpret how people perceive, think, learn, make decisions, manage emotions and otherwise process information. For cognitive designers this is one way to build a psychographic profile.

Just found an excellence source on the web - the decision making individual differences inventory. They describe and provide materials for 15 major cognitive and decision style assessments.

A mad dog gamer is my affectionate description of someone who plays between 35 and 45 hours of action video games a week. There is some interest in understanding the cognitive needs of this group and more to the point, how that much gaming impacts their cognition. Found a blog post that nicely summarizes some of the key preliminary findings so far.

Mad dog gamers have:

1. Increased visual processing ability (reaction to rapidly appearing events or objects in the visual field)

2. Normal reactive attention control (engaging attention just in time as event occur).

3. Decreased proactive attention control (managing your own attention to stay engaged in activities or events that are not automatically engaging).

And of course there are the recent studies that suggest a positive correlation between being addicted to game play and ADD but the causation is far from clear.

Finding 3 is very interesting. Some worry that it will make these folks less effective in the classroom and the workplace. On the other hand, their demand for “low mental  load” experiences and products might force us to make a bigger investment in cognitive design.

Great Leadership

Or so argue the authors of the book Resonant Leadership.  The book has been out for a while but I am blogging on it to show that the levels of cognitive fit - agitate, tolerate, resonate, accelerate and integrate hold between people not just people and artifacts. Effective relationships have a higher level of cognitive fit. I get more mental energy out of them (my heart and mind is moved) than I have to put into them.  Said more directly:

Great leaders are masters at meeting the cognitive needs of the people they influence.

In a more recent book on the same topic, Becoming a Resonant Leader, the author lays bare the cognitive effects at work:

“Through resonance, leaders become attuned to the needs and dreams of people they lead. They create conditions where people can excel. They sustain their effectiveness through renewal.” 

As resonance is only the third level of cognitive fit, I invite you to wonder what types of leaders provide a level four (accelerate) or even a level five (integrate) of cognitive fit.