Cognitive Design

I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop at the Design Research Conference 2009.  I focused on designing for how minds really work. My pitch:

A dash of cognitive science + design thinking = innovation breakthrough!

The workshop started with a personal example on how to make it rain.   A large insurance company had a few sales people that could really out produce (sell) the others. These were the rainmakers. The management of the insurance company wanted to create a “program” that could transfer the secret sauce of rainmaking to other sales professionals to increase their production.

A classic problem and many solutions were attempted – training, best practice databases, coaching, new incentive systems and so on.  Not much happened.

Finally, we tried a dash of cognitive science in the form of talk-aloud protocol studies. These were awkward at first but did uncover the secret sauce.

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I was recently asked to provide input on a new procedure and communication materials a hospital had designed to support family members when they were faced with a decision to discontinue life support for a loved one.  Clearly a serious issue and one that warrants a full-on cognitive design.  I was glad they asked.

One of the things we did was look to the literature and  found an excellent study, Tragic Decisions: Autonomy and Emotional Responses in Medical Decisions.  Click here for a full version (no diagrams) pre-publication copy. The researchers uncover the cognitive (intellectual, affective, volitional and motivational) needs of the decisions makers.  What they found was:

1. Guilt and self-blame, or the anticipation of it, generates more negative feelings than having the decision made by someone else.

2. High degree of ambivalence about decision autonomy or reports that family members were glad to have had the opportunity to participate in the decision but wish they had not had not.

3. Strong preference for information about the situation.  Even though there was ambivalence about making the decision there was none concerning the information needed to make it.

 As they point out:

“Consequently, participants disliked making decisions but also resented relinquishing their option to choose.” 

A difficult cognitive need to design for.  I am open to any ideas readers may have.

Check out David Rock’s new book,  Your Brain at Work. The format is perfect for cognitive designers looking for potential insights into the needs of psychologically overtaxed professionals. It is in story form and infused with basic brain and cognitive science.  The book offers an array of tactics for copying with uncertainty, conflicting priorities, difficult relationships, information overload, unfairness, ego, the constant flow of emergencies and so on. The tactics are interesting but the real value for designers is the psychographic read-out of some deep, unmet cognitive (intellectual, emotional, motivation, volitional) needs in the workforce. This is a potential goldmine (or at least a good starting hypothesis) for those interested in remaking organization to fit how our minds work.

I will blog later offering a taxonomy of cognitive needs I extract from the book. I also plan to understand his research methods and do a literature search to seek supporting or countering views.

Sentiment analysis, or doing web mining to determine how a given population feels, may morph into an important tool for designers. For the latest check out  the post, Charting Emotions, on the Wikinomics blog. It covers some of the techniques we have discussed before but there is some new stuff.  For example, We Feel Fine, has built of a big database on “human feelings” from content in the blog sphere.

Happily they offer an API for any ambitious designer that may want to adapt this technology to gain insight into how groups feel.

but don’t know how to ask for….

Today’s workplace is dominated by knowledge work, relationship management, innovation and constant change.  To successfully lead you must understand, leverage and influence the cognitive needs of employees.   Designing the workplace based on how employees think-and-feel makes for happy, productive and loyal employees.

Historically managers, product developers and organizational designers have viewed “thoughts and feelings” as far too subjective and variable to design and run a business on.   Fortunately, that is changing.  We are beginning to uncover deep and stable patterns in the mind – cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors,  learning mechanisms, emotional processes and psychological needs – that provide requirements. When these requirements are met through good management or design they release blockbuster products and high performance workplaces.

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I get notes and calls regularly asking about doing cognitive design for older adults. So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into how the elderly think and feel. Found a very interesting study on Why So Many Seniors Get Swindled that claims:

“… studies using brain imaging suggest that a subset of older adults who have no diagnosable neurological or psychiatric disease may experience disproportionate, age-related decline in specific neural systems crucial for complex decision-making. New functional neuroimaging findings, along with results from behavioral, psychophysiological and structural imaging studies of the brain, indicate that these seniors may be losing their ability to make complex choices that require effective emotional processing to analyze short-term and long-term considerations. Older adults in this category fall prey to the promise of an immediate reward or a simple solution to a complicated problem. They fail to detect the longer-range adverse consequences of their actions. Finally, they may assume long-term benefits in situations where there are none. We see these characteristics as direct consequences of neurological dysfunction in systems that are critical for bringing emotion-related signals to bear on decision-making. ”

In short, changes in their frontal lobe create a new type of age-related cognitive bias towards selecting simple solutions and immediate rewards reguardless of  longer-term consequences.   

This goes much deeper than the typical assumption that the elderly are more susceptible to fraud because of loneliness, guilt or some other cognitive need, or worse, that they have some form of dementia.

We move around a lot and so supporting the cognition of how we navigate in a new environment for work and fun has become a big business. GPS navigation systems, location-based games and virtual roadside tours are just a few examples.

Opportunities for clever cognitive designers are endless. For a good review of the cognitive science behind getting lost and finding our way, check out the brief article, Why Humans Can’t Navigate Out of a Paper Bag in the New Scientist.   Some of the findings include that we have:

* A very weak ability (especially compared to animals) to judge distances and direction accurately.

* A strong capacity to imagine that we are someplace else.

* Mental maps built up to helps navigate an environment that can be inflexible and thwart our attempts to reorient.

* Fail to be mindful and ignore unique features in the landscape or other queues.

The article also addresses the emotional and visceral dimension of losing our way. Fear of getting lost is like the fear of public speaking.  It can be so intense that some individuals refuse to leave their homes or familiar surroundings.

This is an important finding for cognitive designers as there are many service experiences that involve a little navigation and therefore could easily trip over the fear of getting lost.

Yes, at least for some people in some circumstances according to an interesting new fMRI study covered in Seed Magazine as Truth or Lies:

“What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people. Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.”

For cognitive designers working on ethics/moral related challenges this has some important implications.

First, develop a psychographic profile for picking out those folks in your target group that require behavior change, short of doing an fMRI study. Bombarding folks that have already learned the “moral behaviors” with irrelevant attempts to change will be disorienting and counter productive.  Second, design policies, rewards, processes and other environmental factors to make the honest choice require far less mental energy (critical reasoning and self control) than the dishonest choice.

Marketers group people into target markets using demographic profiles. Cognitive designers do the same thing only using psychographic profiles or sets of common cognitive characteristics, needs and biases.  I am often ask if there are generic psychographic profiles along with instruments and surveys for using them. I believe the answer is no, but I do find the following styles of value:

* Kolb’s four experiential learning styles

* Hermann’s four whole-brain thinking styles

* Gregorc’s four mind styles

Each style is rooted in theory, has good empirical support and includes easy to use instruments for segmenting. Most importantly, the resulting profiles have strong implications for the types of features and functions you need to include in your design.

One goal of cognitive design is to create products, services and other artifacts that put people in a particular mental state or set of mental states (experiences).   But how do we determine when someone or a group is in a particular mental state to know if our design is working?

One answer is to analyze what they write.  Check out this intriguing web science article by Dodds and Danforth on Measuring the Happiness of Large Scale Written Expression. As they point out in the intro:

“The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena.” 

 They look at song titles, blogs and State of the Union addresses and use analytical techniques that can easily be adapted to other applications.   Some of the findings are interesting (happiness of song titles trended downward from the 60s to the mid 1990s) but it is more the technique that is relevant to cognitive designers.