Cognitive Design

The field of design psychology tries to understand why we make the design choices we do. What causes me to prefer and choose one interior design over another, one architectural/home style over another? The basic argument in the excellent book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, is that it is early childhood experiences in your father’s den, grandfather’s workshop and grandmothers kitchen that are the root cause of your design choices.

Not only does this strongly determine consumer choice but also the decision making process of architects and other professional designers.

Talk about probing the mind of your customer! Of special interest to cognitive designers is the toolkit (see environmental autobiographies) and the emphasis on designing for positive change.

In cognitive design we can model human-artifact interaction as a conversion of mental energy. We put mental effort into artifacts to use them and we get mental energy out in terms of how they make us think and feel.  In this way interaction converts the mental work we must do to access functionality into the psychological lift – meaning, emotion and hardwired thinking – we get out of it.

So I am always on the look out for new insights into the nature of mental energy.   Fortunately, there has been a lot to look at. With the discovery of mirror neurons there has been a small flood of studies that suggest we get/burn almost as much mental energy by observing a thing as we get from doing a thing.  Consider the common experience of feeling exhausted after watching a emotionally-stirring movie.  High engagement, high empathy observation burns/delivers nearly as much mental energy as the direct experience.

One recent scientific study that illustrates this is effect is, You Wear Me Out: The Vicarious Depletion of Self-Control.   The researchers found a depletion in self control for those that observed others exerting it. They also found that reading about positive instance of self control (versus reading about failures to exert it) can increase the capacity for self control in subjects. If you don’t want to wade through the paper check out the excellent post, Being in Someone Else’s Head is Exhausting on the Neuronarrative.

These findings suggest that our psychological distance from an event – thinking/reflecting, observing/emphasizing or participating/doing strongly determines the mental energy that flows from the experience.  The relationship is not simply linear. Empathizing and doing for some things are nearly the same.   Whereas the difference between thinking and doing can be opposite – one creating mental energy, the other burning it.  This might explain why for example, vicarious experiences will produce behavior change (empathizing) when verbal persuasion does not (thinking). Further it may explain why some people with emotional intense jobs become remote – they increase their psychological distance to avoid the constant mental energy depletion associated with observing others in pain.

No matter, psychological distance and mental energy are fundamental to taking a systematic approach to cognitive design.

Designing to create a specific emotional reaction, frame of mind or series of mental states (i.e. an experience) is a key area for cognitive design.  This is how you innovate, by moving your offering “up the value stream” from product to service to experience and ultimately to personal transformation for your customers.  But does this make consumers happier?

The PsyBlog reports on some interesting research that sheds light on the issue of material versus experiential purchase. Assuming you have $100 to spend, would you be happier investing it in an experience by say eating chicken at Medieval Times or buying clothing?  The research found:

Experiential purchases tend to make us happier than material purchases, unless things go bad.  If the purchase goes wrong, we are left a little less happy than if we would have bought something material.

There is a naturally symmetry to this. There is more “happiness value” (other things being equal) in an experience purchase and we feel the gain as well as the loss.

Placebos, or the assumption we are receiving a treatment (often a drug) when we are not, can have very real effects and even change behaviors.  Placebos are like “mind medicine” or improvement through belief rather than actual intervention.  As such, they are of great interest to cognitive designers.

That’s why this news item on research into the placebo effect at the University at Buffalo caught my eye:

“Now a recent review of research by University at Buffalo pediatric psychologists suggests that such medication, or the assumption of medication, may produce a placebo effect — not in the children, but in their teachers, parents or other adults who evaluate them.”

Some evidence that the expectation of change can in fact produce change, even in those administering change. The news release explains:

“The act of administering medication, or thinking a child has received medication, may induce positive expectancies in parents and teachers about the effects of that medication, which may, in turn, influence how parents and teachers evaluate and behave toward children with ADHD,” said UB researcher Daniel A. Waschbusch, Ph.D., lead author of the review.

Does this have implications for how we approach organizational change?

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Wow has our view of how minds work changed – even in my lifetime. We have gone from rational calculating machines that carefully consider alternative solutions and seek to maximize economic utility to metaphor-driven, evolutionary kludges of cognitive biases that blink our way through hard problems and seek to maximize our personal mental energy.  

I especially like the emphasis on seeking to maximize personal mental energy.  Mental energy is a fundamental resource so we should be naturally wired to seek objects, relationships and experiences that replenish rather than deplete it.  Fireworks, setting them off or watching a professional delivered display, are great examples. They generate tons of excess mental energy in us.

Watching fireworks triggers meaning, emotion and a wide variety of specific mental states from expectation and surprise to awe.  We anticipate the grand finale, we are pulled into “the now” by powerful sensory effects and we can reminisce and even socialize.  Of course fireworks on the 4th of July are a public expression of our independence as a nation.  The joy of freedom, the pride of accomplishment and the deep psychological power of solidarity release a river of mental energy.

We get this for very little mental effort – all we have to do is look up and watch.  Fireworks are an explosion of mental energy. Millions flock to fireworks displays, like moths to a mental energy flame. 

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In an earlier post, Know Your Employee’s Chronotype, I highlighted an article that argued cognitive performance is influenced by our biological clock or time-of-day-effects. Since then I have been searching for examples of designs that have put that to use. I also received several requests for additional background info that could be used to inform design.

For those seeking a quick background briefing check out the series of posts on Circadiana called the Clock Tutorials.  Short, concise and actionable for designers. I am still looking for great examples of design that leverage our biological clocks.

Cognitive designers create artifacts that induce specific mental states (thoughts and feelings) and/or enhance specific mental processes (perception, learning, memory, decision-making, creativity, etc.) in the people that use them.  To do this systematically the cognitive designer must have empirical insight into how the mind of their target audience works.  So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that reveal the cognitive biases, dominate metaphors,  mental models, problem solving heuristics and other inner mental workings of particular groups.

An excellent example is the recent study, Engineering Stereotypes Drive Counter Productive Practices.   In the study, researchers from Northwestern and the University of Colorado give us insights into the mental model held by some engineering students on what it means to be an engineer. For example:

“There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves,” Leonardi says. “So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?”  In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone, they couldn’t consider themselves an expert engineer.” 

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A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that put people in a particular mental state by using features and functions that enhance specific thoughts, feelings and cognitive processes.   One way to do this is to include features in your design that trigger a positive-affirmation-effect that causes users reflect on or even subvocalize positive thoughts about themselves. 

I read a recent article, Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others, that offers a caution when using this approach.   Here is the abstract:

“Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true. Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who “need” them the most.” 

Bottom line  for cognitive designers – include self esteem in the psychographic profile of your customers. 

The time of day can strongly impact cognitive performance. 

There has been a flurry of scientific studies into how our biological clocks and  circadian rhythms work. Most of it has to do with cell science, physiology and chronobiology but some is trickling up to the psychological-level and is therefore of interest to cognitive designers.

Most relevant to cognitive design is the idea of a chronotype where our functioning is optimal depending on the time of day.  We  are a morning person (lark), night person (owl) or are indifferent.   Chronotype correlates to being vigiliance, creative, able to absorb new information and other aspects of cognitive performance.

An excellent article,  A Time to Think:  Circadian rhythms in Human Cognition,  rigorously reviews the time-of-day effects on 20+ attentional, memory and executive functions.  These 20+ cognitive processes sweep in most of what counts for knowledge work in organizations today.

So the next time you are designing a policy, program or process aimed at improving knowledge work, be sure to consider the chronotype of the employees you are designing for.

Exmocare offers a true breakthrough in remote physiological monitoring.  

“The BT2 is the only wristwatch that can simultaneously, non-invasively, continuously and accurately detect with infrared and tiny metallic sensors from a fully moving wrist: heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, skin conductance and relative movement.  This data gives care givers a more complete picture of the wearer’s overall physical and emotional states.“ 

The info is sent to the web via Bluetooth technology and provides enough information to to infer the emotional state of the user.

A true power-tool for all sorts of applications in cognitive design. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the device is not being sold in the US.