Cognitive Design

Be Sure to Factor Biases about Cognition into Your Design

As we age our memory gets worse, right? Holding that negative stereotype, or believing others around you hold it, can in fact make your memory worse. Or so reports researchers from North Carolina State University.  They report: 

“For example, older adults will perform more poorly on a memory test if they are told that older folks do poorly on that particular type of memory test,” Hess says. Memory also suffers if senior citizens believe they are being “stigmatized,” meaning that others are looking down on them because of their age.”  

I have seen similar studies even ones that have an impact on where folks score on the dementia scale.   

This is an important finding for cognitive designers working on applications for highly educated elderly, especially 70 and up.    (more…)

Experiencing meaning is an essential aspect of living the “good life” for all age groups according to  an interesting study from the MetLife Mature Market Institute.   The study looked at how various age groups balanced priorities such as money, medicine, meaning and place in order to create a good life.  Meaning always scored the highest but is particularly strong for one segment they labeled the meaning-minded:

“The Meaning-Minded are more likely to be older, female, retired, with more assets, and with moderate income. Of the Meaning-Minded group, 52% are age 65 to 74, 32% are age 55 to 64, and 16% are age 45 to 54. Sixty-four percent of the Meaning-Minded are retired, while 23% are employed full-time. Forty-nine percent have investable assets of $500K or more, while 34% have investable assets of less than $250K.”

This offers some demographic insight for those designers interested in triggering meaning and purpose with their work.  The other segments include balanced givers, balanced individualists, financially focused and hyper individualists.

 Wishes reveal what we want to be true – something we long for or even covet but don’t really expect to happen.   When we wish for something we think about it or even plan for it but don’t ever intend on taking action. Wishes are different cognitive creatures than beliefs, expectations, feelings, goals and wants. Designers sometimes miss that point. 

Wishful thinking is a  cognitive bias or logical fallacy that is driven by interpreting things as we want them to be rather than how they are.  In its most naked form wishful thinking means wanting something to be true and therefore it is true. Catching people in acts of wishful thinking can provide interesting insights into their deepest cognitive needs.    

Wishes, no matter how fanciful, can play a key role in how we think and feel and are therefore a useful tool for cognitive designers.  This is true for children and adults.

Wishing is fundamental to how our minds work. 

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Research findings from University of Texas at Austin reported in Science Magazine, suggest that feeling in control (or not) strongly influences how effective we are at a wide range of pattern recognition tasks.

“Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.”

The perception of illusory patterns can lead to poor judgements and decisions making.  So this finding has implications for designers working on a wide range of cognitive applications from management decision-making  and consumer choice to learning and perhaps even the design of new magic tricks!

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How, what and why we remember things plays a very important role in learning, decision-making, emotional experience and many other aspects cognition.  Understanding memory is of critical importance to anyone that hopes to design for how minds actually work. For example,  understanding how memory works means we can add features and functions to products and services that trigger particular memories and therefore stimulate emotions and personal meaning.  

The Cognitive Daily blog has an excellent post on the latest research into the nature of autobiographical memory (ABM) or memories about ourselves and our lives.   A recap of the findings: 

Adults have few accurate ABMs before age five.

 ABM is systematically biased with positive life events easier to recall than negative life events.

 ABMs appear uneven in that a 50-year old is more likely to remember something from their late teens or early 20s than from their 30s.

 This last finding is the most interesting for cognitive designers.

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A typical assignment for a cognitive designer is to create a high-impact innovation program for a client organization. The goal is to design a socio-technical system made up of a coherent set of policies, rewards, management behaviors, development experiences, collaboration systems and even business models that will increase the ability of the organization to turn new ideas into products and services.  

 [Image source:  Jenni Idea Management]

The idea factory shown above may be the desired future state given the traditional view of mind in business but what do we know about how minds actually innovate at work and in the market? Recent commentary in the science journal Nature on The Innovative Brain, provides three potential insights for cognitive designers.

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As a cognitive designer using information technology (IT) to improve healthcare, I am always on the lookout for new applications that support or improve how clinicians, patients and family members think-and-feel.  

One very interesting approach in the news is PatientsLikeMe.   The site uses a social networking model to form online communities around specific conditions such as MS, Bipolar, Parkinson and HIV/AIDS.   Members create detailed profiles of their history, condition and treatments that is freely shared with other members in the community. To make money the member’s data is packaged (with permission) and sold to insurance, medical device and pharmaceutical companies to support clinical trials and health studies.

Asking patients to participate in their electronic care so extensively, sharing health information so freely (PatientsLikeMe has an openess philosophy as well as privacy statement on their website) and then selling the data  to “big brother” (insurance and drug companies) flies in the face of the traditional model that minimizes the role of the patient, locks health data in an electronic vault (privacy at all costs) and shuns selling it to vendors.

Patients help each other on a daily basis by providing information, advice, emotional support and even second opinions. The software provides each member a  powerful visual history of their condition that clearly shows progress or decline.

The cognitive design of PatientsLikeMe is unique not only in the way it presents information but in the way it reshapes how patients think-and-feel about self care.  It is a platform for creating patient practitioners with all the promise and risk that entails.

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Received a number of comments and emails from my previous post on signs that make us think and feel including this great example from “The Crowski” in West Lafayette Indiana: 

Powerful emotional persuasion to get you to change driving behavior. Well done!

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Resigning a pill bottle to meet specific cognitive needs doubles medication compliance.

Not taking meds properly is a major issue in healthcare.  Approximately 125,000 people die from improperly taking meds every year in the US. As much as $100B-$300B is wasted in hospital visits, tests and lost productivity associated with lack of compliance with medication regiments.

Studies show that we take our meds according to the doctor’s orders only 40-50% of the time.  The problem is we forget (or fail to remember to remember to take our meds – a prospective memory need), are boggled by the complexity of what to do (imagine taking 10-15 different meds per day) and have self esteem issues (taking meds makes us appear weak or a burden). In short, prescription pill bottles we get from the pharmacy don’t meet the complex cognitive needs (prospective memory, multi-pill complexity, self esteem) associated with personal medication management.

Fortunately a number of smart pill boxes have been designed to help us solve this problem. According to an excellent article on Medication Compliance by Allan Naditz in the November issue on Telemedicine and e-Health, these devices can take compliance from the 40-50% level to the 90-95% level.    

He discusses eight smart pill boxes ranging from simple reminder systems to personal med dispensers that provide multiple reminders and contact a service provider automatically if you don’t take your meds. A You Tube video outlining the problem and pitching the MD2 system, a top of the line model, can be found here.

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Leading Organizations are Investing in Developing Sophisticated Models of Employee and Customer Cognition. 

When talking to process improvement experts, organizational designers or IT professionals about cognitive design I emphasize that the starting point is always the “workflow between your ears”.  The idea is to understand how people perceive, remember, think, feel, learn and interact with each other in order to do work. This is not the workflow that happens between departments but it is the invisible workflow that happens between the ears and amongst our heads and employees and customers.

Making an effort to model cognition or the workflow between the ears gives us the insight into how people really think and feel. This in turn supports the redesign of business models, work processes, information systems, management policies, incentives and other aspects of the work system in a way that supports, enhances or even creates employee and customer cognition. This means serivce innovation, higher productivity, fewer errors, less turnover, faster uptake, less burnout and all the other signs of happy and engaged knowledge workers.  

Remaking our processes and organizations (not to mention products and services) for how minds naturally work is a mega innovation opportunity for the 21st century.

So how do we see the workflow between the ears, how can we model cognition? 

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