Cognitive Design

Online or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are a new type of socio-technical system. They are technical platforms that provide computer-mediated social interactions of serious depth and breadth.   Literally millions of people participate many spending in excess of 20 hours per week online.  Users stay loyal for years. Some online worlds support virtual economies that spill over into real dollars. Over a billion real dollars have been spent on virtual goods, skills, experience points and level ups!

The opportunities for cognitive designers are vast.   Testing new designs in a virtual world and using online worlds to tackle hard cognitive design problems (lasting behaviors change, knowledge worker productivity, product/service innovation, enhancing brain function) are two major areas of opportunities.  Another is that online worlds have matured as socio-technical systems enough to offer some deep insights (design patterns) for cognitive designers.  To get a taste for that I suggest you spend sometime in country. Join a community and earn some experience points.  

Another approach is to look at the growing literature. One of my favorites is Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and Virtual.  Chapter eleven reveals an important design pattern:

“Most MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) attempt to foster interactions between their players by using a common template, which could be stereotyped as follows:

(1) the player creates a “level 1” character who enters the world with a limited set of abilities and equipment;

(2) the player is presented with “quests” (missions) to accomplish;

(3) successful completion of the objectives generates “experience points” (or any other similar reward), allowing the character to acquire more powerful abilities and/or equipment;

(4) (this is the most important design element) as a player gains in levels, quests become increasingly difficult to accomplish alone, reaching a point where a coordinated group of players is required to move further;

(5) the size of the group required, the length of the quests or dungeons, and the complexity of the encounters make it nearly impossible to succeed with an ad hoc group assembled on the spot, creating the need for more formal and persistent social structures: the guilds (or clans, teams, etc. in other game worlds).”

There are many ways a clever cognitive designer can put this to use even in the real world.

Interested to hear from readers with some significant virtual world time. What opportunities for cognitive designers do you see?

For some time over 70% of the GDP in the US (and 57% of global GDP) comes from services not products. About half of IBM’s revenue comes from services not computers or software. It turns out that creating, delivering and managing services is very different from doing the same for products. Yet our economic, management and innovation models are nearly all geared towards technology and products not services.  Little wonder IBM is championing the development of a new field they call Service Science, Management and Engineering or SSME.

IBM was instrumental in creating the field of computer science in the 1950s and that turn out to be a genius business move. They hope to repeat that move in the early 21st century but with SSME or service science not computer science.

Services are intangible, require the co-creation of value between the provider and the consumer and are driven by the application of knowledge and skills. This means cognition is a key factor in the “production of services” and cognitive design could play a key role in service system innovation.  More specifically, we should optimize the design of our service systems for how minds naturally work.

Unfortunately, the more traditional fields of management science, industrial engineering, computer science, operations research and the like are lining up to dominate the new discipline.  There is some attention being paid to the role of social sciences (see for example MIT’s Center For Engineering Fundamentals) but that might miss the mark. One exception I found was the chapter, The Psychology of Experience: The Missing Link in Service Science in the book (complete version online),  SSME: Education for the 21st Century (see page 35).  Hopefully there are others.

I am interested to hear from readers working in or considering the field of SSME and how cognitive design can play a role.

Understanding the constraints in any given context is fundamental to good design. Indeed, some define design as the ability to simultaneously satisfy multiple constraints. Design is a constraint satisfaction problem.

Constraints come from the client as needs and requirements, the government as rules and regulations and nature as laws and events.  Some say the more constraints you have the fewer options you have as a designer.  This is logical but seems to make assumptions on the limits of creativity. Perhaps we should say, the more constraints you have the more expertise and creativity you need to generate options.

Fred Brooks is a master thinker about the nature of constraints. Outside of computer science he is most famous for his book The Mythical Man-Month.   In this book he reveals a fundamental constraint – after a given point, adding additional resources (e.g. people) to a task does not accelerate the work.  Indeed, at some point the more you add the slower the work goes because complexity and coordination costs increase.   There are many popularizations of Brook’s law – nine women cannot make a baby in a month, you cannot solve a problem by throwing money at it and so on.

Fred Brooks continues to emphasize the importance of constraints in his new book The Design of Design.   A key theme -  design by discovering your scarcest resource and generate a solution that optimizes for it.  You can get a taste for this in an interview he gave to Wired (August 2010 edition not yet available online):

“The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.”

Strongly suggest wading through the 448 pages of the book to any serious student of design.  Another key theme is that there are invariants across different mediums or fields of design. Identify those and we can factor in lessons across design disciplines.  It is a different type of read than your typical book on design. It is written by one of our deepest design thinkers.

The idea that great designs optimize the scarcest resource has some interesting implications for understanding cognitive design. In many situations attention and more broadly mental energy will always be the scarcest resource we have.  Look first the workflow between the ears for your scarcest resource.

You cannot achieve service excellence without meeting the cognitive (intellectual and emotional) needs of your employees and customers. For a great billion dollar example of this check on the new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.

If you want to get a free taste, read the excerpt provided by Strategy+Business  (registration required). Here is my favorite part:

“At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer.”

From scripts, measurement of the “average handle time” and upsell to personal emotional connections.  That is a shift from meeting the cognitive needs of managers trying to control the service to the employees and customers that are experiencing the service. Bravo!

A supernormal stimulus is any stimulus that has evolved or has been engineered to elicit a stronger than normal reaction.  A puzzle or mystery that you compulsively need to solve. A game you cannot stop playing (literally). A toy so cute you just must cuddle, nurture and protect it. A food or drink so tasty that you cannot “eat just one” but will literally eat or drink it until it is gone.  A photo so sexy that….

These stimuli are created by exaggerating the features of normal stimuli that we are hard wired to respond to.  For example, oversize, and super sad eyes to elicit the instinctual response to nurture.  Or foods engineered with unnaturally high levels of fat, sugar or salt will stimulate us to eat compulsively. Why else would triple patty hamburgers with cheese and bacon sell in the millions?

This gives us one formula for creating irresistible artifacts. Understand which features and functions are wired to instinctual responses and super size them.

You can super-size by literally making them bigger or by increasing the frequency of the effect.

Artifacts with supernormal stimuli tend to be irresistible and require considerable self control on the part of the consumer. Indeed, two recent books,  Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose and Waistland: The R/evolutionary science behind our weight and fitness crisis, argue that such artifacts are so irresistible that supernormal stimuli may be a root cause of our health, spending and anger related problems in the US.

Both books are a must read for cognitive designers interested in behavior change.   They catalog examples of supernormal stimuli in both nature and human society and give some insights into the features that are so effective at driving deep instinctual reactions.  

Let’s try to harness supernormal stimuli to makes use healthier, happier, smarter and more financially secure.

The journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking is an excellent resource for cognitive designers working on Internet applications of all types. High quality and readable articles reveal many designable insights and loads of psychographic information.

You can sample a free issues in December 2009 and February 2010.  For examples of material relevant to cognitive design issues check out The Theory of Planned Behavior Applied to Young People’s Use of Social Networking Sites or The Attitudes, Feelings and Experiences of Online Gamers - A Qualitative Analysis.

Or at least that is the consensus view of organizational scientists that contributed to the important new volume, Worker Engagement: A Handbook of Essential Theory and Research.

This is no surprise to cognitive designers. The entire field turns on the assumption that interaction can be modeled as the exchange of mental energy.  To oversimplify, I put mental effort and energy into my work and I get some out. If in general I get more out than I put in, I an invigorated and experience engagement. If on average I get less mental energy out than I put in, I am headed towards burnout and potential exhaustion.

The concept of energy appears throughout the book but gets the most advanced treatment in chapter six, Feeling energetic at work: On Vigor’s antecedents. To quote:

“Vigor refers to individuals’ feelings that they possess physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness, a set of interrelated affective states experienced at work.”

Vigor and the mental energy that drives it plays a key role in the job demands and resources (JD-R) model of worker engagement, the theoretical centerpiece of the handbook.

Design thinking  is critical for interventions that drive higher levels of worker engagement. As the author points out:

“I argue that people feel ongoing changes in the physical, cognitive and emotional energy levels that they posses and these changes are related to specific positive features of their work environment and specific characteristics of their jobs.”

Cognitive design can contribute to tuning these features as we have work hard to define the factors and variables that characterize the use and generation of mental energy. See for example an excerpt on mental energy analysis from a workshop I gave at the 2009 Design Research Conference. Said more directly, the JD-R model puts cognitive design in the center of our efforts to improve worker engagement.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor from Emory University has published a new book, Staring, How We Look, that is loaded with cognitive design insights. Some examples:

* Unpredictable sights cause us to stare and we both crave and dread them.

* We stare as a show of dominance, to flirt, and as an automatic reaction to unexpected sights (response to novelty).

* Those people and scenes that are visually unique (from very attractive to physically deformed or disturbing) can have a special influence over our thoughts and behaviors including attraction-repulsion, obligation, buying behavior and the like.

* As a response to novelty staring can cause a dopamine release.

The book includes 13 chapters looking at the why, what and where of staring. Check out this YouTube video introduction or press release.  You can get some of the content for free on Google books.

Bottled water is a bit of a mystery. Its use has exploded and it is mainly purchased by people that have a nearly free source of water in their homes.  We are paying a lot for something that is nearly free.

I have long argued that the popularity of bottled water stems from satisfying a cognitive need that tap water from our homes does not. And I am not talking about portability.  An interesting new book by Peter Gelick, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, puts some teeth behind that argument.

Gelick, a renown water expert, drives down into the history, science and current use of bottled water to reveal the primary cause, namely our belief that bottled water will make us “healthier, skinnier, or more popular.” 

There is little or no science to support this. The benefits of bottled water like the benefits of a new book on a fad diet or the purchase of a lottery ticket lie mainly in the hopefulness they make us feel.  In short, the value is derived nearly exclusively from the mental state (think-and-feel) created by its use.  A clear case of cognitive design in action.

Be sure to read Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience and Brand Value.  It is an edited collection focused on service and experiential design. It offers keen insights and practical tools. Unfortunately, it is lacks the introduction to applied cognitive science for designers that I believe is necessary to really crack the code in service and experiential design efforts.

I especially like the definition they offer of design thinking:

“.. is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. “

Chapter 20: Will Meaningful Brand Experiences Disrupt Your Market? is of special interest to cognitive designers. The author David Norton shows how firms such as Dyson, Linux and Whole Foods are disrupting their respective industries by delivering powerful customer experiences by clearly standing for something.  A good example of how meaning produces significant and sustained economic returns.

As the author states: “The opportunity for design today is to go beyond making things convenient for people and start making experiences people care about.”

And to do that in a systematic and repeatable way we first must understand how their minds work.