Cognitive Design

The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM) provides a formal classification system for understanding the many ways in which our minds don’t work properly. It is published by the American Psychiatric Society and is widely used in the US as a standard tool for psychiatric diagnosis.  The fifth version of the manual (DSM-5) has been under development for the last 10 years and is due out on May 2013. An advanced look at the DSM-5 has been officially released and generated considerable reaction. For an overview of the changes and potential implications check out the reviews in the Psychiatric Times and The World of Psychology.

Most would agree that good designs are intuitive or easy to understand. But how do you create intuitive designs? In cognitive design we can reformulate that question in more specific terms and appeal to the latest scientific thinking to try and answer it.   More specifically:

What are the cognitive processes associated with intuition and how can we modify our designs (add, refine, and delete features and functions) to support or accelerate those processes?

A new book just published, Foundations for Tracing Intuition, provides a great overview of the cognitive science and modeling techniques needed to answer this question. The author offers a four-process theory of intuition and shows how modeling techniques ranging from talk-aloud protocols to physiological measurements can be used to understand it. This is a must read for the research-oriented cognitive designer. I will be blogging more on the specifics in February.

Electronic books, or e-books are finally making real inroads to reinventing the book.   Clear evidence comes from an Amazon press release that claims on Christmas they sold more Kindle edition books (electronic books on Amazon’s e-reader called Kindle) than physical books.  And Amazon is not the only one pushing e-books hardware and software. I just read that Ray Kurzweil will unveil a new e-book “platform” called Bilo at the Consumer Electronic Show on January 7th.

The cognitive design challenges and opportunities are significant.   e-Books are highly-networked and dynamic knowledge structures versus the static standalone knowledge encapsulated in a traditional book. This will change the cognition of reading. But how, and what e-book features do we need to really leverage that opportunity? The visceral experience and finger-level human factors are very different with e-books.  This could, for example, impede speed reading techniques but accelerate quick reference and look up.  Perhaps it would enable an entirely new class of speed reading techniques.

E-book innovators will bring us many features – color, the ability to annotate, embedded links, automatic language translation, text to speech and so on. The real question to ask is what cognitive processes are we trying to support and enhance?  More generally, how can we design an e-book optimized for how minds work best?

For $0.99 an iPhone app called eCBT from MindApps that is the first phone-based application of cognitive behavioral therapy for mood disorders that I am aware of

It’s not that cognitive designers are moody,  but eCBT is such a cool application of cognitive design.

Second, for the more scholarly designer, or just anyone wanting to get back to first principles for the holidays, there is for $99 a new edition of the classic, Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook.    Check out the table of contents and free chapter on attention and performance here. I especially like Chapter 15 on Cognition and Emotion. Is the illusory distinction between intellect and effect beginning to slip away?  That would be a great present!

Feel free to share your gift ideas.

The technology and market research company, Forrester, has chimed in on the important issue of how to apply emotional design to differentiate your web site. The report is a bit pricey at $499 but you can find a post on the CMS wire that covers the key concepts and techniques here.  What I like is that they put cognition or more specifically, emotional needs, center stage.  They advocate ethnographic analysis and the importance of non-verbal signals (e.g. facial expressions) for uncovering hidden needs. Music to the ears of the cognitive designer.

Although it contains no new insights or techniques for readers of this blog, the report makes for a nice reference when you are trying to make the case for cognitive design.

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.

Check it out , make a contribution and be sure they cover all things cognitive!

Exerting mental effort to pay attention means bad design!

Distraction and multi-tasking are getting more attention as design problems. Distracted students, drivers, parents and workers appear to be less productive and even unsafe. More broadly, we think and live in the future or the past and fail to be mindful of the present.   We have been driven to such a high level of distraction in our daily life that some researchers and authors see a “coming dark age” and are calling for a national movement to regain our focus. I am alluding to Maggie Jackson’s book on Distraction:The erosion of attention and the coming dark age.  A great read for cognitive designers dealing with distraction and multi-tasking.

From a cognitive design standpoint, distraction and attention come down to how well we manage a user’s mental energy.

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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.

Students that take my cognitive design class are often surprised to find that we use many techniques straight from cognitive therapy. And why not, a cognitive therapist has to “get inside the mind” of their patients just as a cognitive designer needs to get inside the minds of their clients.   For instances, The New Handbook of Cognitive Therapy Techniques is required reading. We make use of the ABC technique for modeling a person’s environment in terms of antecendents (A) or activating events, the beliefs (B) generated in response to the activating events and consequents (C), that both emotionally and behaviorally flow from the beliefs.  It is a very simple technique but if applied with discipline produces authentic design-relevant ideas nearly every time. I’ve blogged on this before including a link to some slides.

So I am always on the look out for new insights from the cognitive therapist that are relevant to designers that focus on how the mind really works. A new and promising source is the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy. For example, they recently had a special issue devoted to mental control. Here is a sample from one of the articles on Mental Control of Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts:

 ”…analysis revealed that students primarily reported worry-related intrusive thoughts, suppression was used frequently despite limited success, distraction strategies were used most often and “do nothing” least often, and failures in thought control were attributed to personal failures of willpower or strength, or to the importance of the thought.”

Good insights into the cognitive needs and coping strategies for any designer working on a project involving intrusive thoughts.