Cognitive Design

One goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts (products, services, workflows, programs, events, etc.) that enhance mental processes such as perception, recall, learning, decision-making and even creativity.  The idea is to craft the features and functions of the artifact based on the latest cognitive science and best evidence from practice to measurably improve the mental process of interest.  Important stuff in a complex, knowledge-intensive minutes matter kind of world. 

So cognitive designers are always on the lookout for resources that describe the nature of cognition (how we think and feel) with authority and in enough detail to inform the selection of specific features and functions.  

For example, there is an urgent need to improve our designs to make them more learnable. This includes not only artifacts designed to teach (e.g. courses) but every artifact that requires some learning for use. Who wants to waste precious mental energy learning how to use something or sitting in a lecture hall when they are not designed for how we learn, think and feel?

Recently, I found a blog by Bill Brantley, Designing Knowledge, that appears to be a good source of sources on designing for learnability – or understanding cognition so that we can design more effective training and teaching materials.

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A well-structured metaphor can automatically trigger a cascade of emotions and thoughts that accelerate learning, decision-making, creativity and behavior change.  Metaphors not only move my heart and mind but can also be used as a modeling tool (e.g. Zaltman’s Metaphor Elicitation Technique) to uncover the deep mental structures and cognitive needs of employees and customers.

In short, metaphors as well as similes and analogies are a powertool for cognitive designers or anyone interested in designing for how minds actually work. 

In his recent book, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition,  Paul Thagard offers an analysis of emotional analogies that is useful for cognitive designers.  He describes three classes of emotional analogies including those analogies about emotions, that transfer emotions and that generate emotions.

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According to Dr. Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, and author of the interesting book, Predictably Irrational, the offer of a huge bonus does not improve cognitive performance.  He makes his argument in a recent piece in the New York Times, What’s The Value of A Big Bonus?.

In the article he describes several experiments that demonstrate those offered very large bonuses actually do worse on a cognitive task than those offered a medium or even small bonus.

Many have pointed out that money may not motivate those that think for a living.  But this research goes further:

Given in the wrong dose (too much) money may worsen our performance on tasks that require learning, thinking, decision-making, creativity and other forms of cognition.  

We need to be careful to design compensation and reward systems for how minds actually work, not how we think they should work.

Scientific American has an interesting interview with Neurologist Robert Burton about his new book, On Being Certain: Believing That You’re Right Even When You are Not.  

His basic claim is that for every thought conscious or not,  there is an automatic and independent assessment of the accuracy of that thought.

“Once we realize that the brain has very powerful inbuilt involuntary mechanisms for assessing unconscious cognitive activity, it is easy to see how it can send into consciousness a message that we know something that we can’t presently recall—the modest tip-of-the-tongue feeling. At the other end of the spectrum would be the profound “feeling of knowing” that accompanies unconsciously held beliefs—a major component of the unshakeable attachment to fundamentalist beliefs—both religious and otherwise—such as belief in UFOs or false memories.”

And this automatic assessment of our own thoughts can feel very good, powerfully so:

“Fortunately, the brain has provided us with a wide variety of subjective feelings of reward ranging from hunches, gut feelings, intuitions, suspicions that we are on the right track to a profound sense of certainty and utter conviction. And yes, these feelings are qualitatively as powerful as those involved in sex and gambling. One need only look at the self-satisfied smugness of a “know it all” to suspect that the feeling of certainty can approach the power of addiction.”

The design implications of this are strong.  

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Results from cognitive science over the last 30 years have completely flipped our understanding of how minds work in everyday situations. The old view casts us as conscious thinkers.  Rationally attending to facts to learn and logically weighing alternatives to make decisions.  This view of how minds work infiltrated social policy, economics, education, organizational design, product engineering and service design. The results were the prosperity and problems of the industrial era.

The new view of mind casts us mostly as unconscious emoters. It turns out that when you look at how we really learn, make decisions, solve problems and do other cognitive chores the processes we use are mostly unconscious and driven by metaphors, patterns, biases, mental short-cuts, emotions and other visceral states.  This does not make use irrational just a different type of thinker than was previously assumed. We still reason but more with passion than facts. The calculus of how we think is messier and more of an evolutionary kludge than it is the smooth wheels of a rational computing machine.

 Not embracing this new view of mind as designers has really created some problems.   For example, this is why kids hate math, insurance is still sold rather than bought and we fail to take care of ourselves and save for retirement despite so many educational messages and products to help us. They assume we think and learn based on the old view of mind and talk right past us.

On the other hand, embracing the new view of mind as designers creates some real opportunity for innovation and even competitive advantage.

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Pictures, images and other visualizations have a profound impact on cognition. Imagery if used skillfully, can improve interpretation, recall, decision-making and discovery. The right visualizations can set the course of careers, change lives and even trigger major events.  For example, John Barrow in his book Cosmic Imagery, explains the role of imagery in the history of science.

The study and creation of images in all forms – data visualization, infographics, statistical graphics, scientific visualization, graphic design, visual analytics and other disciplines hold important insights and techniques for cognitive designers.  As I stress with students on every cognitive design project – not only are metaphors, reasoning biases and mental models at work, but so is visualization. If we are not tapping into visualization we are leaving a lot of mental energy on the table.

Some interesting examples of what you can do for the mind with visualization can be found at 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners. 

My favorite is:

This honorable mention winner visualizes the bible with each chapter as a bar graph at the bottom (size determined by the number of verses) and cross references between chapters shown as arcs (color denoting distance between chapters).   One visualization of the word of God.

Our minds have two modes – automatic and manual.

In automatic mode we make instant decisions, take frequent and sometimes dangerous mental short cuts (cognitive biases) and run intuitively with very little conscious awareness and control.  Manual mode on the other hand requires attention and conscious mental effort to exert behavioral control, weight options, manage emotions and the like.

As Blink and other recent best sellers on the nature of thinking have pointed out, we pretty much live in automatic mode.  But as David Meyer’s claims in his book, Intuition: Its Power and Perils, we generally don’t believe that:

“The big idea of contemporary psychological science is that most of our everyday thinking, feeling and acting operate outside of conscious awareness is hard for people to accept…”   

For a good summary of the book look here. 

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Services, unlike most products, are hard for customers and employees to see, touch and explain. Services are a set of activities that we can experience but they are fleeting and don’t seem to have the clearly defined and mostly static features and functions that products do. It is hard to give a demo of a service.  Further, customer don’t own services like they do products.

It is little wonder that it is challenging to explain and sell complex services.  Doing so requires solid cognitive design both of the service itself (to eliminate unneeded complexity and reward necessary complexity with a boost of mental energy) and the design of the communications about the service.

An excellent resource for tips on how to design effective communications about complex services is Joshua Porter’s book, Designing for the Social Web.  One example he presents is an explanation of Netflix’s service:

 You might complain that this is not a good example because the Netflix service is not complex. But of course that it exactly the point. It is not complex because they made it so darn easy to understand.

Although focused on the web the examples and principles can be applied to all services.  Also check out Mr. Porter’s blog.

I have argued many times in this blog that design thinking is not only an innovation method but also a powerful general purpose management method.

Jeneanne Rae in a recent post on design thinking in BusinessWeek, talks about the success P&G is having with this approach as a management model. To quote: 

In his new book, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: “Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

For the cognitive designer then the question is how do we rethink leadership programs, management processes and other aspects of organizational design to support or even inspire abductive inference?

Designing to create a particular frame of mind (thoughts and feelings) in users can have a big impact of the success of your product or service.  Hard evidence for this claim can be found in Colin Shaw’s recent book, The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value.

For an interesting recap, check out this post.

Collin identifies four cluster of emotions and their business impacts on the customer experience:

For the cognitive designer this framework provides some insight into which mental states are likely produce what type of business outcome.