Cognitive Design

The simple act of moving marbles up or down facilitates the recall and valence of emotional memories  or so claims a new paper, Motor Action and Emotional Memory in the journal Cognition. You can find a good overview of the work in this press release from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Test subjects were asked to push glass marbles up or down while recounting an autobiographical memory that was either positive (tell me about the last time your felt proud of yourself) or negative (describe when you last felt ashamed). Here is what they report:

  “When prompted to tell positive memories, participants began recounting their experiences faster during upward movements, but when prompted to tell negative memories, they responded faster during downward movements. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants’ motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. “

The metaphors play a key role:

‘These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren’t just in language’, Casasanto says, ’linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activating the mental metaphor ‘good is up’ can cause us to think happier thoughts.’

It is not clear how strong these effects are, or if they will be reproduced by other experiments. No matter, small behaviors that may trigger big mental events are always of interest to cognitive designers.

BumpTop has released an amazing new way to transform your Window’s desktop into a true-to-life 3D, gesture-based desktop complete with a physics engine, widgets and social networking. The idea is to make your computer desktop be more like your real desktop… only computer enhanced. You can get a fully functional but limited use version for free or pay $30 for the real deal. The file is 10 Megs.

BumpTop is geared much more for how minds work and therefore may be a big step forward in the cognitive design of PC interfaces. To see this clearly watch a three minute YouTube demo on Desktop Zen.

Although optimized for touch-screen technology and Windows 7, I was able to see immediate high-cognitive impact effects on my point-and-click machine.   It will be interesting to see how people use this - it could reveal a lot about how with think about information.  They have half a million downloads so far.

Thanks to Gina for pointing this out and sharing a link to a Fast Company blog post on  BumpTop.

I’ve included some example desktops on the next page.

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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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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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The Zaltman’s have a new book out, Marketing Metaphoria, on the role of metaphors in marketing.

 This is a valuable book for cognitive designers as they share the 7 most common “deep metaphors” they have found at work in the mind of customers around the global (12,000 interviews, 110+ clients, 30+ countries). As we have discussed elsewhere in this blog, metaphors play a basic role in how we perceive, think and feel about the world. They are both a window into unmet cognitive needs and a technique for developing more effective designs.  Understanding the deep metaphors at work in a domain is a pre-requisite to design for how minds work. The seven include: 

1.  Balance “feeling centered”

2.  Transformation “turning over a new leaf”

I am looking at an X-box 360 game controller. It does not resemble anything else I use and has 11 buttons and 3 mini joy sticks on it.  It takes two hands to operate. I am looking at the Wii controller. It resembles a remote control and has only 5 buttons and 1 mini joy stick on it.  It takes one hand to operate. Talk about a difference in cognitive load.

The Wii uses similarity and functional simplicity. No wonder it is such a hit.  When you use Wii to play games, you use your body just as you do in real life. This is especially evidence with sports games when you swing your arm holding the controller to hit a tennis ball or roll a bowling ball.  In terms of cognitive fit during learning, the Wii resonantes or even accelerates.  The 360 controller will likely cause mental agitation.

Of course this depends upon the user. A serious gamer that already has a mental model for operating a sophisticated game controller would likely have little problem learning the 360 controller and experience toleration rather than agitation during the learning phase. Once the 360’s advanced functionality has been mastered, the serious gamer likely experiences cognitive acceleration.

The Wii on the other hand has redefined who a gamer can be. People have no fear of picking up something like a remote control and playing simple body-based games. Check out this news story that describes Wii bowling as big hit at a retirement home in  Chicago (average age 77).  Wii seems to be increasing access to the gaming experience for potentially millions of new players.

How far will Wii go? There is now a Wii internet channel where the hope is you will use the controller to browse the web. Google has created a version of its reader for the Wii. One analyst from Merryl Lynch predicts Wii will be in 30% of US households by 2011. So the Wii may not bee a fad driven by a novelty effect or a niche device.

I know comparing Wii and the 360 is like comparing apples and oranges– different type of games, different target market. But what the Wii shows is the power of using design to satisfy unmet cognitive needs. The Wii is simple, resembles something we already understand (metaphor greases the cognitive wheels), makes use of my body (remember cognition is embodied) and lets me get to the fun faster by myself or in a group (emotional energy). All of these factors dramatically lower cognitive load. It trades off graphical quality and game play sophistication and is able to give a lower price. Some people begin to experience cognitive dissonance (holding conflicting beliefs) when they consider paying a lot for a game or game device.

Why is the Wii so popular? It is a masterstroke in cognitive design.

Metaphors reveal a lot about how we think. Unpacking metaphors means unpacking thought and emotion - an essential task for cognitive designers.

Tangled Spaghetti in My Head: Making use of metaphor is a brief introduction to an important technique - based on asking 12 questions for exploring client metaphors. This technique is used in therapy but it can be easily adapted to design conversations. Try it and let me know how it works. 

Finding unmet cognitive needs (especially ones rooted in emotions and other visceral factors) is a wellspring for product and service innovation. Discovering these needs can be tricky. Listening for metaphors (or doing a metaphor hunt) has always been a good technique.

 Dan Saffer writes a to-the-point Masters thesis (Carnegie Mellon School of Design) on the role of metaphor in interaction design. Clearly illustrates how metaphors lower the cognitive load of an artifact by translating abstract concepts into something more familiar and visceral for users. He warns:

“Unquestionably, companies have fostered onto users all sorts of misbegotten metaphors, stuffing existing functionality into uncomfortable and awkward metaphors. Yet, when used properly, they can be a powerful tool for conceptualizing, orienting, and personifying products.”

If you don’t want to read the entire thesis check out Dan’s work on slide share.