Cognitive Design

Pro-change behavior systems is a cool company. They have taken the evidence-based guidelines or science we have for the transtheoretical approach to behavior change and translated it into products and services.  For example, they built an algorithmic measure of your change readiness into a traditional health risk assessment.  This should help tune the behavior changes strategies you are most ready to act on.  

To hear more about how they are translating the science of behavior change into action look at the proactive health consumer demo.

Interesting post in the Cognitive Daily about Attention Restoration Theory (ART). The idea is that if you are doing heavy mental lifting – studying, writing or thinking - going outside and taking a walk for a break recharges your mental batteries more effectively than staying in place and relaxing. This seems to work because:

“ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn’t really function like a rest.”

Clear implications for the design of  cognition-intense learning and work practices.

Things that give us hope from the American Dream to forgiveness and lottery tickets strongly shape our behaviors and thoughts.  Designing to create, prolong or sharpen hope is key challenge in cognitive design.  But care must be taken to avoid giving “false” hope or “nonproductive” hope in alternatives that otherwise impeded constructive processes.

Nonproductive hope is illustrated well in a recent study at the University of Michigan that shows chronically ill may be happier if they give up hope.  Here is the set up:

“At the time they received their colostomy, some patients were told that the colostomy was reversible — that they would undergo a second operation to reconnect their bowels after several months. Others were told that the colostomy was permanent and that they would never have normal bowel function again. The second group – the one without hope — reported being happier over the next six months than those with reversible colostomies.”

The hypothesis is that the group without hope accepted the situation and got on with their lives.   Clearly illustrating the value of avoiding nonproductive hope.

Crowdsourcing or the use of a volunteer group to work asynchronously through the web to design something or solve a problem for free or a prize is an important new production model.  It offers a unique position on a number of hard cognitive design problems like how to optimize the match between individual motivation and organizational task requirements. 

Answer – don’t try let highly motivated people self-select.

It is a radical and disruptive model – first we insource, then we outsource, eventually we offshore and now we crowdsource.  The field of design should be especially open to this type of approach. Fast Company disagrees. They have a recent blog post arguing that when it comes to design, Crowdsourcing is a one-way ticket to blah.  Further, they reference an earlier article where there was considerable professional backlash against a firm that used crowdsourcing to do logo design:

 ”To create a logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo, they’re crowdsourcing the design, for a reward of $1000. The winner will be announced in six days, and over 700 people have submitted work. But no matter: To many professional designers, so-called “spec” assignments–that is, exploratory work, done for free–is taboo. Many designers think it undercuts them, and denigrates the profession.”

Yikes.  No matter, crowdsourcing will continue to grow. It has produced breathtaking results in many others instances. Our time in design will come. Ironically, it is just a matter of good design, of the crowdsourcing architecture that it.

Designing artifacts that generate deep personal meaning is tricky work.  

Autobiographical memories (AM) or memories about our personal history are a key component of self identity. As such designs that activate AM can often generate waves of deep meaning and mental energy.  Tokens, mementos, family heirlooms and retro designs are common examples. But the opportunities for cognitive design go deeper.

Some designers go further and make use so-called flash bulb memories  or AM burnt deeply and in rich detail into our brains. These range from the first encounter with our true love to presidential assassinations.

However, an exciting new book on the development of AM suggests that there is far more to the story because the development of conscious self, integrated personality and AMs are all intertwined.  That being the case, designs that leverage autobiographic memory should tap a mother load of meaning.

I’ve extract 8 design guidelines from the book and am going to test them out.

One of the things that makes cognitive design so timely is that we have a wide variety of tools for modeling the workflow between people’s ears.  Tools vary by what is measured, cost, intrusiveness and level of expertise needed to use them effectively.  Found a good article that describes the pros/cons of eye tracking studies.  

Interested  to hear from designers that have used eye tracking studies, especially outside the area of software interface design.

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.

A recent study found that using surrealism or other devices to create “meaning threats” (e.g. fire that feels icy cold), pushes us into an enhanced cognitive state that can improve learning outcomes. In one study, subjects read Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” (filled with strange and nonsensical events) and were given an artificial grammar learning test where they were asked to find hidden patterns in text. Researchers found:

“People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure,” said Proulx. “But what’s more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did.”

See  Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

The implication for designers is that meaning threats can be a useful device for priming user’s cognition.

When we design for how the mind works we can achieve some interesting effects by focusing on the body, or so says the theory of embodied cognition. In this theory cognitive processes are strongly determined by the bodies interaction with the world. For example, taking a walk to think something out or making a complex point with our hands.

A new insight comes from a recent study at Ohio State on How Body Posture Affects Confidence in Your Own Thoughts.

“Students who held the upright, confident posture were much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative traits they wrote down.

In other words, if they wrote positive traits about themselves, they rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower.”

The implication for designers  is clear – adjusting body posture may change the intensity of beliefs even on important issues.

Images (of words) shown so fast that you cannot consciously see them do have an impact on your cognition. This is true especially if they are negative (agony, despair, murder) versus positive (cheerful, flower peace) or so found an interesting study at UCL’s Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience.

“Today the journal Emotion publishes a study led by Professor Nilli Lavie, which provides evidence that people are able to process emotional information from subliminal images and demonstrates conclusively that even under such conditions, information of negative value is better detected than information of positive value. “ 

 Not that anyone is using subliminals in design any more.