Cognitive Design

With design thinking on the rise, prototyping is getting a lot of attention. Check out the excellent post on Box and Arrows on Integrating Prototyping into Your Design Process. I especially like the the fidelity grid (reproduced below).

[click on the image to increase its visual fidelity!] 

It describes different flavors of prototypes based on their visual and functional fidelity. Clearly each will have a different impact on or fit with the user’s cognition and therefore render a different insight into the effectiveness of the design.

Sentiment analysis, or doing web mining to determine how a given population feels, may morph into an important tool for designers. For the latest check out  the post, Charting Emotions, on the Wikinomics blog. It covers some of the techniques we have discussed before but there is some new stuff.  For example, We Feel Fine, has built of a big database on “human feelings” from content in the blog sphere.

Happily they offer an API for any ambitious designer that may want to adapt this technology to gain insight into how groups feel.

 Want to design a non-pharmaceutical that nevertheless produces real clinical outcomes? Here are some guidelines:

1. Have a convincing beside manner when delivering the placebo (lie well)

2. Use the right color (yellow for antidepressants,  red for stimulants,  green anti-anxiety, white antacids)

3. Prescribe frequent doses (4 times a day is better than twice per day)

4. Stamp them with widely recognized brand names that correspond to the desired effect (Valium = chill out)

5. Use clever and suggestive names (Viagra = Vigorous + Niagara)

Source: Placebos are Getting More Effective.

Check out the Greater Good Science Center.

“The Greater Good Science Center is an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the scientific understanding of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior. While serving the traditional tasks of a UC Berkeley research center—fostering groundbreaking scientific discoveries—the GGSC is unique in its commitment to helping people apply scientific research to their lives.”

This promises to be a  treasure trove of insights and techniques for cognitive designers. For example, the article Changing our Minds, offers some intriguing suggestions for how to use Fiction as a technique for building empathy.

The most urgent cognitive design problems we face today have to do with creating artifacts that help us make and sustain the lifestyle changes needed to improve health. Much of the cost of healthcare and the morbidity and mortality we experience in advanced countries (especially the US) can be linked to lifestyle choices and otherwise avoidable health risks.

Designers that work in this space need to be aware of the enormous range of literature on causes, assessments, interventions and effectiveness that have grown up over the last 20 years or so.  A great source is the new initiative on lifestyle medicine launched by the American College of Preventative Medicine. They focus on lifestyle interventions (nutrition, physician activity, smoking cessation, safe sex, stress reduction, etc.) and the effective management of chronic diseases (asthma, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.).

Of special interest to cognitive designers  is a set of evidence-based guidelines and a supporting  literature review  for making health-related behavior change.

It is a single source for generating scientifically-grounded design insights and evaluating competing designs across the full range of health-related behavior change challenges.

Any product, service or experience that heightens our sense of inclusion – or feeling that we belong to a group – generates considerable positive mental energy through meaning, association, security and identity effects.  This turns on the idea that people are “social animals” and have a deep need to be part of the pack.

On the flip side, products, services or experiences that leave us feeling alienated or even rejected run the risk of generating a river of negative mental energy.  The old idea that rejection “hurts” is at work here.  Found an interesting item in the UCLA newsroom that indicates just how deep this effect may go.

The findings give weight to the common notion that rejection “hurts” by showing that a gene regulating the body’s most potent painkillers — mu-opioids — is involved in socially painful experiences too, said study co-author Naomi Eisenberger, UCLA assistant professor of psychology and director of UCLA’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.

Inclusion and rejection are powerful psychological forces, ones that appear to be rooted in genetics.  They are a deep well of mental energy for the sensitive cognitive designer.

There is an interesting article in Slate that talks about our fundamental drive to seek out information and how modern communication devices from Google to email and Twitter help us take it to the next level. I like how the article begins to zero in on the fact that the root-level craving here is not so much the information we find but the mental stimulation (energy) we get from the act of seeking. A couple of quotes to drive that home:

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.”

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Seeking is fundamental just because we are hardwired to behave in a way that maximizes personal mental energy. The lesson for designers is clear – irresistible designs are those that deeply stir cognition to create mental energy.

Mobile phone use and texting have spread like wild fire around the globe. Likely faster than any other technology we have seen (except perhaps for the internet).  Texting is a unique style of communication especially when it includes predictive software that provides word completion.  Some worry that it teaches us to be fast but inaccurate. The question is, how does texting and mobile phone use in general impact cognition, especially in school-age children?

A new research study from Monash University in Australia found:

 “This study provides evidence that using mobile phones is changing children’s behaviour. However, we have not found any serious or long-lasting effect on the way that they think or learn.”

This is good news, opening the door for the cognitive designer to explore the upside – How can we use texting and mobile phones to accelerate the learning and thinking of school-age children? We have seen how other forms of new media such as the web and gaming have been embraced as enablers of educational innovation, why not the mobile phone and texting?

We mimic the behaviors around us especially those in our “in group”.  Behaviors spread through groups sometimes as swiftly as a contagion. Yawning, laughing, happiness, skipping school, smoking, obesity, cheating, and bullying are a few of the behaviors that have been shown to spread contagiously.

Some of these vector through biology, others direct influence and still others through social network effects. Contagious behavior, like an idea virus or viral product (e.g. a video clip) has a unique design pattern or set of features and functions that make it irresistible and effortless.  But what is the design pattern for contagious behavior? How can we for example, invent contagious behaviors for achieving and sustaining health weight loss, managing chronic illness and the like?

Some have offered answers on how to design and seed contagious behavior (e.g. The Tipping Point) but none that have led to reproducible results. Until the design pattern for contagious behaviors is discovered we will have to follow the advice of mothers and effective leaders – hang out with the good kids and surround yourself with talented people.

Check out the article, Eye Candy of the Day: Wall Stickers for Grown Ups over at Fast Company. Something to consider adding to your rapid prototyping kit for cognitive design.