Cognitive Design

One goal of cognitive design is to create products, services and other artifacts that put people in a particular mental state or set of mental states (experiences).   But how do we determine when someone or a group is in a particular mental state to know if our design is working?

One answer is to analyze what they write.  Check out this intriguing web science article by Dodds and Danforth on Measuring the Happiness of Large Scale Written Expression. As they point out in the intro:

“The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena.” 

 They look at song titles, blogs and State of the Union addresses and use analytical techniques that can easily be adapted to other applications.   Some of the findings are interesting (happiness of song titles trended downward from the 60s to the mid 1990s) but it is more the technique that is relevant to cognitive designers.

On the Significant Objects website, objects purchased for a few dollars at a garage sale are transformed into “significant objects” via fictionalized accounts (stories) and then sold on e-bay.   According to the site, care is taken not to hoax anybody on e-bay but to test a hypothesis:

“A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!” 

From a cognitive design perspective, the story is enhancing the “think and feel” layer of the artifact remaking it into a significant object with increased market value. Is it working? The site is actually a catalog of objects, their stories, purchase price and selling prices.  For example,

Purchase price was $2 and it sold for $32.08. Click here to read the story that created $30.02 of value.

The field of design psychology tries to understand why we make the design choices we do. What causes me to prefer and choose one interior design over another, one architectural/home style over another? The basic argument in the excellent book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, is that it is early childhood experiences in your father’s den, grandfather’s workshop and grandmothers kitchen that are the root cause of your design choices.

Not only does this strongly determine consumer choice but also the decision making process of architects and other professional designers.

Talk about probing the mind of your customer! Of special interest to cognitive designers is the toolkit (see environmental autobiographies) and the emphasis on designing for positive change.

                  [Source: Idea Sandbox Blog]

A great design is something that deeply resonates, energizes and even enlights you.  Often the most powerful designs are found in our personal artifacts, family heirlooms and sacred spaces.  Such designs deeply reflect not only who we are but the best that we can hope to be. They work because they reflect our character strengths.

Designs that leverage our character strengths will naturally have high cognitive impact.  I see myself, I see the best of myself, I see what I have worked hard to become all reflected in the features, functions, interaction and experience that the designer provides.  This is especially important when you are designing for behavior change.

A good tool for understanding character strength (for design purposes) is the VIA classification of character strengths. It includes five core elements – wisdom & knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. It does not take much work to figure out which dominate the psychographic profile of the people you are designing for.  The neat thing about the VIA classification is it goes beyond values to include cognition and mental states in the characterization. For example,

“Humanity - Interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others

• Capacity to Love and Be Loved: Valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated; being close to people
• Kindness [generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love, "niceness"]: Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them
• Social Intelligence [emotional intelligence, personal intelligence]: Being aware of the motives and feelings of other people and oneself; knowing what to do to fit into different social situations; knowing what makes other people tick”

This provides plenty of hooks for the cognitive designer interested in tuning features and functions to invoke and think-and-feel of “humanity”.

Check out the website, VA institute on Character, for additional background and tools. A potential goldmine for cognitive designers interested in designing to leverage character strengths.

Crowdsourcing is a powerful new model of production that uses mass collaboration to generate new content, software and other products and services of commercial value using self-selected volunteer labor. Its continued success raises an interesting question for the cognitive designer – Why do highly compensated knowledge workers and talented amauters alike work so hard for free?

One answer pulls on the  so-called “big tent” theory of motivation claiming that the key comes from the fact that crowdsourcing offers a generous menu of alternative motivations. This way passionate and talented contributors are bound to opt in from the hundreds of millions of candidates on the web. Some evidence to support this comes from the interesting post on Wikinomics about LinkedIn’s Crowdsourcing Dilemma.

LinkedIn is planning to us Crowdsourcing to produce other language versions of its content. In considering the strategy they asked potential crowdsourcers – What incentives would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?  This is what the found:

From a cognitive design standpoint the implication is clear – I will trade valuable labor for recognition, meaning and fun. Of course, some free services (upgraded account) would also be nice.

This site offers a good catalog of communication methods for service designers.  Cognitive designers will find some of them very useful. Check out service maps, customer journey maps, Lego serious play, experience prototyping and mood boards.

Check out the excellent (but brief) description of the innovation work by the Steelcase Healthcare Team, How to Turn Research into Innovation Gold.

They are focused on designing new spaces and experiences for chemotherapy patients and make good use of cognitive oriented techniques.

I especially like:

“For example, the researchers noticed patients mentioning or complaining about seemingly small things: access to power outlets or a place to store personal items. The Steelcase researchers added them up to understand that as cancer patients face what is both physically and emotionally draining treatment, such small details matter greatly, and that hospitals need to pay attention.” 

Clearly illustrating how small changes in features and functions can have a big impact on cognition.

Placebos, or the assumption we are receiving a treatment (often a drug) when we are not, can have very real effects and even change behaviors.  Placebos are like “mind medicine” or improvement through belief rather than actual intervention.  As such, they are of great interest to cognitive designers.

That’s why this news item on research into the placebo effect at the University at Buffalo caught my eye:

“Now a recent review of research by University at Buffalo pediatric psychologists suggests that such medication, or the assumption of medication, may produce a placebo effect — not in the children, but in their teachers, parents or other adults who evaluate them.”

Some evidence that the expectation of change can in fact produce change, even in those administering change. The news release explains:

“The act of administering medication, or thinking a child has received medication, may induce positive expectancies in parents and teachers about the effects of that medication, which may, in turn, influence how parents and teachers evaluate and behave toward children with ADHD,” said UB researcher Daniel A. Waschbusch, Ph.D., lead author of the review.

Does this have implications for how we approach organizational change?

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A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that put people in a particular mental state by using features and functions that enhance specific thoughts, feelings and cognitive processes.   One way to do this is to include features in your design that trigger a positive-affirmation-effect that causes users reflect on or even subvocalize positive thoughts about themselves. 

I read a recent article, Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others, that offers a caution when using this approach.   Here is the abstract:

“Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true. Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who “need” them the most.” 

Bottom line  for cognitive designers – include self esteem in the psychographic profile of your customers.