Cognitive Design

Design for behavior change is a hot topic. And it should be. Nearly everyone looks to rid themselves of some unwanted behaviors. Products and services that promise to change health or money related habits are a multi-billion dollar industry. For the most part they don’t work as the engineers and designers that develop them fail to draw on the science of behavior change. 

As a cognitive designer I am always on the look out for scientific insights into how to change behaviors while respecting individual autonomy.   That’s why the recently published meta-analysis of the effects of web- and computer-based smoking cessation programmes caught my eye.  

EurekAlert! news service has a nice summary of the study and reports for example,

“When the results of the trials were pooled and analyzed, individuals assigned to use computer- or Web-based programs were about 1.5 times more likely to quit smoking than those assigned to control groups. “

The evidence supports including software as a feature/function in the design of behavior change products and services. 

Priming is a simple technique that psychologists (and other scientists) use to put subjects in a particular frame of mind to set the stage for doing an experiment.  They expose subjects to a primary stimulus to see how they will react to a secondary stimulus.  Priming can have a huge impact on how we perceive, remember, decide, learn and emotionally react when presented with the test conditions of the experiment.

Priming of the mental pump is also fundamental to success in cognitive design for two reasons. First, using a priming effect helps us realize a basic goal of cognitive design namely, creating specific mental states through interaction. Second, the fact that priming has such a pronounced effect on the follow-on cognition means that enhancing cognition is achievable through design manipulations!

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Improvisation as an art form has been used in a variety of ways to stimulate creativity and innovation in the workplace -sometimes as just a metaphor for team interactions but also as a training technique.  As cognitive designers, we are interested in understanding the science behind why it works so that we can take it to the next level of application. 

Seed Magazine published an interesting note, Creation on Demand, that provides some insights.  Seed covers two recent fMRI (brain scan) studies that reveal improv is a choreographed set of mental events. 

“These two brain-scanning studies provide an elegant view into our seething cauldron. They reveal a brain able to selectively silence that which keeps us silent. And just when we’ve found the courage to create something new, the brain surprises us with an expression of ourselves. We suddenly find our reflection—not in the mirror, or even in our words. It’s in the music. ”

Designs that seek to tap the power of improv must get participants to worry less about what they are trying to create and more about simply expressing themselves. Imagine features and functions that encourage and even prize raw unfiltered self-expression.  Clearly not the  typical mood on a corporate innovation team worried about the voice of the customer, deadlines and what upper management thinks. 

One view on cognition holds that our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and other mental functions are strongly shaped by how our bodies interact with the world. Examples of embodied cognition include talking/thinking with your hands, working things out (solving a problem) by taking a walk, smiling to lift your mood, remembering something by rubbing your head and so on.

These effects are not trivial and are likely fundamental to the nature of mind. This means as cognitive designers we must always be on the look out for scientific insights into how we can synchronize mental processes and body movements to improved cognitive performance.  

For example, a new study from the Netherlands, Body Locomotion as a Regulatory Process,  suggests that physically taking a step back from a difficult situation may in fact trigger higher-order cognitive control functions.   The control functions help us direct our behaviors and attentional processes to more effectively deal with the situation.  So just as the distraction task of counting to 10 helps us self-regulate our emotions,  physically stepping back from a problematical situations will help us self-regulate cognitive resources (e.g. refocus and attend to new information).

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Word choice is a giant lever for cognitive designers or anyone interested in impacting how people think and feel. But exactly how do words and phrases impact cognition?  An interesting new finding is reported by NPR.

The bottom line is:

“…native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender”

If this finding holds up it gives us a powerful insight into how to tune word choice to invoke specific mental states and models based on gramatical gender.  I won’t spoil the well presented examples in the story by trying to reproduce them here so check out the link above.  

Thanks to Gina Farag at Northwestern for pointing this story out.

Research is finally catching up with what savvy architects have known for a long time – the design of a room can have a big impact on how we think and feel (cognition). Or so argues an interesting article in April 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind.  

A few of the design heuristics include:

Raise the height of ceilings to stimulate creativity and lower them for more focused detail oriented work

Provide external views of natural scenes (greenery and natural light) to stimulate mental focus and rejuvenation

Use blue LEDs and full fluorescent lighting to stimulate alertness

Of course I oversimplify a bit.  Beyond the heuristics the article explains the cognitive science of why they work. A must read for cognitive designers. 

Cognition is very resource-constrained. We only have so much energy for paying attention, remembering things, making decisions, learning and controlling our emotions before we get mentally fatigued and start making mistakes or give up. Playfully, I always ask students, how many cognitrons (units of mental energy) does their design require and how many does it produce?   

So as a cognitive designer I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into the resource-limited nature of cognition. A just published study,  Acts of Benevolence: A Limited-Resource Account of Compliance With Charitable Requests, reveals once such insight.

The researchers found that social influence techniques used to get you to sign petitions, donate money, or volunteer time are successful because they “induce a state of self-regulatory  resource depletion”.   Initial requests for donations that you resist burn up a lot of cognitrons (mental energy) and so you are more compliant with subsequent requests.  This is more than the “I will wear you down” technique as successful pitches for donation are specially designed to burn up all the cognitrons in your head!  

Earlier I blogged on a design contest sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Ashoka focused on designing for better health. The idea is to design artifacts that nudge us into making healthier decisions.  Definitely cognitive design in action.

I submitted an entry on Health Change Cards and described the achieving healthy weight loss deck that Mark Pierce and I developed.  Check it out and please leave comments. You can find example cards, the workbook for achieving health weight loss (all 24 cards) and more info on the cognitive design of the change model HERE. 

 As a cognitive designer I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into extreme mental states such as the aesthetic experience, religious beliefs, sudden enlightenment and the like.  My hope is that we can use insights into such states to design more cognitive impact into our otherwise mundane services, programs and products.  

A recent article, Religious Ideas Burrow into our Brain, tries to unpack the cognitive science of religious belief.   The key to their cognitive power lies in the fact that religious beliefs  are counter intuitive (concern other worldly entities and events) and yet are strongly endorsed by authority figures such as parents.

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As a cognitive designer I am constantly searching for evidence-based ideas (or even informed hunches) on how to tweak features, functions and forms to induce specific mental states and processes in folks that use the products, services, concepts or experiences I design. One such insight is mentioned in a recent article in Science Daily, Key to Happiness is Gratitude and Men May Be Locked Out.   

Gratitude is an emotional state usually created through an expression of thankfulness for receiving a gift or some form of support. Recent research suggests that experiencing gratitude is an essential part of being happy.  So designing artifacts that facilitate the expression of gratitude should otherwise create a happy mental state.  This design  challenge may be linked to gender or at least the psychographics of how one views the burdens and blessings of receiving a gift.  

No matter, a great gift idea from a cognitive design standpoint is one that enhances the recievers happiness by making it easy (low social anxiety, fast, low cost, little effort) and appropriate (reflects values and personality) for them to express gratitude for receiving it.  

Bottom line - build functionality for the expression of gratitude into product, service and workplace designs to enhance happiness.