Cognitive Design

Found another competition that is ripe for the application of cognitive design, this one sponsored by the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Program  and Ashoka’s Changemaker Program.

The fuse is very short – entries are due April 1st.

Competition aside, this is a great site for cognitive designers.  There are 103 entries from 30 countries that you can learn from.  There is also excellent advice (decision types, flavors and dos and don’ts) on how to design nudges. Remember, nudges are seemingly small behavioral influencers that we embed in the environment that suggest an improved course of action but still respect the right of the individual to self determine. They are just-in-time “pushes” that help us make better choices and avoid failures in self-regulation.  

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Searching amongst alternatives and deciding between similar options takes a tanker of mental energy. Indeed, if I have many similar alternatives, it can take too much mental work to compare them and I may defer making a choice at all, or so argues the excellent article, Testing the tyranny of too much choice against the allure of more choice, in the March issue of the Journal of Psychology and Marketing.

The entire issue is devoted to Assortment Structure and Choice and is a must read for cognitive designers. 

Here is a s short video on the science of cute that lists five infantile features that cause us to see something as cute. These include disproportionately large heads, large low set eyes, button nose, soft round bodies and a waddling gate.

You will find these features being used in a wide variety of artifacts – toys, characters, emoticons, service robots, etc. in a way meant to invoke a parental instinct.     

A major challenge in cognitive design is modeling psychological (thinking, affective, motivational, volitional) processes, structures and content. To design for cognition you must understand how it is working (or not) within the groups and artifacts of interest.  

It is best to start any modeling effort with a context diagram and drive down on various components using specific techniques until you have the information you need.  I illustrate one way to do this with the cognition at work template in a brief slide presentation.  

Recently, I have been experimenting with a new technique, the macrocognitive modeling procedure (MMP) developed by  researchers at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.  

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I am often asked by coaches and mentors for tips on “how the mind really works” that can help the folks they support.  Scientific American Mind has an excellent article filled with good cognitive tips on How to Avoid Choking Under Pressure.  

A key tip: If you have practiced extensively avoid self monitoring during performance. This is great advice because the cognitive processes of conscious monitoring can collide with processes that are automatic.  This has nothing to do with performance anxiety or fear, it is more like a “senior moment” created when we ask two very different regions of our brains to work together…. and they don’t.

Coaches sometimes suggest tactics that involve conscious self monitoring.  Unfortunately, these can be a prime cause of choking under pressure.  

If you are well-practiced just let the learning you have done unfold under the force of unconscious rather than conscious thinking. 

And fairly dramatically according to a study, Blue or Red? Exploring the Effects of Color on Cognitive Task Performances, published on-line in Science Magazine and reported in the New York Times. 

Older color studies offer the cognitive designer conflicting results. This study aims to resolve the conflict and demonstrate that: 

1. Red produces an avoidance reaction and supports the cognition needed to do detail-oriented work. 

2. Blue produces an approach reaction and supports the cognition needed to do creative tasks.

These effects work by sparking emotions/moods which in turn support specific ways of thinking.

In Thought Speed, Mood and The Experience of Mental Motion, two Princeton psychologists argue that positive affect is generated by faster and varied thinking. That is, the more thoughts we have per unit time and the less related the thoughts are the more mental energy we generate through excitement, elation, happiness and even an increased sense of self confidence and power.  

Although the authors discuss the implications for therapy (e.g. manic thinking) this is a potentially important finding for cognitive designers interested in creating artifacts that generate positive affect (mental energy).     

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Last month I blogged about the new version of Ruth Clark’s book on Building Expertise. She reviews what we know about the cognitive science of learning to provide an evidence-based approach to instructional design. I believe her lessons are of general value to cognitive designers dealing with issues of learnability.  

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One major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that put customers in a particular frame of mind or mental state.  Such states include pleasure, excitement, flow, pride, fear, sorrow, feeling safe, awe, self confidence, in touch with the past and so on. Putting customers in specific mental states typically serves a larger purpose such as entertainment, learning or performance. They enhance the primary functionality of the artifact or act to differentiate it from competing designs.  

Cognitive designers are always on the lookout for features and functions they can add to designs that promise to create a specific mental state.  A recent article in the Chicago Journal of Consumer Research on Feeling Superior, explores the impact of the structure of loyalty programs on customers perception of status. It holds some interesting insights for cognitive designers.

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In my 3-day cognitive design workshop I ask participants to do a few short experiments using everyday objects  (ping-pong balls, radios, chairs, etc.) designed to cause vivid perceptual illusions.   During the debrief we talk about what the experiments reveal about how minds work and the implications for sensorial design. 

A former participant sent me a note yesterday describing a recent story in the Boston Globe on Hack Your Brain: How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio.  

The brief article covers five good experiments with one of my favorites illustrated below. 

              [Click in the image for a more readable version] 

Try one of the experiments and let me know what you think it tells us about designing for how minds really work.