Cognitive Design

In service delivery it is important to be polite especially when things are tense. Politeness reflects respect and commands respect.  Being treated with respect puts customers and employees in a positive and productive mental state. Politeness is key to building and holding effective relationships.

Designing for politeness is good business and is a clear example of cognitive design or designing to create a specific “think and feel”.

Your services may be polite but what about products? Do they treat your customers with respect or are they rude?  We don’t normally think about products (versus services) that way but we should or so it is argued in the post, Designing For Politeness, on the Interaction Design blog. 

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 Wishes reveal what we want to be true – something we long for or even covet but don’t really expect to happen.   When we wish for something we think about it or even plan for it but don’t ever intend on taking action. Wishes are different cognitive creatures than beliefs, expectations, feelings, goals and wants. Designers sometimes miss that point. 

Wishful thinking is a  cognitive bias or logical fallacy that is driven by interpreting things as we want them to be rather than how they are.  In its most naked form wishful thinking means wanting something to be true and therefore it is true. Catching people in acts of wishful thinking can provide interesting insights into their deepest cognitive needs.    

Wishes, no matter how fanciful, can play a key role in how we think and feel and are therefore a useful tool for cognitive designers.  This is true for children and adults.

Wishing is fundamental to how our minds work. 

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For $1.99 you can have an ad-free application that turns an iPhone into a fart machine – the iFart.  You can select from a  range of farting sounds (e.g. a wet one) and play them on-demand, on a delayed timer for a sneak attack, as a security alert or in other modes.

You can see and hear the iFart work on YouTube.

Sales have been brisk and news/blog coverage has been impressive. By why? 

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Imagine being able to measure the cognitive impact of a workspace or building design before you built it.  A group of architects and academic researchers is doing just that in California as they monitor the brainwaves (EEG) of users as they interact with a proposed design in a virtual reality (VR) environment. 

Not only do they expect to avoid costly design errors,  make way-finding easier and otherwise optimize designs for how our minds work but they expect to gain scientific insight into how we form “cognitive maps” as we navigate.  This is doing cognitive design and some applied cognitive science at the same time.

The project is described well in a post on MSNBC, Get Lost and Get Better Architecture. The end of the article is most interesting to cognitive designers. Berns a Neuroscientist at Emory University speculates that ”the relative mobility of EEG technology could lend itself to poring over the brain waves of people in existing buildings as well”.   This might open up a new level of rigor for the cognitive design of spaces.

One of the exercises that is most popular in my 3-day cognitive design workshop is redesigning signs to improve wayfinding, increase behavorial compliance (e.g. handwashing) instill pride, give the readers a little jolt of mental energy or otherwise leverage how minds actually work. It is a fairly straight forward application of cognitive design that gets an immediate response from your employees and customers. Besides it can be fun.

One of my favorite examples:

[Image source: The Semiotics of Toilet Signs] 

A good way to tell patrons who the facility is for and more importantly to hurry it up when the toilet facilities are limited.   Using images to generate empathy is often a better way of getting compliance than barking a command.  Good cognitive design!

I just found a short (7 minute) YouTube video on Emotionally Intelligent Signs that provides some great examples of using Pecha Kucha to create signage that displays and encourages empathy.  Check it out and then redesign a sign in your community or workplace.

Leading Organizations are Investing in Developing Sophisticated Models of Employee and Customer Cognition. 

When talking to process improvement experts, organizational designers or IT professionals about cognitive design I emphasize that the starting point is always the “workflow between your ears”.  The idea is to understand how people perceive, remember, think, feel, learn and interact with each other in order to do work. This is not the workflow that happens between departments but it is the invisible workflow that happens between the ears and amongst our heads and employees and customers.

Making an effort to model cognition or the workflow between the ears gives us the insight into how people really think and feel. This in turn supports the redesign of business models, work processes, information systems, management policies, incentives and other aspects of the work system in a way that supports, enhances or even creates employee and customer cognition. This means serivce innovation, higher productivity, fewer errors, less turnover, faster uptake, less burnout and all the other signs of happy and engaged knowledge workers.  

Remaking our processes and organizations (not to mention products and services) for how minds naturally work is a mega innovation opportunity for the 21st century.

So how do we see the workflow between the ears, how can we model cognition? 

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One goal of cognitive design is to support or even create specific mental states (thoughts and feelings) in people. We do this by tweaking the features, functions and forms of artifacts  or anything that is designed  such as products, workflows and customer experiences.  We don’t do this by tweaking randomly. Ideally, we use solid and sometimes emerging insights into how minds really work from cognitive science.

For example, the so-called science of happiness has been very much in the news lately. So it is not surprising when I get a question like:

How can we use the science of happiness to design organizations that make employees happier (more productive)  and customers happier (more satisfied)?

[Chinese symbol for double happiness - employee and customer]

The literature on positive psychology and happiness studies is vast. Where should you start? 

I like the approach of Hein Zegers.  As a happiness researcher at the University of Leuven, a nearly 600-year-old Belgian center of learning and research, he  stressses  the importance of  establishing evidence-based interventions.  

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According to a recent study  by scientists at Yale and the University of Colorado, how we rate a stranger’s personality can be influenced by the temperature of a cup of coffee (or other beverage) we are holding. Warm coffee means I will tend to be trusting and see the person as warm. Ice or cold coffee has the opposite effect.

 The temperature of the coffee is priming my emotions, not too surprising given the embodied nature of cognition.   Now we know why warm cookies, heated car seats, hot cocoa and a warm glass of milk all seem to be more than physically comforting. 

This finding offers tentative guidance for the cognitive designer intent on creating artifacts that generate a sense of trust, emotional warmth and soothingness:

Heat them up!

Pattern recognition, framing and sense making are fundamental to cognition or how we think and feel.  All of these cognitive activities have one thing in common, they are geared towards creating order from sense perceptions, beliefs and even conflicting ideas. When we create order the pleasure center in our brain is activated. We are rewarded with a natural high – literally.

Herein lies the secrete sauce to many successful games and puzzles.  They exploit our hardwired need to see and create order.

Wired magazine hit this theme well in a recent article that aruges Bejeweled and Bejeweled II are masterful examples of simple and addictive games that “exploit our desire for order”.

The idea is you swap the position of adjacent stones to create chains of three or more identical gems (a little bit of order).

With players investing $300M and 6 billion hours there is a powerful effect here.  

OK maybe you don’t like that one but what about Solitaire or Sudoku sometimes referred to as “the crack cocaine for the brain”? Or perhaps you just doodle or organize the socks in your underwear drawer.

No matter, the lesson cognitive designers is clear.  Creating order is a key way we generate mental energy. No matter what your design problem, consider adding features and functions that let users see and make order in a way that is natural given the context.

 It seems these days many people have avatars or digital versions of themselves (or how they want to be) that run around in virtual worlds, live in customizable video games or otherwise inhabit cyberspace. Below is the menu from Second Life for creating your avatar for that most popular virtual world.

What does the  personalization of an avatar reveal about us and how we think and feel?  I must decide what my avatar will look like, how it will behave (interact with others) and in some cases even evolve into other forms of life.

 From a designer’s perspective, can I study avatars to determine the psychographic profile (list of cognitive needs and tendencies) of their creators? If so, avatar studies could be a valuable tool for creating high-impact products and services using cognitive design.

I think this would be a wonderful Ph.D. thesis.

This work has already started. Two social psychologists from Northwestern have conducted a field study of avatars behaving in a  complex virtual world.  A key finding:

 “You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently,” Eastwick said. “But people exhibited the same type of behavior — and the same type of racial bias — that they show in the real world all the time.”  

Although it is disappointing that we bring our racial bias into the virtual world it is a signal that studying avatars will reveal something about the psychographic needs and profile of their creator. Further evidence:

 “This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world,”

Also see a Stanford study that shows our “need for space” (interpersonal space) and eye gazing behavior shows up in virtual worlds.  

Of course, further study is needed but the idea that avatar studies could be a new power-tool for cognitive designers has some scientific momentum.

For anyone interested in doing avatar studies, two researchers from Stanford have created a method and toolkit for doing Longitudinal Data Collection in Second Life.