Cognitive Design

The web, social media, mobile apps and online worlds/games have created a small explosion of new communication forms with unique cognitive impact. Tweets, blog posts, short homemade videos, cell phone pics, text messages, tags (like, friend, stumble, vote, etc.), emoticons, animations and avatar interactions are just a the few examples.

In addition to creating new communication forms, the mobile social web takes older forms to new heights. Take for example, the listicle.  A combination of a list with an article or more precisely, an article written as a number list, is getting a big boost on the web.  To see them in action check out some of the entries on Listicles.com:

• 8 Actors that Bailed on Superhero Movies
• 4 Reasons You City Might Ban Plastic Bags

 Or Cracked:

• 6 Things from History that Everyone Pictures Incorrectly
• 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes Thanks to the Movies 

These have 4-5 million views each. Well-written listicles have strong cognitive design. They offer cool information (unique, interesting or even shocking) that can be important to us or just plain fun. All in an easy to consume package. We like lists because they offer high content with low cognitive load. You get a lot of information for very little work. By starting each listicle with a number, we signal the reader’s brain exactly how much info and mental work is in play. Interestingly, many start with the number of 7 plus or minus 2, or the number of items we can hold in short term memory at any one time.

I am interested to hear from readers that use listicles in organizational change or workplace communication efforts.  Want to learn to write good listicles and make some money? Check out Cracked’s writer forum.

How much mental work can you do in one sitting? Are you motivated to tackle tough intellectual or emotional issues? Do you feel mentally invigorated or foggy? Each of these questions tests your level of mental energy. Mental energy is the fuel for self control, active reflection, conscious thinking and other executive cognitive functions. It is an important resource and one we need to manage carefully as we design workflows, consumer experiences, organizational change programs and other knowledge-intensive interactions.

So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that directly probe the nature of mental energy. Take for example the new research, Being of Two Minds: Switching Mindsets exhausts self-regulatory resources.

“Across five experiments we found support for the hypothesis that switching mindsets is an executive function that consumes self-regulatory resources and therefore renders people relatively unsuccessful in their self-regulatory endeavors. The current studies found converging effects across a wide range of mindset operationalizations”

A mindset like a mental model is a set of general purpose cognitive constructs and procedures we boot up often in response to situational queues that guide how we perceive, think, feel, decide and act.  

Avoid switching mindsets to conserve mental energy.

Although a simple idea, it has powerful implications for the cognitive designer.  As you design seek to minimize the number of mindset shifts that must occur during interaction. Designs that invoke a single low-load mindset avoid wasting mental energy.

Good magic and placebos clearly illustrate the power of cognitive design.   Magic explicitly uses an understanding of how minds work to demonstrate to us in plain sight something we know is impossible. Placebos on the other hand accidentally play off of how minds work to demonstrate to clinicians something that should be biochemically impossible.   In both cases our minds are fooled. Optical illusions and sugar pills that none the less create real effects not because of how the world works but because of how our minds work.

That’s why I was especially intrigue by claims made by Canadian researchers that they created a machine that produces hand illusions that significantly reduce osteroarthritis pain. The machine captures a real-time video of your hand and uses some optics and simple sensors to trick you into believing your finger is being stretched or shrunk.  I captured an image of their YouTube video below.

It feels and looks real and is enough to reduce joint pain by 50% in 85% of the members in one test group.  There is other literature related to the use of optical illusions to relieve pain.

What else can we design optical placebos to do? How can the emerging technology of augmented reality (visual overlay of information on real objects) be used to create applications that leverage these cognitive effects?

Words are powerful because they activate mental models. Mental models provide context for making decisions, solving problems, learning and all sorts of cognitive tasks.  Some words are much better at activating mental models than others.  While it remains controversial exact which words are best, I am always on the look out for research on the cognitive power of words.

Take for example the recent post on the Neuromarketing blog about Adjective Power. The post reminds us that a wise use of adjectives transforms mundane words or phrases such as “ham” into mentally stimulating phrases such as “hardwood smoked ham”. The post also reviews research that suggests that the impact of word choice is real. It drives revenue.

Even more interesting to cognitive designers is the list of what makes for a mentally stimulating word modifier. These include terms that are vivid, sensory, emotional, specific and branded.  Given what we know about how minds work, this list makes a great deal of sense.

Check out the examples in the post such as “freshly cracked eggs”.  Interested to hear from readers that have examples of communication designs that use this technique in other (non-food) domains.

All cognitive designers and change managers should check out the work by Dr Neff, an associate professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas at Austin on Self Compassion.  The site includes assessment instruments, exercises, research articles, videos and more.

The concept of self compassion is straightforward  - having a mindful and open hearted or kind reguard for yourself especially when faced with your shortcomings. But according to the latest research it can have a big impact on how well we adapt to change. For example, a recent study showed that even a modest self-compassion intervention could significantly impact eating habits.

Including specific self-compassion interventions (positive self-talk, journaling, best/worse trait analysis, mindfulness training, etc.)  in your next organizational change program could improve outcomes. This is especially true since our traditional approach to organizational change tends to emphasize what is wrong and implicitly encourages people to be self critical.

Interested to hear from readers that have used self-compassion interventions in change programs.

Works of art have a unique and powerful cognitive impact.  Ideally, we could reverse engineer them, figure out what key features make them tick and then use the key features to artify other objects.   Of course people have been trying to figure out what makes a work of art a work-of-art for a long time.  Most attempts have come from philosophers, artists or critical theorists. Now neuroscientists are getting into the act. Some of the work could be useful for designers.

Take for example the early work (1999), The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of the Aesthetic Experience. The authors offer 8 key features that we find pleasing in works of art including the peak shift effect, isolation, grouping, contrast, symmetry, generic viewpoint, perceptual problem solving and art as metaphor. For a quick overview watch the 10-minute video on the 8 Laws of Artistic Experience.  After watching the video you will notice that at least 50% of the features work because they engage our brains in the active construction of the perceived object (e.g. grouping, perceptual problem solving, metaphor) in a way that results in reward rather than frustration or boredom.

There are many (and more recent) studies in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. Very interested to hear from readers about other studies especially ones with implications for how to art up the design of other artifacts.

Brainstorming is the most commonly used technique for attempting to generate new ideas. Unfortunately, it often fails to produce interesting results. It rests on dated science about how our brains really work. It is played out. That is one of the conclusions argued in the must-read article, How Aha! Really Happens, on the Strategy + Business website.

The authors suggest we replace dated thinking about left brain versus right brain and instead formulate our approach to creativity on the theory of intelligent memory. Intelligent memory is one model of dynamic memory proposed by cognitive neuroscientists over the last 20 years.  In the new view, memory is dynamic and constructed rather than static and retrieved. Intelligent memory includes content or what the memory is about, links and connections between content and mental processes that mix and match the links and content.  It is our native ability to dynamically construct memories that is the seat of creativity.

To be creative we need to intelligently remember by finding relevant patterns and mixing, matching, deleting, adding or otherwise combining the various components in novel ways. We can incubate, generate and test various permutations until something sticks.

Although not mentioned in the article, The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) and various simplifications such as Systematic Innovation Thinking (SIT) work on this principle. TRIZ was developed by studying the variations and patterns of features and functions in some 200,000 patents that described various innovations. TRIZ is complex and difficult to use but produces amazing results.

Patents are one public way we document innovations.  The lessons of history, legal precedent, business case studies, best practices databases and many other repositories exist.  Opportunities for patternstorming –  or generating new ideas by systematically modifying patterns of what has proven useful in the past- are strong.

One example, covered in the article comes from GE:

“Here’s how it works. At the top of the matrix, write down your current understanding of the situation (always as a provisional draft, because your understanding might change). Then comes analysis: List in rows what actions you think you might need to take to succeed in the situation (these too are in draft form, because they also might change). Then ask the most important question you can ever ask to solve any problem of any kind: Has anyone else in the world ever made progress on any piece of this puzzle? List sources to search for an answer to this question, across the top, as columns (in draft again). The team then starts a treasure hunt. They search the sources for elements that might apply to the list of actions, trying to find a good combination.”

I am not sure how widely used this method is but I have seen several variations of it in practice. It does work.

Very interested to hear from readers that use of patternstorming techniques.

We have covered retro design, or creating artifacts that trigger/satisfy nostalgia, many times in the Cognitive Design blog. And why not? As our population ages a “yearning for the past” will naturally increase. Meeting that yearning through cognitive design is an important source of innovation that has been tapped in many product and service lines ranging from suits and cars to Coke bottles and office equipment.

 So I am always on the lookout for new insights into why or how nostalgic designs work. Recently found a post on the blog innovation playground that provides some insight into how Nostalgic Clues Create Emotion Connections.  My favorite part:

“A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad. It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!”

High-end (and old school) stereo amplifiers use to sport big blue meters to display information. They got burned into many peoples’ brains. This example also illustrates how we can wrap existing artifacts in a retro skin. A powerful technique.

Many product and some service innovators have embraced retro design but few if any organizational or workplace designers have.  A clear opportunity. For example, how might we retain talent or improve knowledge worker productivity by satisfying a yearning for the past on the job?

New psychological research shows that encouraging the use of hand gestures improves spatial visualization.  When trying to mentally manipulate an object,  using hands to “see” the shape and behavior of the object improves our ability to make judgments and learn.

 We have known about this in science education for a while. For example,  in my physics classes I always teach specific hand gestures and pencil gestures to use to think clearly about forces, fields and vectors.

This finding has clear implications for teaching in every field (e.g. design) and thinking in the workplace.  Hand gestures are natural and spontaneous but are sometimes discouraged in more formal workplaces.  We often teach people to minimize the use of their hands during presentations. This finding suggest it might be far more effective for both speaker and listener to learn to use topic-specific hand gestures, especially when mental or spatial visualization is required.

Interested to hear from readers that have specific hand gestures they use individually or in groups to stimulate thinking.

There is an art to simplification. In the ideal case to simplify X you:

1. Compress X without loss of information

2. Render X so that it can be experienced with a lower cognitive load or greater mental stimulation.

In my leadership class at Northwestern students practice simplification all quarter by taking a draft deliverable that is 7-15 pages of rich ideas and data and rendering it as single page document that meets the criteria above.   To get a good result they must find deep patterns – semantic, graphic, temporal, etc. in the content and use that to compress the complexity of their deliverable.

It is interesting to note that the best results are not just easier to understand they are striking (mental stimulating), a bit like a work of art.  Indeed, works of art may generate an aesthetic experience in part because they present sensory complexity that is easy for our brain to compress.  For example, BMC Research Notes recently published, Musical Beauty and Information Compression.  The key idea:

“Deep cognitive insights are reported as intrinsically satisfying, implying that at some point in evolution, the practice of successful information compression became linked to the physiological reward system. I hypothesise that the establishment of this “compression and pleasure” connection paved the way for musical appreciation…”

The experiments done found that random noise, rock music and Beethoven’s 3rd symphony compress to 86%, 60% and 40% of their original information content respectively. This implies that musical masterpieces present compressible complexity.  I have seen similar studies about the visual arts.

Perhaps the key to the high art of simplification is not to simplify at all but instead to express complexity in a compressible form.