Cognitive Design

Clients often ask for advice on how to apply cognitive design to the challenge of group decision-making.  A common request is for interventions that get individuals to contribute more and avoid group think. How can we productively unleash the individual?

One approach is understand the individual and social cognition of conformity and design interventions and interactions that soften it.

For specific evidence-based clues on how to do that check out, Conformity: Ten Timeless Influencers. The author does an excellent job summarizing some of the literature.  Key point have clear design implications including, for example:

-  Avoid groups sizes of 3-5

- Plant a competent dissenter in the group

- Make authority less visible

- Deemphasize opportunities for winning group approval

Of course dialing-down the impact of conformity is just one of several things we can do with cognitive design  to improve group dynamics.  I am interested to hear about other approaches from readers.

Fast Company has a great article on The 10 most Addictive Sounds in World.  Here is how they were found:

“Buyology Inc. and Elias Arts, a sound identity company in New York, wired up 50 volunteers and measured their galvanic, pupil and brainwave responses to sounds using the latest neuroscience-based research methods. We learned that sound has remarkable power. This may not be surprising for many, but it was certainly surprising to realize just how many commercial brands over the past 20 years have made their way into the world’s 10 most powerful and addictive sounds–beating some of the most familiar and comforting sounds of nature.”

I won’t spoil any surprise by listing the sounds in this post, especially since the article includes a section for those that want to take a QUIZ . Be sure to listen to the sounds and ask yourself – can you ignore many of these? I think not.

The lesson for cognitive designers is simple, be sure to go beyond the visual when doing sensorial design. We often forget about the cognitive power of sound.

Be sure to read Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience and Brand Value.  It is an edited collection focused on service and experiential design. It offers keen insights and practical tools. Unfortunately, it is lacks the introduction to applied cognitive science for designers that I believe is necessary to really crack the code in service and experiential design efforts.

I especially like the definition they offer of design thinking:

“.. is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. “

Chapter 20: Will Meaningful Brand Experiences Disrupt Your Market? is of special interest to cognitive designers. The author David Norton shows how firms such as Dyson, Linux and Whole Foods are disrupting their respective industries by delivering powerful customer experiences by clearly standing for something.  A good example of how meaning produces significant and sustained economic returns.

As the author states: “The opportunity for design today is to go beyond making things convenient for people and start making experiences people care about.”

And to do that in a systematic and repeatable way we first must understand how their minds work.

The PsyBlog has done a post outlining 10 key studies in social psychology all of which have immediate relevance to problems and challenges in cognitive design. Topics covered include:

1. Believing everything you read

2. Truth about self-deception

3. When rewards backfire

4. Groups fail to share

5. Thought suppression

6. The Chameleon effect

7. Other people’s expectations

8. Situations not personality

9. Gaps in self knowledge

10. Stereotypes

The post recaps each article and provides a link for further reading. You can even vote on your favorite.

A major challenge in cognitive design is figuring out how to translate information into emotional impact. Designer Mathieu Lehanneur (see tab 36) offers one approach with his Age of World Jars:

Each ceramic jar is build from demographic data of nation starting with 99-year olds at the top of the jar and newborns at the very bottom. The shape of the jar reveals the demographic patterns of a specific nation or society.

Yes if we can preserve the cognitive factors that make them work.

Mississippi is in trouble when it comes to health and healthcare.   According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) they have the highest rates of obesity, hypertension and teenage pregnancy in the country. Their infant mortality rate is 50% higher than average and 20% of the population has no health insurance.

They have spent millions but report in a recent NIH news story:

“We’ve been attacking this problem over and over again with just heartbreaking results,” said Shirley, chairman of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation, a one-stop health care facility for Mississippi’s underserved.

Now they are trying to import a health service delivery model, called the Health House from the middle east.  The Health House developed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war is simple but apparently very effective.  

(more…)

How we perceive the world, learn, think, plan, emote, imagine the future and perform other mental activities is strongly influenced by our physical bodies. In short, cognition is embodied and as designers we need to factor that into our work.

The Association for Psychological Sciences has an excellent article on their site, The Body of Knowledge: Understanding Embodied Cognition that is written in a designer friendly way.  There are a number of scientific insights loaded with design implications including how:

1. Physical sensation of temperature is related to judgments about friendliness and other social relationships.
2.  Perceptions of environmental cleanliness and color is related to our judgement about morality. Or as the authors point out “Just as feeling distant from other people makes us feel cold, feeling immoral makes us feel physically unclean.”
3.  Our bodies sway back and fourth as we reflect on the past or project into the future.

And many more.   Seemingly small bodily effects with big mental impact. Just the stuff a cognitive designer wants to leverage.

Most would agree that good designs are intuitive or easy to understand. But how do you create intuitive designs? In cognitive design we can reformulate that question in more specific terms and appeal to the latest scientific thinking to try and answer it.   More specifically:

What are the cognitive processes associated with intuition and how can we modify our designs (add, refine, and delete features and functions) to support or accelerate those processes?

A new book just published, Foundations for Tracing Intuition, provides a great overview of the cognitive science and modeling techniques needed to answer this question. The author offers a four-process theory of intuition and shows how modeling techniques ranging from talk-aloud protocols to physiological measurements can be used to understand it. This is a must read for the research-oriented cognitive designer. I will be blogging more on the specifics in February.

Many people get considerable mental energy from boasting but don’t want to seem boastful.  The question for the cognitive designer is how can we create experiences that give client’s the mental lift of boasting without the downside of appearing too self promoting?  There is no easy way, but the literature provides some guidance:

 1. Have the person who is hearing the boast prompt the telling of it with a question. This effect indicates “self promotion in response to a question is perceived more positively”.

2.  Have a third-party, especially one that is neutral, do the boasting. This effect indicates that you are less likely to seem boastful if someone else sings your praises.  For some, such reputational effects are even more psychological pleasurable (mental energy) than direct telling.

The question and third-party effects give hints on how to keep a positive valence to the mental energy/emotion that comes from boasting.

The Research Digest Blog reports on a study that provides important insights into medical decision-making for cognitive designers. The study focused on how text summaries improved (or not) the interpretation of graphical data about a patient’s state in a neonatal intensive care unit (ICU). They found:

‘Overall, these results confirm that in a neonatal ICU, human generated descriptions of time series physiological measures are better able to support medical decision-making than graphs with trend lines,’ the researchers said. ”

The post goes on to talk about the high labor cost associated with generating text summaries and the emergence of new software that can generate summaries automatically.