Cognitive Design

Successful video games are packed-full of cognitive design insights. So I am always on the look out for games that offer a “new category” of cognitive experience for users.  The idea is to reverse engineer them and apply their high-impact features and functions to other design challenges.

In 2009 the killerApp from a cognitive design standpoint has to be Sony’s Flower.  In flower you are the wind and make a poem through interaction with flowers and landscapes. All this happens by using a single button (any button) and tilting your controller while listening to a zen-like soundtrack.  Sounds a bit mushy (the category is called Zen gaming) but it is capturing the cognition of millions. The question for the cognitive designer is how does it work?

 I’ve included a still below but check out this this 4 minute video clip. Better, spend some time with the actual game.

The Design with Intent Blog is providing a toolkit including 47 design patterns for achieving behavior change. We have discussed many of the patterns on this blog but having them summarized, categorized (architectural, error proofing, persuasive, visual, cognitive and security) and illustrated in one spot is a real advantage.

There have been many recent studies highlighting the important role of mirror neurons  in generating empathy. Now there is more evidence that chemosensory information may be key.  Chemosensory processing has to do with the sensing of chemicals through smell. Chemosensory ability is an important but often neglected sense from a design standpoint unless of course you design fragrances or foods.

 Finished reading a study on chemosensory abilities that demonstrates using brain scans that we can detect the chemicals associated with fear/anxiety even though the sweat given off is indistinguishable from the smell of other sweats, such as sport sweat. Induction of Empathy by the Smell of Anxiety finds:

In sum, the processing of chemosensory anxiety signals engages significantly more neuronal resources than the chemosensory processing of sport sweat. The odors were hardly detectable and the odors could not be differentiated regarding their intensity, pleasantness, unpleasantness or familiarity. Accordingly, it is concluded that the human brain automatically guides physiological adjustments to chemosensory anxiety signals, without being dependent on conscious mediation. However, in contrast to other modalities, the physiological adjustments in response to chemosensory anxiety signals seem to be mainly related to an automatic contagion of the feeling. In other words, smelling the feelings of others could be termed as an incorporation of the chemical expressions and thus the feelings of others.

For the cognitive designer the implications are clear, don’t forget the nose when you are creating artifacts meant to inspire empathy in users.

I was sharing a story the other day about how I found that shower board from Lowes ($15 for a 4′x8 ‘sheet) can be used to make super cheap and giant white boards and a friend told me about IdeaPaint.  IdeaPaint is  a coating you can apply to any surface you would normally paint and turn it into a dry-erase surface.  It is a bit more expensive than my solution but far more interesting. Check out the photos below.

(more…)

Patterns play an important role in how minds work at many levels.  For example, our ability to recognize patterns is key in perception, thinking and creativity.  So it is no great leap to claim that designing for cognition requires an understanding of the patterns that turn our mental wheels.

But what is a pattern, where do we find them, and which types have the most cognitive impact and why? One answer I give in my cognitive design class is to look to nature – body curves, the golden ratio and crystalline structures invoke powerful cognitive effects. But why is that?

An intriguing explanation, at least for the golden ratio, has just been proposed. The golden ratio or divine proportion (because it appears everywhere) is a geometric relationship that invokes aesthetic pleasure and even awe. It shows up in nature (seashell spirals), art (Mona Lisa) and architecture (pyramids).   According to Adrian Bejan, a professor at Duke and father of constructal theory, we can most easily scan objects shaped after a golden ratio rectangle.  Those patterns are optimized for perception. Furthermore, the golden ratio is inherent in a deeper pattern in nature that unifies perception, cognition and locomotion so that it becomes more effective over time.

 “It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth,” he said. “The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature.”

You can find his paper here. The bottom line for cognitive designers is creating artifacts that are optimized for how the minds work will  in some cases turn on the golden ratio.

[click image for enlarged view & the link below for more info]

Making Meaning

The ScienceDaily blog reviews yet another new report on the incidental brain/cognitive training impact of playing video games. Racing, Shooting and Zapping your Way to Better Visual Skills, reports:

“According to a new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors, not only during game play, but in real-life situations as well.”

 And here is the skinny:

 Playing video games enhances performance on mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention.

In short,  playing the right type of video games strengthens visual cognition automatically or incidentally. What I would like to see is a study of these incidental brain training effects compared to those with software packages that have been explicitly engineered to improve visual cognition.

Cognitive designer’s delight in such examples because they show us how to create artifacts that naturally make users smarter.   Imagine remaking your product or service so that it naturally makes your customers smarter. In my workshop on cognitive design I show how you can do this with any product or service, even a paper clip.  Redesigning products and services to create a think-and-feel that incidentally build customer’s mental skills is a powerful way to use cognitive design to differentiate your offering.

Four new experimental studies confirm what many cognitive designers suspected – we are over confident when it comes to predicting our ability to control urges and impulses. Described in the research article, Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior, the authors get right to designable-insights:

“This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people’s self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior.”

 If you don’t have access to the journal, you can get more info in the blog post, Step Away from the Cookie Jar!

Be sure to test for the restraint bias in your next behavior change project.

Design a guided imagery experiment to reveal what people really think-and-feel 

 Figuring out what people really think and feel is the big problem in cognitive design. After all, most of what we know (memory) is implicit and cannot be readily called to mind and reported. Simply asking people what they think and feel fails to produce interesting results. That is why we do protocol studies, build prototypes and ask people to bring in pictures that resonate with them. All so we can play detective and try and infer what cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors and other implicit memories are beneath the surface driving thoughts and feelings.

 I was reading a post, Mind over Matter: Imagery in the Classroom, on the Eide Neurolearning Blog and it reminded me of powerful technique for getting at implicit or unconscious memories – mental imagery.  The post links to a chapter by Kosslyn and Moulton on Mental Imagery and Implicit Memory.  This is a must read for cognitive designers for several reasons.

 First, it provides ample scientific evidence for the claim that asking people to imagine doing something and reporting on the experience (a guided imagery experiment) is a powerful way to reveal how they really think about things.

More specifically, it argues how we simulate things in our mind (imagine doing and feeling things via imagination) provides many clues into the content of implicit memories. This make sense because in the absence of direct perception to guide our thinking we  must rely of what we assume to know, or what we know unconsciously to construct events, project behaviors and simulate feelings.

(more…)

Check out the paper, Designing for Doubt, that argues sensor-rich mobile phones can be used to design personal measurement instruments that will enable a powerful new wave of citizen science. Citizen science or “street science” involves the public in the collection and analysis of data to conduct large-scale professional grade scientific work.  With web-based crowdsoucring platforms it has seen considerable growth.  Add to that souped-up cell phones and you might change the game in how some of modern science is done.

 Designing such tools and platforms presents many challenges for the cognitive designer.  Chief among them is to insure the appropriate mental discipline when forming a hypothesis, collecting data, analyzing data and conducting other scientific activities by non-scientifically trained yet highly motivated citizens.