They have received $542M in start-up funds to bring magic back into the world….
“Using our Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™, imagine being able to generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world.”
Mana for Cognitive Designers!
In cognitive design we create artifacts that generate specific mental states when seen or used. In addition to core functionality and ease of use, cognitive designs reliably deliver a particular think-and-feel experience. Retro car designs that invoke nostalgia, educational events that generate wonder and websites that help you forge deep personal relationships with others are examples.
But designing think-and-feel experiences that meet deeply felt psychological needs is hard. One reason is that you must understand what other people really think and feel. And that requires something that business have not normally focused on – empathy.
But all that seems to be changing. According to a recent column by Geoff Colvin in Fortune, Employers are Looking for New Hires With Something Extra: Empathy. The author did a quick online search for jobs paying over $100K involving empathetic traits and got a thousand hits with positions from firms ranging from McKinsey to Mars. Brad Smith, CEO of Inuit (a $4B software company) hits it on the head:
Designing emotion into the product is now something you really have to think about explicitly and measure yourself against”.
This is a big claim from a technology company and one that signals cognitive design is starting to move into the mainstream.
Bullying is a big problem in the US. It happens in schools, at work, on the internet, at home and in the community. Studies indicated that approximately 30% of US students are bullies or victims.
As the focus of cognitive design is to address deeply felt but unmet psychological needs, bullying is definitely a relevant challenge. Not only to help victims cope and ultimately forgive but to help design interventions that have the best chance of preventing bullying in the first place.
October is National Bullying Prevention Month and to help celebrate it Routledge has publish some free articles into the nature of the problem that are full of insights for cognitive designers.
I hope readers of the Cognitive Design blog will take up the challenge.
In cognitive design we look for specific features and functions that reliably produce a given psychological impact or mental state. For example, the facial features of big round eyes, a prominent forehead and pudgy cheeks generates the psychological response that what we see is cute, adorable and even squeezable.
I have cataloged 310 such design patterns and the theories behind them. But I am always on the lookout for more. A new entry I am considering is based on the research, Rituals Enhance Consumption, recently reported in Psychological Science.
The researchers conducted four experiments that suggest adding rituals and delays to food consumption more deeply involves us in the experience of eating and has a significant impact on how much flavor and enjoyment we experience. And the rituals do not need to be complex. Here is what they used:
“Without unwrapping the chocolate bar, break it in half. Unwrap half of the bar and eat it. Then, unwrap the other half and eat it.”
Of course, the experimental situation is contrived and so applying this result requires establishing a personal ritual. Personal rituals have meaning and create a state of mindfulness and thus enhance the experience. But how do we break that down into the features and functions of a design pattern? Saying we need to ritualize is too vague.
Every year organizations and individuals spend billions of dollars and countless hours to develop soft-skills. These include personal productivity and interpersonal skills such as communication, teamwork, creativity, assertiveness, influence, self control, time management and the ability to work well under pressure. Often developing soft-skills are part of a larger attempt to build even broader competencies in areas such as leadership, innovation, emotional intelligence or personal effectiveness.
Building soft-skills means reading how-to books, taking seminars, being coached and doing developmental exercises or projects. While such efforts can lead to increased motivation and conceptual knowledge they often fail to produce behavior change and improved business or personal outcomes. I have dramatized the situation for a hypothetical training class below.
While most participants in the training class will give high marks to the experience (happy! score on evaluations) and pass a quiz demonstrating conceptual knowledge, few will achieve lasting behavior change that translates into improved organizational or personal outcomes (e.g. increased sales or weight loss).
The question is what are the people at the lower right of this graph doing that others are not?
They are showing a positive deviance that we need to understand. They have mastered a technique or small set of vital behaviors for converting general advice and how-to knowledge that they glean from reading and training into new outcomes. If we can understand and replicate that we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the impact of our investment in soft-skills.
I have conduct several studies aimed at answering that question. The results are clear. People getting the most out of soft-skill development efforts are able to take the macro-scale concepts and techniques taught in books and seminars and break them down down into small short experiments they can try in a real setting on a regular or daily basis. In short, they are natural born micro-learners or they have coaches that are.
I am going to discuss these studies and how we can use the results to improve the impact of soft-skills development at the Online Learning Conference in Chicago that runs September 17-19 at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. I will be doing three speed sharing best practice sessions on Thursday morning 8:15-9:00 am. You can access the supporting handout HERE.
Hope to see you there.
The Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX) is hosting an open innovation challenge to identify radical ideas (hacks) and success stories that illustrate how to dramatically expand the leadership capacity of an organization. Called the Leaders Everywhere Challenge they believe the key is to redistribute power so more individuals can participate in leadership and to equip and motivate emergent leaders to be effective without formal authority.
My entry is titled Using Micro-learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders. It demonstrates with a success story how you can use cognitive design to do interesting things in leadership development. Check it out and please leave your comments. I’ve copied an extend summary below.
Innocentive has four open challenges that have a strong cognitive design component.
There is a call for a crowd-funded project to reduce tobacco consumption worldwide. P&G has requested proposals for disruptive new products in multiple categories. There is $2000 prize for the best idea on how to use data about the state of your house (from utilities, devices and sensors, etc.) to create useful and exciting consumer services. And another $2000 prize for figuring out how the PC should evolve in the next 3-5 years. Entries are due late in May.
Focusing on design concepts that are optimized for how our minds naturally work (as cognitive designers do) will lead to strong entries in each of these areas. I hope you are up for the challenge!
The National Science Foundation (NSF) convened an international panel of experts and held a workshop to explore scientifically validated game designs that boost attention and well-being. The finding are encouraging.
They claim there is ample evidence that some types of video games enhance attention and executive control which in turn can improve self-regulation and well-being.
We also have a long-way to go before we understand how to design interactive media for specific cognitive effects. The panel cited research that showed many serious games (those designed to purposes other than education) failed to produce the desired outcomes. While at the same time some produce widespread unintended but fortunately positive effects. The panel called for more research into the cognitive impacts of specific game mechanics, a focus on social/emotional skills and individual differences as well as improved validation and commercialization methods.
The full report is worth reading for cognitive designers working on game, interactive media, self-control or well-being applications.
In an earlier post I described enhancing well-being as one of the grand challenges of cognitive design. I received emails and comments asking for more detail. Fortunately, the Society of Personality and Social Psychology just held an annual meeting that highlighted some relevant findings. Researchers reported on several surprising connections between actions and well-being including:
* Getting a good night sleep enhances our ability to feel gratitude and other prosocial emotions which is essential for well-being.
* Spending money on others or even giving money (and time away) enhance our sense of wealth and contributes to a sense of well-being.
* Buying experiences (e.g. going to a concert) rather than something material (e.g. a new shirt) and telling stories about it enhances our sense of well-being.
Designs that maximize the psychological effects of being well-rested, generate a wealth effect from giving, and help us savor experiential purchases are examples of some of the cognitive effects we can consider when designing for well-being. Once we reach a basic level of health, wealth and happiness further enhancing well-being requires some real insight into how minds actually work.
