Cognitive Design

A primary thrust in cognitive design is creating artifacts that put consumers and employees in a specific frame of mind – feeling pride, experiencing joy, luxuriating, savoring and so on.  Designing a specific think-and-feel into an existing product can produce a real differentiating effect and even contribute to competitive advantage.

For example, in the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, Jenny Cordina and others argue in The Role of Emotions in Buying Health Insurance, that the key to winning in the health insurance business is designing products and services that give consumers peace of mind.  Specifically they write:

“ Consumers shopping for health insurance today face more choice, complexity, and financial exposure than ever before. In an increasingly uncertain world, what they are really seeking is peace of mind in their choices. Insurers that address the emotional needs and biases embedded in the typical consumer’s behavior will be successful in creating and distributing effective products, earning the consumers’ trust, providing a more satisfying shopping experience, and, ultimately, helping consumers better manage their health.”

A clear illustration of the fundamental importance of designing for how people think and feel in today’s economy. 

Tuberculosis (TB) infects and kills millions of people every year around the globe. TB can be neutralized by a 6-month long daily regiment of antibiotics. But people still die, not so much because they cannot get the drug (even in poorer countries) but because they fail to comply with medication regiment. They don’t take the meds regularly enough for them to be effective.

An innovative solution (and excellent example of cognitive design) based on Take TB Meds, Get Mobile Minutes has been field tested in Nicaragua. Here is how it works: 

“To get around that problem, Jose Gomez-Marquez, program director for IIH, and his collaborators developed a simple paper-based diagnostic that detects metabolites of the TB drug in urine. The papers are dispensed from a device every 24 hours; when the diagnostic comes in contact with patients’ urine, the metabolite reacts with chemicals embedded in the paper. That reaction reveals a code, which the patient then texts to a central database every day. Those who take the drugs consistently for 30 days are rewarded with cell-phone minutes.”  

I am part of a small team of cognitive designers working on a similar concept for improving foot care for high-risk diabetes patients here in the US.   (more…)

Attracting, retaining, developing and getting the most out of today’s knowledge workers is the number one priority for most employers. This is the central challenge for cognitive designers focused on organizational issues.

The idea is simple.  If I can understand how minds (individual, group and even machine) really work then I should be able to design a workplace to maximize a return on/for talent.  

So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into the cognition of workplace and service productivity.  One such insight can be found in the article Three Lessons for Creating Flourishing, that summarizes several keynotes from  the 2nd Applied Positive Psychology Conference.  

Pay special attention to the second lesson that discusses a case study by Aviva, a large insurance company.  They use a strength-based approach rather than a competency-based approach to human resource management and have produce some impressive results.

The insight is to hire people “made for the job” (uncompromising match to their core strengthens) rather than hiring someone that can do the job and emphasizing skill and competency development.   

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I was talking with a group of educators the other day and they were explaining how pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are becoming popular in their field. The idea is that we give students money, prizes or tokens to engage in and perform well in the learning process. 

As a cognitive designer this caught my attention –  How do extrinsic rewards support or enhance the cognition of learning? 

There is literature on the issue but it is mixed. A recent article in the New York Times, Rewards for Students Under A Microscope,  offers a brief review and confirms what I heard – the question stirs a lot of emotion and programs that pay for performance are growing at a rapid rate.   According to the article, 

“Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.”

And some are showing some interesting results.

But others are failing….  

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With President Obama’s signature on the stimulus bill we have decided to spend some $19B to scale up the use of electronic medical records (EMR) software across the nation.  This might not be good news.  According to a recent study by the National Research Council the current products and implementation approaches fail to provide the “cognitive support” needed to improve clinical outcomes and administrative efficiencies. 

Scaling up current EMRs will likely not produce the benefits we need to improve healthcare in the US.   We must redesign the EMR so that it supports the cognition of clinicians and behavior change in patients if we want a return from our national investment.   A true challenge for a cognitive designer!  In answer, I have developed a position paper describing the motivation, principles, building blocks and economics of a redesigned EMR or EMR 2.0.  

You can review the full paper or a one-page executive summary.

We need to move quickly if an EMR 2.0 – designed for how minds naturally work – is to be ready for the first round of stimulus incentives in 2011.   I am currently selling this vision, building a business case, recruiting a team and seeking funding to build a prototype.   Should you have any interest or comments drop me a note at mark.k.clare@gmail.com

There are literally hundreds of books, software packages and tools designed to help you manage your money more effectively. Most of them don’t work very well for many people.  They fail because they involve a lot of up front learning and setup, are often very hard to use, require constant updating, results can be complex or confusing and in general they don’t really provide the type of cognitive support we need to do personal money management. 

One exception stands out and that is mint.com. The product is an outstanding example of cognitive design or designing for how our minds naturally work.   Not only is set-up a snap, but you get an integrated view of your finances that is automatically updated, the ability to view and benchmark spending in many categories and specific advice (with $ amounts) on how to manage your money more effectively.  

You can watch a video of how it works here. Or just try it out – it is free.  They are adding some 3000 new users everyday.

Now all we need is something similar for managing personal health. 

Here is a s short video on the science of cute that lists five infantile features that cause us to see something as cute. These include disproportionately large heads, large low set eyes, button nose, soft round bodies and a waddling gate.

You will find these features being used in a wide variety of artifacts – toys, characters, emoticons, service robots, etc. in a way meant to invoke a parental instinct.     

 The spirit of cognitive design is that a little bit of insight into how our minds actually work can profoundly reshape the products and services we sell, the social programs we invest in and even how we manage our organizations.  Indeed, designing for how minds work is a major driver of innovation for the 21st century. 

Take for example the idea of spaced learning and the novel approach to teaching that supports it.  In this approach learning material is presented or studied three times for 20 minutes and each repetition is separated by a 10 minute gap (or space) filled with physical activity.   

Learning that is spaced in this way is based on a recent finding from cognitive science that shows long-term memories form best when the network of nuerons encoding the memory is switched on and off multiple times.  The key is the time gap or space between stimulations. Doing physical activity (e.g. juggling) instead of another learning task insures that the network is switched off.  

The poster child for success with this approach is Monkseaton High School in the UK.  Their website has a great overview on spaced learning and the success of their program was recently highlighted in this blog post. There are even interviews on the book, Making Minds, which explores the implications of spaced learning for education.  

When creating training and development programs designers must pay special attention to cognition. Being frustrated during learning or stressed during a thinking task can be tuned to impede cognitive performance or actually accelerate it.  A recent neuroimaging study performed at Rockefeller University offers some specific advice.   The study found that prolonged stress (over a period of a month), as measured by perceived stress scale, sharply decreases performance on attention-shifting tasks but does not impair performance on response-reversal tasks. 

IDEO has launched an interesting blog that reveals some of the details of a design deep dive. 

“Welcome to the blog for an open project between Bug Labs and IDEO! Whether you’re a prototyping professional or amateur gadget enthusiast you’ve probably heard about the BUG hardware platform. We’re thrilled to be working with Bug Labs to make this great product even better. We are also prototyping a new, open way of working that we hope will combine the expertise of Bug Labs engineers, IDEO designers, and the BUG community throughout the design process.” 

To learn from it I suggest you learn a bit about BUGbase and then go to the first blog post and work your way forward.