Cognitive Design

I am just starting a small project focusing on students sending and receiving off-topic text messages during class. This came about in part because of the series of posts on the Cognitive Design Blog about the topic. 

MSNBC posted the results of recent 269 student survey that had some interesting findings:

- 90% of the students text during class

- 50% claim it is easy to do

- 10% do it during exams

- 3% use texting to cheat

Some professors have instituted a no-texting policy resulting in a “zero” if caught. At least  one professor leaves the room when he detects texting. In another approach instructors ask students to bring phones and use them as a polling technology during the lecture. The resulting text messages are displayed on a screen and used to faciltate discussion.   This may or may not minimize off-topic texting by the same student group.

There is an important related issue.  Working adults frequently text, email or IM during business meetings.

How can we use cognitive design to approach texting off-topic during class?

I am often asked by clients and students how cognitive design can be used to improve the effectiveness of coaching.  Or more specifically, what findings from cognitive science can help us coach employees in the workplace, patients in healthcare and students in the classroom more effectively?

These are important questions as coaching programs have sprung up everywhere, are deeply entangled in cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) and don’t always produce the outcomes we want.

So I am always on the look out for good scientific studies that have designable insights for improving the coaching process. Take for example, the work at Case Western Reserve University that clearly demonstrates Coaching with Compassion can Light up Human Thoughts.  Researchers are using brain scanning to study the neural signatures of different coaching styles and their impacts on outcomes.  A key finding:

 ”Boyatzis, a faculty member at Weatherhead School of Management, and Jack, director of the university’s Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab, say coaches should seek to arouse a Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA), which causes positive emotion and arouses neuroendocrine systems that stimulate better cognitive functioning and increased perceptual accuracy and openness in the person being coached, taught or advised. Emphasizing weaknesses, flaws, or other shortcomings, or even trying to “fix” the problem for the coached person, has an opposite effect.”

Perhaps not so surprising to folks that are good at coaching.  But the fact is we normally coach using a Negative Emotional Attractor by focusing on what is wrong and trying to “fix” the person.

Coaching, according to this study, tends to produce the best outcomes when the person being coached feels inspired and compassion flowing from the person doing the coaching.

“By spending 30 minutes talking about a person’s desired, personal vision, we could light up (activate) the parts of the brain 5-7 days later that are associated with cognitive, perceptual and emotional openness and better functioning,” Boyatzis said. 

You still provide corrective suggestions as a coach but you must do so from a genuine sense of compassion versus critical judgement.  Coaching is framed in terms of making changes to achieve the individual’s dreams and ambitions. It is grounded in a caring, empathetic and emotional intelligent interaction between parties. It is not technical compliance with the duties of some formally specified coaching process.

Our minds open to influence in the presence of an informed, caring voice that has our best interests at heart.   Compassionate coaches, just like compassionate leaders, doctors or teachers, will be the most effective in changing how we feel, think and behave.

To tackle coaching from a cognitive design perspective we must first discover, cultivate and unleash compassion for helping others. Without that, what follows will fail to light up our brains.

Effective disease management programs are a cornerstone for any serious attempt to improve the cost and quality of healthcare in the US. These programs target chronic conditions such as congestive health failure and diabetes and provide services to insure compliance with best practices by clinicians and patients alike. The goal is to improve outcomes, avoid hospitalization and eliminate unnecessary cost.  As most of our healthcare dollars are tied up in chronic conditions, effective disease management programs are a must have.

But how do you design an effective disease management program (DMP)? That question was asked and answered in a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly.  The researchers studied programs that worked and programs that failed in several countries and found:

“Five traits seemed to be the most important in ensuring that DMPs meet their goals: program size, simplicity of design, a focus on patients’ needs, the ability to collect data easily and analyze results, and the presence of incentives that encourage all stakeholders to comply with the program.”

Although these traits seem basic (and they are), there  are some details especially relevant for cognitive designers.

For example, decreasing cognitive load is key. Under simplicity the cognitive load is decreased in the program by avoiding complicated care pathways that have been customized for multiple sub-groups of patients.  While under the patient need trait it is lowered by avoiding the use of complex technologies to monitor and report results.  Also under patient needs care was taken to support the cognition of self-regulation:

“The patients are given ongoing, disease-specific coaching to maximize their ability to care for themselves”

A careful reading of the article reveals other cognitive factors that help drive the success of disease management programs.   It is not surprising that cognitive factors play a key role but it is very useful to see the details revealed in a empirical study.

Bracelets are the rage when it comes to cognitive design. I can get a bracelet to show solidarity with a cause (e.g. cancer awareness), help me change my behaviors and habits, to act as a reminder, to provide medical alerts, to friend someone and assist with other cognition intense goals and activities.

A reader recently sent a link to a story about how the Braille Bracelet won the 2010 People’s Choice design award.

The bracelet is designed to support the process of learning to read braille. Each tile has an engraved letter of the English alphabet on one side and the corresponding braille symbol on the other side.  It is a wrist-side guide for translation that is also very stylish.

Reading is a powerful and much used cognitive process.  We use it to communicate, learn and have fun. It involves perception, pattern recognition, language comprehension and other mental processes. The experience of reading is strongly shaped by how knowledge is structured – story, book, memo, billboard, etc.

We can improve how well and fast we read through training. Much has been learned about the cognitive science of reading over the last 25 years.  A number of technological innovations ebooks, e-readers, Google books and tablet computers has finally positioned the book for reinvention.

For example, IDEO has presented three interesting iPad-based concepts in The Future of the Book:

Nelson – Topic content is organized in information layers including time, impact, fact check, discussions and recent media coverage

Coupland -  Reading materials is organized around who is reading what in your social or professional network

Alice – A narrative reading experience that is shaped by user interaction.

Each of these concepts satisfies a different cognitive need by changing how I read.  Nelson satisfies my need for completeness, Coupland my need to know what others know and Alice my desire to co-create the story.

There are other ongoing attempts to reinvent thn e book to change how we read and satisfy cognitive needs in new ways. For example,  Flatworld offers the remixable textbook so instructors cacustomize content and students can engage in social learning.   Knowledge cards (my own effort) seeks to reorganize the content of books into a set of linked cards designed to translate concepts into new habits and accelerate behavior change.

No matter, the timing is right to rethink how we structure and deliver knowledge in books to support, accelerate and even integrate with the psychological (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) needs of readers.  Given the central role it plays in our mental life, even a small improvement in the cognition of reading could have strong society-wide implications.

Looking forward to hearing from readers that have cognitive design ideas for shifting how we read books to change the world.

David Rose gave a very interesting talk on how to change behavior at Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Healthcare.  He found (through 10 years of work) that if we scrap the right information off the screens of our computers, smart phones and tablets and make it available in everyday objects behaviors will change.  This allows us to monitor things we are interested in – stock market, weather, our health- more frequently with very little cognitive load. It also means creating a special purpose device or remaking existing objects so that they are capable of information display. He calls these enchanted objects:

“The best metaphor that’s really driven me over the last 10 years or so is the idea of the “enchanted object.” This is the next logical step from Ishii’s “Things That Think” concept of ubiquitous computing: the functionality of computation and the representation of information and of communication will be embedded in many everyday objects. They will seem to be a little bit magical—delightfully easy to use and adding value to our lives a little bit at a time.”

One example, covered previously on the the Cognitive Design blog is GlowCaps or remade drug bottle caps that flash and play a ringtone when you need to take a med, automatically reorders and sends email alerts and reports to doctors and family members all designed to maximize medication compliance.

Other examples include – displays at bus stops that shows when the next bus is due to arrive, umbrellas that beep when rain is likely and a personal orb that glows to deliverable a signal the is customized to your behavior change needs.

Sometimes in my cognitive design class I will ask students to identify one picture that produces a big cognitive impact on them. I create a collage of the results and then we figure out as a group what is happening to produce the impact.

The exercises always produces a lot of energetic discussion and personal reflection on what makes the mind work. Occasionally we get some insights that are useful for project work.

Last time I did this a student suggested forming a Flickr group and throwing this task out to the crowd. Thought that was a great idea and found an existing group that fits the bill. Check out ThinkPhotos.  Upload what you have and offer comments on why you think the others photos may be turning mental gears.

In my neighborhood you will see signs in some yards with kids in an action pose running toward the street.  The signs are part of a campaign to get folks to drive more safely. The images are very life-like. I have often wondered (as a cognitive designer) what could be done to maximize their effectiveness.

Recently, I received some photos from the The Crowski in Lafayette that might begin to suggest an answer.   It turns out the city of Vancouver is painting a special image of a little girl chasing a ball in the middle of the street as part of a drive safe campaign.  The image is special as it looks three dimensional (3D) when you are close.  For quick introduction check out, Vancouver Uses Image of Girl to Slow Drivers.

From a distance the image looks like a blob.  As you approach, it slowly emerges in 3D as a little girl chasing the ball.  The goal is to increase driver vigilance but not cause people to swerve or slam on their brakes.  A post on Preventable.CA  provides more details:

“* The 2D decal gradually appears 3D to drivers approaching the image. A risk assessment of this project shows that drivers do not mistake this image for a real girl and can see the image 100 feet away. The image does not “jump-out” at drivers and there is no “startling effect”, the road conditions on 22nd Street are very good for this project, which is precisely why this location was selected.  Sight lines are perfect northbound along the road and to the cross streets.  Although the community continuously grapples with unsafe driving behaviours in this particular school zone, twenty-second (22nd) Street in West Vancouver has a very good vehicle crash record.”

What do you think?

Systems that remotely monitor the movements, weight, blood pressure, compliance with medication schedules and other daily behaviors of older adults are springing up. For children with older parents experiencing failing health such systems mean high-tech eldercare from afar. For the parents it means a chance to age in place.

Take for example, the BeClose system.

Add some smart software into the mix as they do in the QuietCare system and you can infer a lot about what is going on:

“Have they gotten out of bed in the morning?

Have they navigated the bathroom safely?

Have they eaten?

Have they taken their medicine?

What’s their overall activity level?

Are they sleeping well?”

But technology is only part of the story. Successful deployment and use requires close attention to human factors and good cognitive design.   A recent article in the New York Times brings this to a sharp point:

“Many of the systems are godsends for families. But, as with any parent-child relationship, all loving intentions can be tempered by issues of control, role-reversal, guilt and a little deception — enough loaded stuff to fill a psychology syllabus. For just as the current population of adults in their 30s and 40s have built a reputation for being a generation of hyper-involved, hovering parents to their own children, they now have the tools to micro-manage their aging mothers and fathers as well.”

The article makes the point that remote monitoring eldercare systems are meeting cognitive needs on both sides of the fence:

In addition to giving him peace of mind that his mother is fine, the system helps assuage that midlife sense of guilt. “I have a large amount of guilt,” Mr. Murdock admitted. “I’m really far away. I’m not helping to take care of her, to mow her lawn, to be a good son.”

The article does a good job of raising some of the key cognitive design issues but it is far from clear how they can be resolved.

MIT’s journal, Sloan Management Review, has an outstanding article that highlights why we must do cognitive design to get excellent customer service. The article, Designing for the Softer Side of Customer Service,  demonstrates how three psychological variables – trust, emotions and feelings of control shape the modern service experience.  They provide a good theoretical frame, new research and many specific suggestions such as:

“Service providers should categorize events based on the type of emotion and the source. When negative events are caused by the company, quick recovery is vital. When they are caused by external agents, the company can generate good will by either being supportive when the emotions are negative or celebrating with the customer when the emotions are positive”.

Interested to hear from readers that have implemented service innovations designed to leverage  trust, emotions or feelings of control.