Cognitive Design

Converse has set up a mass customization capability for their shoes. Working from their website you can design your own shoe and get one or more pairs in just 4-6 weeks. You can control shoe type and color/print on many parts of the shoe including toe, outside body, sole, lace, tongue, stitching and so on.   You can even add text.

There is enough flexibility to create some truly distinctive effects. For cognitive designers, this could be an opportunity to test ideas about how to create a specific think-and-feel via shoe designs. For example, can you design shoes that would cause people to reminisce, give thanks, feel centered or experience other specific mental states? Try it out.  If you do try it out be sure to share your results. I am especially interested in thoughts on how to link shoe parts to color/patterns to generate specific thoughts and feelings.

Core77 has a post on the results of the betacup competition. A $20,000 open innovation design contest to develop a way to eliminate paper coffee cup waste.  According to the post we generate some 58 million cups a year which tend to end up in landfills.  The goal is to design something to change our behavior from using paper coffee cups to doing something else that still gives us coffee but avoids the environmental impact. The tag line is to drink sustainably.

The winner is the Karma Cup - “A chalkboard sitting by the register. Every guest who uses a reusable mug marks the chalkboard. Every 10th guest receives a free item.” 

A great example of an attempt to use ordinary materials to create extra ordinary behavior change. But will it work? From a cognitive design perspective do you expect the Karma cup to produce lasting behavior change in coffee drinkers?

The Scientific American has an excellent article on Alcoholics Anonymous as it celebrates its 75th year. The article highlights success stats. Not surprising the ability to stay sober correlates to the number of meetings you attend and how long you stay with the program. To quote:

 ”Of those who dropped out of A.A. after the first year, only 43 percent were still sober at year five. Of those who went to 60 meetings a year 73 percent continued to abstain. And 79 percent of those who attended 200 meetings annually had gone into remission by year five. Maybe most surprising, is that 61% of those who attended 200 meetings in their first year but dropped down to six meetings in year five, were still able to stay dry.”

 Staying sober is a powerful behavior change. AA’s 12 guiding principles warrant serious study by cognitive designers working in any area of behavior change.

I hate math. Google that phrase and you will find a large number of groups, sites, books, articles, posts and images that celebrate the hatred of mathematics in the US.   The obvious cause of this is that we teach (or try to teach) a lot of math to many students in the US. It is required.  For most people math (or the way it is taught) does not fit how their minds naturally work. There is a strong mismatch between how we think and mathematical reasoning. Forcing it, in public, for a grade leads to negative and sometimes even traumatic experiences and ultimately anxiety.  Such anxiety is why we hate math.

Resolving math anxiety is definitely a cognitive design problem (one of the more important ones) so I am always on the look out for new scientific studies that provide designable insights into it.

Take for example the interesting post on the BrainBlogger, Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Effects Female Students, that suggests math anxiety might be contagious. To quote:

 ”A new study done on elementary school children suggests that a female teacher’s attitude to mathematics affects the performance of her female students. In the study, the more anxious teachers were about math, the lower the math achievement of female students. Moreover, girls who believed in traditional gender ability beliefs such as “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading,” had significantly lower achievement in math at the end of the school year than girls who did not and boys overall. This relationship between the teachers math anxiety and students performance was absent at the beginning of the school year when teachers did not have ample time with the students to affect their performance. It was evident only at the end of the school year. Thus, teachers with high math anxiety specifically affect girls’ math achievement, by influencing girls’ gender-related beliefs about who is good at math.”

Given that females teach most of the elementary school math in the US this could be an important source of the problem.  As the author states later in the post “more care needs to be taken to develop positive math attitudes in these educators.” I agree. But exactly how do we do that? Can we leverage anxiety into empathy?

For the record, I do not hate math.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor from Emory University has published a new book, Staring, How We Look, that is loaded with cognitive design insights. Some examples:

* Unpredictable sights cause us to stare and we both crave and dread them.

* We stare as a show of dominance, to flirt, and as an automatic reaction to unexpected sights (response to novelty).

* Those people and scenes that are visually unique (from very attractive to physically deformed or disturbing) can have a special influence over our thoughts and behaviors including attraction-repulsion, obligation, buying behavior and the like.

* As a response to novelty staring can cause a dopamine release.

The book includes 13 chapters looking at the why, what and where of staring. Check out this YouTube video introduction or press release.  You can get some of the content for free on Google books.

Bottled water is a bit of a mystery. Its use has exploded and it is mainly purchased by people that have a nearly free source of water in their homes.  We are paying a lot for something that is nearly free.

I have long argued that the popularity of bottled water stems from satisfying a cognitive need that tap water from our homes does not. And I am not talking about portability.  An interesting new book by Peter Gelick, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, puts some teeth behind that argument.

Gelick, a renown water expert, drives down into the history, science and current use of bottled water to reveal the primary cause, namely our belief that bottled water will make us “healthier, skinnier, or more popular.” 

There is little or no science to support this. The benefits of bottled water like the benefits of a new book on a fad diet or the purchase of a lottery ticket lie mainly in the hopefulness they make us feel.  In short, the value is derived nearly exclusively from the mental state (think-and-feel) created by its use.  A clear case of cognitive design in action.

Designing artifacts that help us sustain positive behavior change is a grand challenge problem for cognitive design.  Often what is required is a wrap-around or makeover of a new technology or intervention that is failing to produce the behavior change that was expected.  Take for example, electronic health records. Just implementing the technology does not lead to the changes in clinical and patient behavior needed to improved safety, better health outcomes and more efficient operations.

For a more global example, consider the new technologies for personal energy management. I will save energy and help the environment (lower carbon emissions) if I know more about how much energy I am using, which appliances are using it efficiently or not and how my consumption compares to others in my neighborhood and various social networks.

The New Scientist has an excellent article, Innovation: Only Mind Games will make us save power, that discusses these new technologies and the psychology that surrounds them.  The author describes both wrap-around and makeover designs that are emerging and offers some insights into the mind of consumers when it comes to saving energy. The insights include:

-  Economic savings are too small to motivate behavior change

-  Peer pressure is a relevant motivator. “We turn off the lights because we think others do”.

- Information about about energy use can help shift behaviors especially if it is personalized. One study indicated behavior change went from 5% to 80% when personalized information is used.

- Peer pressure and personalized information are not enough, producing only a 2-3% energy reduction when at least 10 times that is required.

- It may be necessary to use smart meters that monitor the environment and automatically adjust consumption and communicate with energy suppliers. See for example, the Adaptive Occupancy Control Technology.

The article cautions that these findings are based on a few preliminary studies and more research is required.   Hopefully, some of that research will have a stronger cognitive design bent. More specifically, we need to  explore how to apply related design patterns (e.g. successful behavior change efforts to make driving safer) and define better ways of creating mental energy (meaning, emotion, pleasure, etc.) to trade for behaviors that save energy in the home and lower carbon emissions.

A one-day symposium, Headspace, was held in New York to explore the broad design implications of scent. Seed magazine covers it with a  great slide show, The Scent of Design.  It is worth a look from a cognitive design standpoint. One item that caught my interest:

Yuka Hiyoshi and Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck worked with thier perfume team to explore the profound connections between memories and scents. They decided to craft odors based upon the concept of “threshold moments”—life experiences that are at once deeply personal and yet collectively shared by nearly all people. Hiyoshi and Birsel’s objects are designed to fit in the palm of your hand, playing on the powerful capacity of scent to capture a specific moment in time.

These threshold moment are birth babyhood, puberty, sex, partnership, empty nest and death.  The objects are pebbles and prototypes are shown below.

Getting folks with diabetes to regularly monitor their blood glucose level is a major design challenge, especially for children. Why not make it fun and exciting to do? That is what DIDGET a relatively new blood glucose monitoring device promises to do.

The monitor docks with a Nintendo DS gaming system and converts glucose monitoring results into points. With the points you unlock new levels and buy items in the game. You are rewarded just for monitoring and even more for keep your glucose in the right range. In principle, this is a cognitive design master stroke!

Check out Kelly McGonigal’s blog, Science of Willpower: Secretes for Self-Control without the Suffering. She is a mind-body psychologist and health educator at Standford. She teaches Psychology 205, a very popular course on the science of willpower.

Her blog is filled with posts that should be of interest to cognitive designers working on problems in self-regulation and behavior change. Take for example the post, New Research Roundup on Contributing Factors in Obesity. She looks at three factors including:

This article by Olivia Judson details several recent studies showing how the body shuts down when you sit down. Sit at a desk all day, or watch three hours of TV at night, and it doesn’t even matter if you squeeze in an hour of exercise. A full hour! Every day! It’s not enough to counter the metabolic disaster of being sedentary the rest of the day. That’s right, even people trying to do the right thing have the deck stacked against them.

This has clear and novel implications for anyone designing obesity management programs.