Cognitive Design

Research into what makes us happy and why has exploded over the last 10 year.  Books, conferences and even dedicated journals on happiness have been cranked out in ever increasing numbers.  It can be a little confusing. What do we really know about happiness? I have been careful on this blog to discuss only those results that have clear implications for design and are rooted in evidence.  After all, happiness is a major challenge for the cognitive designer.

PsychCentral recently reported on 5 Reliable Finding From Happiness Research. Although we have touch on them in other posts, it is an excellent summary highlighting:

1. Experience not things makes us happy

2. Relationships are the key to happiness

3. Once you reach a certain income level more money does not mean more happiness

4. Windfalls such as winning a lottery do NOT create lasting happiness

5. Half the factors that determine happiness are under your control.

Points 1 and 5  justify taking a cognitive design approach to happiness.  Points 2, 3 and 4 give general but important guidance to creating specific designs for happiness.

A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that reliably cause a specific “think and feel” or mental state in the people that interact with them. The UK’s Design Council has taken on just such a task in trying to redesign the hospital environment to improve a patient’s sense of dignity. The program is bearing fruit including new designs for reclining day chairs, room screens, beds, gowns, washroom pods and other components.

My hope is to push behind these designs to understand if and how they modeled the cognition of dignity. In the meantime, you can follow the link above to videos on each of the results or just look at the photos on the next page.

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The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

The cognition behind completing other people’s sentences is decisively explored in the article, Predicting Syntax  published in the March Issue of the Journal Language. The article argues our ability to predict what others are going to say comes from knowledge of linguistic probabilities that in turn are developed through day-to-day experience with language. We have knowledge of most probable phrases in a wide variety of contexts and use that knowledge to do many things including completing other peoples sentences.

Discovering the “probable phrases” at work in a given context should provide important insights for guiding all sorts of cognitive design efforts.  A few are mentioned in a press release by the Linguistic Society of America:

“This intrinsic ability to predict based on probability has implications for language comprehension. Educators engaged in foreign language instruction might effectively focus their initial efforts on the most probable sentence constructions. Entrepreneurs engaged in marketing their products or services might use the most probable phrases in preparing their advertising messages. These research findings on linguistic probability may also be helpful in making computerized language more natural. Another practical application would be in the refinement of tools used in profiling and diagnosing those with language disorders. As noted by the authors in an interview, “Linguistic patterns are important in predicting comprehension. If we can make better use of these patterns to enhance comprehension, then we can improve people’s ability to understand one another.” 

Interested to hear from readers that have suggestions for how we can discover probable phrases during the design process.

If you see a problem in your neighborhood, or anywhere for that matter, and want to take low-hassle but decisive action, the new site  SeeClickFix might be for you. The site is  a distributed sensing and community problem solving application.  It is a great platform not only for citizens that want to report and track issues (and watch areas) but governments, community agencies or other groups that want to mobilize and involve their constituents.   

Working for a difficult boss is a big challenge. Working for a bullying, abusive or aggressive boss can be a nightmare.   Dealing with such difficult relationships is in fact a cognitive design problem.  Toxic relationships are most often rooted in unmet cognitive (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) needs.  

Discovering the unmet needs is the first step in designing a fix. A new article on Strategy+Business,  The Real Reason Your Boss is a Bully, offers some interesting insight. They bypass the often quoted psychological needs of ambition and need to feel powerful to get to a much more widespread issue:

“In fact, the authors conclude that aggressive behavior on the part of managers is often the result of self-recognized incompetence; in other words, vindictive bosses may be in over their heads — and their feelings of inadequacy cause them to take out their frustrations on subordinates.”

This finding clearly outlines the aggressive manager’s unmet cognitive needs.

With all the computing power in your car why don’t we treat it as another mobile computing platform?  Although this raises potential safety concerns it also creates the possibility of meeting the cognitive needs of drivers in new ways to improve safety, fuel efficiency and the quality of the driving experience.

 The Technology Review reports that this idea is about to get some legs. In  Creating Apps Just for Cars they describe a new class-based collaboration between Ford and the University of Michigan. The idea is that student teams with  conceive, design and prototype mobile apps for use in cars. 

 [Source: New Course - Cloud Computing in the Commute]

The goal is to avoid simply porting existing mobile apps and to develop ones that uniquely meet the needs of drivers. According to the article:

We’re not interested in apps that could be running on your smart phone and moving it into your car,” says Noble. Instead, the students are developing unique apps, such as a “green mileage” application, or a crowd-sourced app to track road conditions and traffic. “The challenge is to find a killer app and then build it,” Noble says. 

I am very interested in hearing about ideas for “killer apps” from readers, especially ones that make use of cognitive design principles.

Clients often ask for advice on how to apply cognitive design to the challenge of group decision-making.  A common request is for interventions that get individuals to contribute more and avoid group think. How can we productively unleash the individual?

One approach is understand the individual and social cognition of conformity and design interventions and interactions that soften it.

For specific evidence-based clues on how to do that check out, Conformity: Ten Timeless Influencers. The author does an excellent job summarizing some of the literature.  Key point have clear design implications including, for example:

-  Avoid groups sizes of 3-5

- Plant a competent dissenter in the group

- Make authority less visible

- Deemphasize opportunities for winning group approval

Of course dialing-down the impact of conformity is just one of several things we can do with cognitive design  to improve group dynamics.  I am interested to hear about other approaches from readers.

Procrastinating or putting things off when it is not in our best interest to do so is a common problem. According to research reported on Psychology Today:

“Everyone procrastinate sometimes, but 20 percent of people are true procrastinators. They consistently avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions, which, unfortunately, are increasingly available. Procrastination in large part reflects our difficulty in regulating emotions and to accurately predict how we will feel tomorrow, or the next day. Procrastinators say they perform better under pressure, but that’s just one of many lies they tell themselves. Since procrastinators are made and not born, it’s possible to overcome procrastination—with effort.”

This makes procrastination a major cognitive design challenge. As with all such challenges the first step is to understand the underlying cognitive processes and needs.

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A major challenge in cognitive design is figuring out how to translate information into emotional impact. Designer Mathieu Lehanneur (see tab 36) offers one approach with his Age of World Jars:

Each ceramic jar is build from demographic data of nation starting with 99-year olds at the top of the jar and newborns at the very bottom. The shape of the jar reveals the demographic patterns of a specific nation or society.