Cognitive Design

The Global Women’s Leadership Network  has joined forces with others to launch a major effort in developing women and girl leaders around the world.  They posted an open innovation challenge and are looking for fresh thinking on how to quickly build leadership capacity in women and girls.   Their stretch goal  is to develop 5 million women change agents improving our world in 5 years.

This is an important effort for many reasons. As they point out in the preamble to the challenge:

“There is a growing recognition that there can be no peace, security, or sustainable economic development without women’s equal participation in all spheres of society.”

You need to register with Innocentive and electronically sign an agreement to see the details of the challenge.  I signed up as a solver and suggested an approach (copied below) based on knowledge cards and NewHabits.

I hope you too will take up the challenge.

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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!

One way we democratize something is to make it available to a very large group, preferably everyone. Publishing your ideas on the Internet was democratized by blogging and trading stocks was democratized by on-line brokers.  These functions, once held by highly trained experts are now open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection.

Now attention is turning to the democratization of leadership. Scholars have long recognized two general types of leaders. We have the formal or assigned leader such as the CEO or VP that carries the title, power and budget of leadership.  But we also have the informal or emergent leader that wields influence and is driven by passion to change how things work.  The question is, how do we develop and unleash these informal or emergent leaders? 

If you have a good answer, you might want to submit it as a story or hack (disruptive idea) to the Leadership Everywhere Challenge. This is the latest M-prize being sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Consulting.   A snapshot:

“In the future, a company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they’re capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.”

In my teaching at Northwestern University I have been fortunate enough  to work with emergent leaders from across the US. They are driven to lead without formal authority because they have an authentic insight into how to make things better and the natural influence skills to get others to act on their ideas.  The skills and habits that make up informal leadership talent are developed very differently from those of formal leaders.   They are developed through a micro or day-to-day learning from experience rather than elaborate and macro leadership development programs.

I’ve captured this micro approach to developing emergent leaders in a free mobile learning app called NewHabits. Check out the modules or decks on innovation. They teach you how to find a cause, think flexibly, experiment and get others to act on your ideas.  While the modules are focused on innovation these are just the skills and habits that drive emergent leaders. Best of all they can be practiced daily without formal authority, a training budget or the need to change your organization.

A good way to democratize leadership? Give the App a try and let me know what you think.

The NeuroGaming Conference and Expo runs May 1-3, 2013 in San Francisco.  In neurogames technology is used to more directly link game play to your brain, nervous system and body.   Examples include touch stimulation, augmented reality and gesture-based interfaces, brain-controlled games, emotional dynamics and even the direct electrical stimulation of the brain to improve performance. 

The conference will cover games, therapeutic games, investing and trends. In addition, eye tracking, brain monitoring and others tools that provide a robust but cost effective way of measuring mental states are covered.   For example, Advanced Brain Monitoring will be at the conference. They offer a wireless medical grade EEG monitoring unit (shown directly above) that should be useful for all sorts of cognitive design studies.  Check out a short video on how it is being used to help uncover the neuro-correlates of strong leadership. 

Best of all you can directly experience the games and tools on the expo floor.

I hope readers that attend the conference will share their impressions and photos. I am especially interested to hear if you believe neurogames offer a 10x improvement in the gaming experience.

Thanks to the advent of MOOCs (massive open online courses) you can now learn with the best professors from around the world. These are free online courses that often award a certificate or statement of achievement but no college credits.  Some upcoming MOOCs of interest to cognitive designers include:

1. Gamification
2.  Design – creation of artifacts in society 
3. A crash course on creativity- Stanford Venture Lab

Check out the list at Open Culture for other MOOCs that might complement projects (e.g. global health) you are working on.

Check out the open access International Journal of Design.  It includes many articles of relevance to cognitive designers for example,  25 Positive Emotions in Human-Product Interactions.  There is a current call out (due March 1, 2013) for papers on designing for subjective well-being.

Like behavior change, designing for well-being is one of the grand challenges of cognitive design.  Well-being, often viewed as a combination of  health, prosperity and happiness is being defined by the editors as “someone’s enduring life appreciation.” They point out there is growing interest in the topic and that:

“This growing interest can be observed in the lively discussions on topics such as empathic design, value-centred design, socially responsive design, meaningful design, positive design, and happiness-driven design.”

I agree. They are looking for long and short papers  that present frameworks and tools for well-being driven design as well as a discussion of the ethical and social implications.

About three years ago in my Cognitive Design class at Northwestern a small group of students focused on applying insights from reversal theory to hard design problems.   They used it as a way to model motivational states – one of the four psychology states (motivational, affective, intellectual and volitional) we study in cognitive design.

The idea behind reversal theory is that human motivations are complex and often conflicting. We can model motivation in terms of four types of states and how we switch or reverse our positions on each. The four states include how we are:

1.  playful or serious

2.  other or self-focused

3. focused on control or sympathy

4.  conforming or challenging.

Our motivation in any given context can be explained as a mixture of these four states. Changes in our motivation are caused by reversals in any one of the states. For example when we go from playful to serious or from sympathetic to controlling. They shape the meaning we assign to events and objects which in turn generate emotions such as enjoyment, communal feeling, caring and a sense of freedom.

Michael Apter, a leading researcher in reversal theory goes farther emphasizing the central role of motivation in determining emotion:

“But to the extent to which designers deliberately attempt to induce emotions, they typically overlook the fact that emotions arise only through motivations, each emotion representing a desirable or undesirable way of experiencing a particular motivation.  Reversal theory has the potential to provide a framework for design by identifying ways in which ‘things’ (in the most general sense) induce motivational states. “

To bring it to a sharper point, as cognitive designers we can consider features and functions that trigger a reversal in any of the four mental states described above.

For a designer friendly introduction check out the reversal theory training site.

The first round of competition for the M-prize on innovating innovation just closed. There are a 134 entries presenting hacks (disruptive ideas) or stories on how we can make innovation a natural act for organizations. It is a wonderful resource for cognitive designers looking for the latest thinking on improving innovation.

I submitted a hack, Create an Army of Innovators with 125 habit formation cards, that presents the work I am doing with Jason Becker’s  mobile app development team. We are creating an online marketplace for decks of knowledge cards  designed to create new habits that you can access from an iPhone or iPad.

We are going to launch in iTunes a bit later in the year with 5 decks designed to create the innovation habit and 2 decks for mastering personal change including a deck of Willpower cards. Additional decks are already in the works and we are looking to partner with others interested in creating knowledge cards to address a specific behavior change or skill building challenge.

Earlier this year I described a design contest sponsored by the BrainArt project that looked especially relevant for cognitive designers. They wanted submissions that use art and design to convey the neuroscience of everyday pleasure.  There were many entries and the results can be viewed in a virtual gallery. 

I was especially proud that my son, Maxim Clare won a special mention for his piece on:

VIRTUAL IMMERSION, REAL REWARD

“Video games are akin to the mind in that they create worlds. Immersion is when we find ourselves lost in these worlds. To be lost in these worlds is to free of what was once possible. The physiology responds with bursts of neurotransmitters from the reward and attention centers. The process drives us deeper. A cycle is born, we are immersed.”

His graphic illustrates Mario, a well-known video game character morphing into a dopamine molecule.  He developed this in part as a response to: An argument against immersion in video games.

Immersion is just one concept developed during the BrainArt contest that is relevant to cognitive designers.  I am interested to hear from readers that see others.

The Francis & Taylor publishing group offers many books and journals relevant to cognitive design.  Checkout their new digital catalog that provides easy access to their behavioral science journals including access to 100 free articles.

Interested in taking a cognitive design oriented class from a world class university and instructor? How about doing it online and for free? Check out these options from Coursera:

• Gamification
• Drugs and the Brain
• Basic Behavioral Neurology
• Networked Life

and more.

I am interested to hear from readers about other free (and top quality) resources for learning about cognitive design.