First, 84% of the executives asked indicated that innovation was extremely or very important for their firm.  This should create strong demand for designers able to create new products, services and experiences that meet the cognitive needs of customers in simplified or unique ways.

Second, as firms turn towards innovation-based growth strategies they are facing the same organizational barriers that they have tried to overcome many times before. According to the survey:

Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.

While the suggested improvements  in the article are strong - formalize the prioritization process and link innovation to strategic planning - they miss the mark. Past efforts to enable organizational innovation have failed because we have neglected the cognitive factors. From a cognitive design standpoint the key questions are:

How do the minds of organizational innovators really work? What psychological needs, work practices, cognitive biases and mental models make them tick?

We need to answer these questions for all the key stakeholder groups - executives overseeing innovation, employee innovators, customer co-innovators and supplier collaborators.

                       Image source: Innovation Playground 

Not having these answers will result in poorly designed innovation programs and processes. Take for example this survey finding:

 As in the past, executives have the most difficulty stopping ideas at the right time, with only 26 percent of respondents to this survey saying they do this well.

I can try to stop ideas at the right time by designing a formal approach to prioritization but that will have little impact if I don’t understand the cognitive biases at work in setting and following priorities especially when “pet ideas” are involved.

Innovation at both the individual and organizational level is an inherently cognitive-political process.  No matter what programs and processes we design to stimulate it, the cognitive (intellectual, emotional, volitional and motivational) needs and political realities of the key stakeholder groups must be well understood and satisfied. This puts the cognitive designer center stage.

This contest is an excellent opportunity to exercise your talent in design thinking. For example, imagine how much cleaner, healthier and safer the world would be if we had low cost, high reliability, easy to use and noninvasive brain-machine interfaces?

Motivations for self-measuring vary but it is exploding because technology is making it easier to do and personal informatics feeds the core cognitive need to know about ourselves over time and how we compare to others.

The cognitive design blog has covered a couple dozen personal informatics tools and gadgets and how they can be used in behavior change. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of some 200 popular tools for collecting and analyzing information about yourself.  My favorite blog on the topic is The Quantified Self.  For a good general overview check out the New York Times article, The Data Driven Life or the piece in the Wall Street Journal, The New Examined Life.

The field of personal analytics and informatics offers significant opportunities for the cognitive designer. There is the challenge of how to collect the most relevant personal data in or near real-time while keeping the cost and cognitive load down.  Also, cognitive designers can contribute to defining products, services and experiences that leverage the personal data that is collected to create value in new ways.

The field appears to be wide open. Very interested to hear from readers that are active in the area and have opinions, lessons or resources relevant to designers.

This is a common sense strategy but it will backfire.  

There is plenty of evidence that suggests suppressed thoughts reassert themselves with a vengeance.  If I try and avoid thinking about smoking I just end up thinking about it more!  But worse, recent scientific studies show there is also a behavioral rebound.  For example, the Research Digest Blog reports in Stubbing out thoughts of smoking leads smokers to end up smoking more:

 ”The main finding was that smokers in the suppression group smoked less than others during the middle week while they were suppressing smoking-related thoughts, but ended up smoking significantly more than the other smokers in the final week. In other words, trying to avoid thinking about smoking had a short term benefit but ultimately led to more smoking later on.” 

The same researchers also reported suppressing thoughts about chocolate leads to eating more of it.   The fact that it produces a short term win but fails in the longer term is especially important. This has clear implications for cognitive designer working on behavior change programs.

This is not a design contest with an open innovation prize but instead an opportunity to work with a community of designers and innovators (including Sony engineers) through inspiration, concepting, evaluation and realization.   They are not looking for new product ideas, or ideas on how to make consumer electronics greener.  Instead the challenge is to determine how to use existing technologies to achieve sustainability.

A video explains how the process works. They have collected 22 inspirations so far that include views of the most pressing environmental issues as well examples of clever uses of technology. Concepting will start in 29 days.

I strongly encourage readers of this blog to participate.   From a cognitive design perspective I am very interested to see how removing the element of competition with a cash prize impacts the outcome.

Can you drive a car and talk on your cell phone without reducing you ability to drive safely? Common sense and several actuarial studies say no way. However, a recent study in the Psychonomic Bulletin, Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability, claims that 2.5% of us might be able to. To quote the abstract:

“We tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual task involved driving while performing a demanding auditory version of the operation span (OSPAN) task. Whereas the vast majority of participants showed significant performance decrements in dual-task conditions (compared with single-task conditions for either driving or OSPAN tasks), 2.5% of the sample showed absolutely no performance decrements with respect to performing single and dual tasks. “

It should be noted that the OSPAN task used has a lower cognitive load than your typical cell phone conversation.  Further, the supertaskers also scored in the top quartile when tested on the individual tasks. So they are super single taskers too. No matter, the results are striking. For the cognitive designer that has been following the literature, it demonstrates some form of deep multitasking is possible but it is very rare (3% of the population).

As cognitive designers we need to understand how to engineer choice-making and more basically when offering a choice creates value.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that might help us understand when choice is important.  An upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Why Making Our Own Choice is More Satisfying When Pleasure is The Goal, offers some designable insights:

“Results consistently show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic, but when the goal is utilitarian there is no difference in satisfaction between choosers and non-choosers,” the authors write. “A lack of choice feels less like a deprivation of the capacity to determine one’s own fate when the goal choice is utilitarian than when it is hedonic.”

To over simplify, we get more value from choice when pleasure is involved. Having pleasurable choices gives us the opportunity to savior which offsets the energy required to do the mental work of making the choice.  

As is always the case, satisfaction or cognitive performance improves when the mental energy you get out of an interaction is more than you have to put into it.

“Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.”

Some of the motivations for wanting to expel the unselfish include the complaints that they raise the bar for everyone, make you look bad and break the social rules of the group.   The research claims this is true even if the unselfish behavior is good for the group.

I agree with other commentators that this research may have important implications for management and leadership. It has distinct cognitive design implications. But we need to be careful in how we try and apply it.  There could be strong psychographic or group profile effects.

It is interesting to note that study participants were introductory psychology students. I am not sure you would find the same behavior in 20-year workplace veterans with considerable career success, a small team intensely focused on a new product launch or many other types of high-performance groups.  In such  groups stepping up (especially to do unpopular but necessary work) would be appreciated perhaps even respected not fuel for resentment.

What do you think? Are unselfish employees really resented?

This 3-day  event  promises to overflow with cognitive design ideas, examples and methods.   The workshop on Black Box Design that looks at the relationship between magic and design as well as the workshop on Finding Love in Everyday Objects looks especially interesting.

If you get a chance to attend please share your impressions with other readers.

Learning to see the mental energy signature of an artifact is a core skill for the cognitive designer.  

Laughter is one place to look. We laugh because something tickles the novelty center in our brain by catching us by surprise. A momentary instance of cognitive dissonance between the set-up and punch line creates a spike of mental energy we cannot contain so we laugh. We also laugh and try and make others laugh to relieve situational stress, worry or anxiety.  This is often the source of the inappropriate jokes or laughing at the wrong time.  The cognition is the same - a spike of mental energy, too much to handle, looking to go to ground.

So I am always on the look out for new scientific studies into the nature of laughter.  For example, a recent study conducted by North Carolina State took a unique empirical look at the role of laughter during jury deliberation. The news release, aptly titled No Laughing Matter, provides some potential insights into group dynamics. For instance:

“The researchers learned that laughter could be used as a tool, intentionally and strategically, to control communication and affect group dynamics. For example, one juror was very vocal and made it clear early in the case that she was opposed to the death penalty. In one instance, when that juror agreed with other jury members, one of the other members said “She’s so smart,” resulting in laughter from other members of the group. “That had the effect of further distancing her from the rest of the jury,” Keyton says.”

The article goes on to point out there is little research into the nature of laughter  in serious settings.  Fortunately, cognitive designers are well positioned to offer field observations.  When have you seen laughter in a serious setting and what did it reveal about the mental energy dynamics of the situation?