Cognitive Design

A recent essay in Wired,  When reality feels like playing a game a new era has begun,  points out that the “gaming mindset has now become pervasive. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer question, to find creative solutions.” And why not? Games move our hearts and minds, they are powerful cognitive stuff. Mimicking excellent cognitive designs is a great way to innovate.

And it works for anything not just games.  The key is to deconstruct or reverse engineer the design to understand what makes it tick from a cognitive science standpoint. Then you can replicate the effect by adding new features and functions to your product. Last year I ran a two-day cognitive design workshop focused on this technique.  Attracted participants from several industries and we deconstructed high impact cognitive designs including lottery tickets, video games, life saving services, idea viruses, works of art and the like. Out of the box thinking was the goal.

For example, leveraging the design of lottery tickets that offer hope (but not a rational chance) of “making it big” an insurance agent developed a provocative idea for longevity insurance. Many are worried about outliving their financial assets. This creates what insurance professionals call a longevity risk (risk of living to long).  For a very small monthly premium (say $10/ month) it might be possible to offer a very large payout benefit (say a million dollars) if the policy was designed to payout at a very advanced age (say 90 years old). Chances are nearly everyone buying the product won’t get the benefit but very few will and they get the big pay day (just like a lottery ticket).  Needless to say this idea generated a storm of debate in the workshop. And it should.

There was also an engineer that developed an idea for playing a game over a GPS system for commuters caught in traffic. The game was designed to naturally keep the drivers attention focused on the traffic (avoiding safety concerns and perhaps even helping to solve a current safety issue) and had a strong element of competition built in (so as to engage cognition).  Again objections from other workshop participants but that stimulated refinements.

It is fun to think about lotterizing or gamifying your products and services and that may even generate some actionable ideas if you understand the cognitive science at work. But for most firms that would not play well with their brand image. Fortunately, high-impact cognitive designs abound and so there are plenty to mimic no matter what your brand or target market.