Cognitive Design

   In cognitive design we want artifacts that are tuned to support, enhance or even create a particular frame of mind (thoughts + emotions).  One push back I get on this is everybody thinks and feels differently so how can you design for more than one person? This is where the cognitive science comes in – there is a lot of common ground in the way we think and feel and that can be used to build up psychographic profiles that segment a market or define target groups.  Psychographic profiles define groups of people that are operating on a shared mental model, cognitive bias, metaphor, decision heuristic, learning style, emotional trigger or other combination cognitive psychological characteristics that have enough discriminating power to generate meaningful classification.  The work of cognitive design is to link the psychographic profile to behaviors and ultimately to product features and functions.  

  There are not well developed out-of-the-box psychographic profiles.  Investing in developing accurate psychographic profiles for your markets is well worth the effort because it provides the insights needed to drive waves of innovation and possibly competitive advantage.

  Take mental models for example. Mental models (long the focus of cognitive scientists) define how we think and feel about a particular thing/event/agent in the world. So I have a mental model about families, trees, cars, mountains, bosses and the like. Mental models are grounded in my experience and values. They include attitudes which can generate emotions. For example, my mental model of snakes includes attitudes that invoke the emotion of fear.  Understanding a group in terms of the mental models they share – especially as they relate to products and services, can be a powerful foundation for psychographics. So the question becomes, how do we discover shared mental models?

  Most techniques start by eliciting the individuals’ mental model and then aggregating those using a technique for measuring similarity to define the common or shared mental model.  The end result is a “concept map” that defines the thought/feelings that make up the model and how they related to each other. Some example techniques:

1. The ACSMM method that measures similarity based on the number of nodes and links that the individual mental models have in common  

2. The ZMET technique that uses images and metaphors to elicit individual and discover shared mental models

3. Pathfinder networks that use a statistical analysis of pair-wise comparisons by individuals to establish a graphic theoretic measure of similarity to discover the shared model  

  For a brief comparative overview of many of the major techniques see the study by Johnson and others.  For the most part, these are research-based techniques and represent the “big gun” in psychographics.  They are not commonly used by marketing and product development groups. My bet is that they (or more streamlined versions of them) will be.   Just as you drive business decisions based on demographics today, you will drive business decision based on psychographics in the future.