Cognitive Design

  Cognitive biases are short-cut ways that we use to perceive the world, make decisions, solve problems and behave in social situations. They are rules of thumb for dealing with complex situations fast and effectively. Turns out that when we use them outside the area they are intended for (and we do this all the time) we make systematic errors. This is why we can look and behave so irrationally.    

Researchers have documented a wide array of cognitive biases. Check out the list of 100+  cognitive biases that Wikipedia has complied.  In cognitive design, since we are concerned with designing things for how minds work, we must understand which cognitive biases are at work in our application and how we plan to manage or paternalistically leverage them.

A classic example is the Save More Tomorrow pension plan that lets you save some portion of a future raise (rather than your current money) out of respect for our bias to undervalue future resources and over value current resources.  Turns out emphasizing what you currently have (a bird in the hand is worth to in the bush) is a great strategy except when it comes to savings. Vanguard Investments has taken this idea even further with their Autopilot 401k  savings plan that is designed to accommodate all the latest findings in behavioral finance.    

Cognitive biases are hot. Best selling or popular books focus on them – Freakonomics, Blink, Gut and many others.  A recent addition to this list that I just finished is Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.  The authors provide many detailed stories that illustrate three common biases including loss aversion (over valuing current resources), diagnosis bias (inability to rethink our initial assessment of something) and the chameleon effect (taking on the behaviors and properties that others have attributed to us).  I am recommending this book to designers as a good way to sharpen your instincts for detecting and dealing with cognitive biases as a constraint and sometimes enabler in the design process.

Prediction markets have emerged as crisp architecture (structure and dynamic) for designing artifacts with collective intelligence. On-line trading sites let us buy and sell shares on an uncertain outcome (e.g. who will win an election, which product will be successful, if a stock will go up or down tomorrow, etc.).  The outcome with the greatest share price at the end of trading reflects the market’s prediction.

This is how the capital markets work as the stocks with the highest share prices reflect the market’s prediction of which companies will generate the most free cash flows in the future. 

The prediction market will on average be more accurate than the best expert judgment and therefore the claim that intelligence emerges from the collective trading activity by those in the market. Note this is not a form of collaboration or brainstorming where people get together and try and figure through conversation or group problem solving which outcome is most likely. Instead it involves little to no direct communication and relies on isolated individual judgment being aggregated and reflected as a single piece of information – the price of a share. 

Successfully designing prediction markets requires a careful understanding of the underlying cognition at work.

John McQuaid makes this point well in his recent Wired essay, Prediction Markets are Hot, But Here’s Why They Can Be So Wrong.

Two key points McQuaid makes is that prediction markets require a diversity of individual cognition to work (insider, noise traders, etc.) and that they need to have real skin in the game (e.g. significant dollars or stakes at risk).  Without those factors traders are not motivated to seriously focus nor can the market aggregate the diversity of knowledge needed to outperform individual experts.  Excellent advice on the cognitive design factors for prediction markets!

The Zaltman’s have a new book out, Marketing Metaphoria, on the role of metaphors in marketing.

 This is a valuable book for cognitive designers as they share the 7 most common “deep metaphors” they have found at work in the mind of customers around the global (12,000 interviews, 110+ clients, 30+ countries). As we have discussed elsewhere in this blog, metaphors play a basic role in how we perceive, think and feel about the world. They are both a window into unmet cognitive needs and a technique for developing more effective designs.  Understanding the deep metaphors at work in a domain is a pre-requisite to design for how minds work. The seven include: 

1.  Balance “feeling centered”

2.  Transformation “turning over a new leaf”

IBM and the University of Cambridge are getting a little buzz from a 30-page report they published on succeeding through service innovation.  The report points out that nearly 80% of the  US’s GDP comes from services yet only a third of our R&D dollars go to services. Services are big globally as well with 2007 marking the first year that more people worked in the services industry than any other around the global.  The report calls for doubling the investment in service science and retooling a dated academic curriculum that is too focused on manufacturing.

  The whitepaper does an excellent job of listing the vast number of disciplines that must be utilized to take a systematic approach to service innovation. Cognitive science is called out but the paper fails to mention the central role that cognitive design (or any of its close cousins) will play.  Cognitive design, or the ability to support, enhance or even create a specific “frame of mind” in users, should act as a lens to focus the myriad of issues that must be worked through when designing a service.  

   High touch services and those based on advanced skills, knowledge and experience are especially sensitive to creating and maintaining a “frame of mind” in the customer.  For example, studies have show that surgeons that use a respectful tone of voice with their patients are far less likely to be sued for malpractice when they make a serious mistake.  Gallup has exhaustively studied customer-employee interactions and found that it is emotional states that drive the encounter.  Meaning, trust, co-creation of value, mutual learning and other “high cognition” activities have all been called out broadly in the literature on service design and innovation.  

This is the stuff of cognitive design.

Perhaps the best place to start the service sciences revolution is by learning to design for how minds work.

 Sohrab Vossoughi, founder and president of ZIBA design has an article in BusinessWeek on the role of emotional engagement in design.  His basic argument is that companies that go beyond functionality and usability to create an emotionally engaging experience for customers are succeeding.   

  Cognitive design, with a focus on supporting, enhancing and even creating specific frames of mind is an essential tool for creating customer and employee experiences.

  When we interact with an artifact (anything that has been designed) we can experience five distinct frames of mind including: agitation, tolerance, resonance, acceleration and integration.  So something either irritates me, bores me, really clicks with me, speeds up my thinking and emotions or literately makes the thoughts and emotions I am having possible in the first place.  This last state – integration, implies a profound coupling between the functionality of the artifact and the cognition of the user.  For example, a brain-computer interface may let me move a cursor on a computer screen by thought alone. Without the brain-computer interface (artifact) I cannot have the cognition to move the cursor on the computer screen. It is the two things working together in an integrated system that give rise to the cognition.  In this way, cognition is actually extended beyond the skull to include the artifact and aspects of the environment. 

 Designing to achieve this fifth or extended state of mind – integration between user and artifact – may seem exotic (how many of us use brain-computer interfaces) but an emerging position in the philosophy of mind argues it may be more common place than we think. 

   Andy Clark, a philosopher has an exciting new book coming out, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension,  where he argues that certain forms of cognition are so entangled with artifacts in the environment that we need to think of mind as extended not “brain bound”.  That is the mind extends beyond the brain and the body into the environment by the way it is tightly coupled to objects and events.  For example, a scientist who uses pen and paper to write, think and develop insights into nature.  Pen and paper are far more mundane than brain-computer interfaces but in the rights hands may in fact generate an extended frame of mind.  

   In my cognitive design class I challenge students to come up with examples of how this extended state of mind works in our everyday world.  Common responses include thinking in the shower or while listening to music.  Does the flowing water or sound actually integrate with and extend cognition beyond the body?  I’m not sure but I hope Andy Clark’s new book will help me figure that out.  In the meantime,  I must agree with the publisher’s write up: 

“The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.”