Cognitive Design

Designing artifacts that change people’s behavior “for the better” is very difficult. Changing unwanted health, savings, safety or customer-related behaviors are among the hardest things we must do. Cognitive designers are always on the look out for new tactics and approaches to help clients avoid failure and achieve success with behavior change programs.

Check out Melinda Fulmer’s article in the LA Times on Parent Seeks Ways to Make Kids Eat Vegetables.  The tactic is to grind them up and sneak them into other foods so kids get them without thinking about it.  Kids get what they need and parents don’t need to do battle with them.

There are even books of recipes (The Sneaky Chef) and special lines of food (Bobokids line from Bobobaby) you can buy to take a “sneak attack” approach to behavior change. The approach seems to work and raises some interesting questions for cognitive designers:

- Is this the best approach to take to the problem? The article discusses ways it can backfire.

- Are there other paternalistic (for the user’s own good) applications of the sneak attack technique?

The concept of mental energy plays a central role in cognitive design. We want to create artifacts that “lift users up” or generate and release more mental energy then they require to use. This means keeping cognitive load low and triggering a cascade of associations, meaning, emotions and other mental processes with a positive valence.

Until recently, there has been very little scientific investigation into the concept of mental energy. The North American Branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has published a nice over of some of the most important work to date in  Mental Energy: Defining the Science.  Here is a brief summary that I wrote elsewhere:

“The ILSI defines mental energy in terms of three components or as “the ability to perform mental tasks, the intensity of feelings about energy/fatigue, and the motivation to accomplish mental and physical tasks.”   The first component or ability to perform mental tasks or cognition (in the narrow sense) includes attention, memory and speed of processing.  The second component is highly subjective and is based on how energetic we feel. It is transient and makes of the “mood of mental energy”.  The third component is motivation which is a measure of our enthusiasm and determination.”

So mental energy plays a fundamental role in cognitive design. We need to pay special attention to any features or functions that impact its use or production. Indeed, we can model and understand the interactions between a user and an artifact as the conversion of mental energy.