Cognitive Design

One way to know if a topic is really “in the air” is to see how it is treated in a US Presidential election.  Although it is not rolling off Wolf Blitzer’s tongue, I have found at least one solid reference to cognitive-design like thinking that might generate some buzz.

Wired magazine, recently ran a cover story highlighting the views of 15 people the next president should listen to. Fortunately, they included a short piece on David Laibson, a behavioral economist from Harvard entitled, Tweak Human Behavior to Fix the Economy. The basic idea is that we do not need to overhaul the principles of the free market economy to resolve our housing, healthcare, retirement and various economic woes. Instead, small changes in programs and policies that nudge consumer behavior in a different direction is enough to fix the problem. After all, these problems are chiefly rooted in how we make decisions and behave. 

The example nudge discussed is something we have covered in this blog several times namely, changing the default on 401k plans so that people are automatically enrolled and have to opt out if they don’t want to participate. Studies show that such a small change can go a long way to addressing the fact that 50% of Americans do not save enough for retirement.

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In cognitive design we take ordinary objects or events and ask – how do people think and feel when they learn to use or operate this? Or, more importantly, how can we enhance how they think and feel when they use this?

Supporting, improving or even creating cognition (thoughts and feelings) by the way we design products, workflows, HR programs, public health initiatives and really anything, is what cognitive design is all about.

Easy to say, hard to do. One way to do it is by being a student of how minds actually work. Amazingly, most of our management models and product designs make anti brain and mind assumptions. That is, they make faulty and often antagonistic assumptions about how our minds work. They are too complex, boring, assume we value things in a way we don’t, forget our brains our emotional, treat us like computers, ignore the psychology of behavior change or otherwise take more mental energy to use then they give through use. 

Fortunately, thanks to practical advances in cognitive science, we have learned more about how the mind works in the last 20 years than we did the previous 500.  It is the job of the cognitive designer to put these insights to work and remake our products, services and organizations to fit and enhance the human mind.

Take for example, the recent research into the role of sleep in cognition, especially creativity. Creativity or the cognitive process of coming up with new and interesting ideas is essential to social and economic prosperity. Designing products, services, workspaces, business process, employee programs and so on to support it should be a fundamental concern.  

 Recent research has shown, that incubation, involving extend periods of unconscious thought, including sleep, is essential for creativity. Aspects of this is covered nicely by Leslie Berlin in her New York Times article, We’ll Fill This Space But First a Nap.  

So for the cognitive designer the message is clear.  Be sure the design of your client’s innovation process or program goes beyond brainstorming sessions to include several rounds of incubation.  Trying to do this too directly and calling for goofing off, napping and over emphasizing ideas that “just come to me” is likely to meet with resistance and failure.  However, starting innovation projects and processes early to get plenty of lead time for incubation, conducting intense briefings on aspects of the problem to flood the mind, debriefing people after vacations or other long absences from consciously thinking about the problem, encouraging the use of idea-ries (diaries to capture your ideas)  outside of work and having a way to vet ideas “that just came to me” are all simple but essential to supporting how our creativity minds really work.

Skip the brainstorming session and take a nap.

Pictures, images and other visualizations have a profound impact on cognition. Imagery if used skillfully, can improve interpretation, recall, decision-making and discovery. The right visualizations can set the course of careers, change lives and even trigger major events.  For example, John Barrow in his book Cosmic Imagery, explains the role of imagery in the history of science.

The study and creation of images in all forms – data visualization, infographics, statistical graphics, scientific visualization, graphic design, visual analytics and other disciplines hold important insights and techniques for cognitive designers.  As I stress with students on every cognitive design project – not only are metaphors, reasoning biases and mental models at work, but so is visualization. If we are not tapping into visualization we are leaving a lot of mental energy on the table.

Some interesting examples of what you can do for the mind with visualization can be found at 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners. 

My favorite is:

This honorable mention winner visualizes the bible with each chapter as a bar graph at the bottom (size determined by the number of verses) and cross references between chapters shown as arcs (color denoting distance between chapters).   One visualization of the word of God.

I am always on the lookout for unique approaches to designing for how minds work (cognitive design).  Recently, I recieved a note introducing me to  perception-based engineering at Purdue University.

Definitely an approach to cognitive design and a very rigorous one as you might expect.  Mathematical models of the key design parameters or features of the product are linked to information processing models of perception, memory and decision making and the resulting framework is used to optimize the design based on its impact on cognition. Amazingly, special attention to “human responses” in the form of comfort, pleasure, perception of quality and decisions made are included in the approach.

Purdue coined the phrase perception-based engineering and has granted more that 25 Ph.Ds. in the area and has some notable successes in industrial and automotive design using it.  Perhaps more importantly, Purdue’s program in Healthcare Engineering, sees it as part of the solution for our healthcare crisis:

“The efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery can be enhanced by perception-based engineering- optimal design for the human-interface aspects of machines and environments in engineered healthcare systems. Informed inclusion of cognitive and sensory processes in design of these facilities, instruments, and machines can greatly improve the working environment for healthcare providers and, most importantly, improve the quality of care and patient safety. This mode of engineering compliments the systems analysis and modeling expertise present in the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.”

Perception-based engineering is supported by many departments at Purdue including the Herrick laboratory which just completed an $11M fund raising.  Once renovations are complete, Purdue will be operating one of the foremost perception-based engineering laboratories in the world.  Go Boilermakers!

Kansei Engineering originated in Japan and is a structured approach to sensorial design or designing for the senses. It has shaped many successful products including Mazda’s cars and Sharp’s introduction of the LCD-based camcorder which allowed them to capture an extra 21% of that market.

The relationship between “Kansei” or sensory and mental states and the product’s features, functions and form are empirically studied. The findings are used to design new products and services that include specific elements (features, functions, form) to create a sensory or mental impact. 

The modeling and analysis is focused on product semantics or a statistical analysis of  Kansei words (mostly adjectives that describe perceptions, emotions, impressions and feelings) and how changes in particular product featuress correlate to the words.   Data is gathered from user surveys and statistical analysis can be done using regression, principal component analysis or more exotic pattern finding techniques such a neural nets, genetic algorithms and rough sets. Questions are designed using bipolar attributes and participants are asked to rate where a product falls on a continuum or scale (e.g. simple to complex or exciting to boring). In some approaches, enthnographic, observational and interviewing techniques are also used to get at Kansei words.

A flowchart from the  International Kansei Design Institute illustrates the process:

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Part of designing for how minds work means engineering smarts into machines. This lowers the cognitive load on humans by giving the artifact itself the functionality for doing basic mental tasks.   For example,  complex office copiers have simple on-board smarts to help us troubleshoot paper jams, Bankers using expert underwriting systems give loan decisions in minutes and video games can read our frustration level and dynamically adjust the difficult of play.

 Today’s machines are getting pretty good at perception, decision making, natural language processing, autonomous navigation in rough terrains, planning and a wide range of activities that involve what we normally call intelligent. We are sneaking up on AI.

So cognitive designers must watch out for any new smart functionality that can be embedded in the artifacts they design. Along these lines, Cognitive Technology recently made an important announcement.

“We have taught the computer virtually all the meanings of words and phrases in the English language,” Cognition chief executive Scott Jarus told AFP. “This is clearly a building block for Web 3.0, or what is known as the Semantic Web. It has taken 30 years; it is a labour of love,”Jarus said.”  

 They call the product semantic map and you can try it out on their website to search Medline (health), a giant database of legal decisions and Wikipedia. An overview on how to try it out can be found in this video.

Cognitive training programs for improving the control, intensity and duration of conscious attention are being introduced into the classroom.   For more read this excellent post by Maggie Jackson  in the Boston Globe.

 Most important for cognitive designers is that these training programs are based on new insights into how the mind works:

 ”After decades of research powered by fresh advances in neuroimaging and genetics, many scientists are drawing a much clearer picture of attention, which they have come to see as an organ system like circulation or digestion, with its own anatomy, circuitry, and chemistry. Building upon this new understanding, researchers are discovering that skills of focus can be bolstered with practice in both children and adults, including those with attention-deficit disorders. ” 

All on the Mind, a recent  story in the Economist talks about the current and future drugs that will enhance concentration, memory and learning.

Conclusion – “mind expansion may soon become big business”.

Our minds have two modes – automatic and manual.

In automatic mode we make instant decisions, take frequent and sometimes dangerous mental short cuts (cognitive biases) and run intuitively with very little conscious awareness and control.  Manual mode on the other hand requires attention and conscious mental effort to exert behavioral control, weight options, manage emotions and the like.

As Blink and other recent best sellers on the nature of thinking have pointed out, we pretty much live in automatic mode.  But as David Meyer’s claims in his book, Intuition: Its Power and Perils, we generally don’t believe that:

“The big idea of contemporary psychological science is that most of our everyday thinking, feeling and acting operate outside of conscious awareness is hard for people to accept…”   

For a good summary of the book look here. 

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