Cognitive Design

 A recent issue of the Design Management Review (DMR) is focused on The Future of Design Leadership.   You can access some of the content for free or read a review in BusinessWeek on Desgining the Future of Business. 

One basic point is that design is beginning to play a much broader and long overdue role in business.  Design is starting to be seen as a general approach to innovation, an important tool for managerial problem solving and even an essential element of leadership in the 21st century. 

The DMR claims “Perhaps the ultimate leadership strategy, though, is to instill a design culture that pervades all dimensions of a business.”

We are moving from understanding design as a technique or speciality (e.g. graphic design) to a view of design as a mode of thinking – design thinking. 

Cognitive design provides an important foundation for the emergence of design thinking.

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According to a recent study  by scientists at Yale and the University of Colorado, how we rate a stranger’s personality can be influenced by the temperature of a cup of coffee (or other beverage) we are holding. Warm coffee means I will tend to be trusting and see the person as warm. Ice or cold coffee has the opposite effect.

 The temperature of the coffee is priming my emotions, not too surprising given the embodied nature of cognition.   Now we know why warm cookies, heated car seats, hot cocoa and a warm glass of milk all seem to be more than physically comforting. 

This finding offers tentative guidance for the cognitive designer intent on creating artifacts that generate a sense of trust, emotional warmth and soothingness:

Heat them up!

Scientific American has an interesting interview with Neurologist Robert Burton about his new book, On Being Certain: Believing That You’re Right Even When You are Not.  

His basic claim is that for every thought conscious or not,  there is an automatic and independent assessment of the accuracy of that thought.

“Once we realize that the brain has very powerful inbuilt involuntary mechanisms for assessing unconscious cognitive activity, it is easy to see how it can send into consciousness a message that we know something that we can’t presently recall—the modest tip-of-the-tongue feeling. At the other end of the spectrum would be the profound “feeling of knowing” that accompanies unconsciously held beliefs—a major component of the unshakeable attachment to fundamentalist beliefs—both religious and otherwise—such as belief in UFOs or false memories.”

And this automatic assessment of our own thoughts can feel very good, powerfully so:

“Fortunately, the brain has provided us with a wide variety of subjective feelings of reward ranging from hunches, gut feelings, intuitions, suspicions that we are on the right track to a profound sense of certainty and utter conviction. And yes, these feelings are qualitatively as powerful as those involved in sex and gambling. One need only look at the self-satisfied smugness of a “know it all” to suspect that the feeling of certainty can approach the power of addiction.”

The design implications of this are strong.  

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Pattern recognition, framing and sense making are fundamental to cognition or how we think and feel.  All of these cognitive activities have one thing in common, they are geared towards creating order from sense perceptions, beliefs and even conflicting ideas. When we create order the pleasure center in our brain is activated. We are rewarded with a natural high – literally.

Herein lies the secrete sauce to many successful games and puzzles.  They exploit our hardwired need to see and create order.

Wired magazine hit this theme well in a recent article that aruges Bejeweled and Bejeweled II are masterful examples of simple and addictive games that “exploit our desire for order”.

The idea is you swap the position of adjacent stones to create chains of three or more identical gems (a little bit of order).

With players investing $300M and 6 billion hours there is a powerful effect here.  

OK maybe you don’t like that one but what about Solitaire or Sudoku sometimes referred to as “the crack cocaine for the brain”? Or perhaps you just doodle or organize the socks in your underwear drawer.

No matter, the lesson cognitive designers is clear.  Creating order is a key way we generate mental energy. No matter what your design problem, consider adding features and functions that let users see and make order in a way that is natural given the context.

The Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! team used biofeedback and mind control systems to prototype a car that safely slows and even stops  as the driver becomes angry.

If you have 40 minutes watch the full episode of the Mind Controlled Car. It is worth it! Or if you just have a few minutes check out this 3 min video on final testing.

Just three posts ago on October 9th I argued for using crowdsourcing (a new knowledge model where you open source your hardest problems to anyone motivated to try and solve them) and a $10M X-prize to take on the challenge of redesigning the American healthcare system to achieve cost effective quality care for all citizens. I suggested this as an illustration of how we can use cognitive design to tackle large-scale social issues.

Today, WellPoint the largest US health insurer and the X PRIZE foundation announced a collaboration to offer a $10M prize to advance revolutionary ideas for improving the healthcare system.

“Reinventing and rebooting the U.S. health care system is not to be taken lightly,” said X-Prize Chief Executive Dr. Peter Diamandis. “Its an audacious task but, we think, very achievable.” 

They are crowdsourcing the US healthcare crisis!

This means anybody who thinks they can solve the healthcare problem (access, cost, quality) can form a team and compete for the $10M.  

So far the reaction from the business and public policy communities has been very positive. WellPoint and X PRIZE are soliciting input on how to shape the contest.  The rules will be released early next year.

To contribute your ideas to the prize development process  (general public is welcome) and to see what others are saying about this game-changing approach click here.

Michael D’Zmura the chair of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Irvine reports landing a $4M grant to develop an advanced brain computer interface for the Army. According to the press release:

“The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.”

Talk about designing for how minds work! 

Spin-out applications are years away but this shows seriousness about continuing to develop the technology.

[Two people writing "how are you?"]

The discovery channel has covered the UC Irvine grant as the news story, Helmet to Convey Messages by Thought.

Connecting this to the items I blogged earlier on  Brainwave Binoculars  (that interface with the solider’s brain) we get a glimpse of how far the military is taking the disciplines of cognitive engineering and design.

Results from cognitive science over the last 30 years have completely flipped our understanding of how minds work in everyday situations. The old view casts us as conscious thinkers.  Rationally attending to facts to learn and logically weighing alternatives to make decisions.  This view of how minds work infiltrated social policy, economics, education, organizational design, product engineering and service design. The results were the prosperity and problems of the industrial era.

The new view of mind casts us mostly as unconscious emoters. It turns out that when you look at how we really learn, make decisions, solve problems and do other cognitive chores the processes we use are mostly unconscious and driven by metaphors, patterns, biases, mental short-cuts, emotions and other visceral states.  This does not make use irrational just a different type of thinker than was previously assumed. We still reason but more with passion than facts. The calculus of how we think is messier and more of an evolutionary kludge than it is the smooth wheels of a rational computing machine.

 Not embracing this new view of mind as designers has really created some problems.   For example, this is why kids hate math, insurance is still sold rather than bought and we fail to take care of ourselves and save for retirement despite so many educational messages and products to help us. They assume we think and learn based on the old view of mind and talk right past us.

On the other hand, embracing the new view of mind as designers creates some real opportunity for innovation and even competitive advantage.

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I am sometimes asked – what can cognitive design do for the healthcare industry? 

The field can make big contributions to creating new programs for changing health behaviors, dramatically increasing the level of service excellence in hospitals and clinics, assisting clinicians in making decisions based on best practice and in many other ways I have blogged on before. 

I see another opportunity, a potentially big one that has not be discussed before.  It has been widely recognized for many years that the American healthcare system is broken. 

For a great recap of the facotids rendered in video and music checkout this YouTube post.  The point is we don’t have the policies, infrastructure, incentives, practices, entities and relationships in place to deliver cost effective high quality care to all Americans (and our guests from other countries).  We need to design, implement and refine a “new system”. But how do we discover what that new system should be? How do we design it?

Our current approach, using a combination of the political process augmented by research from think tanks (e.g. the McCain and Obama plans) combined with limited experiments in the free-market (e.g. retail clinics, concierge medicine and consumerism) and institutional attempts (e.g. Medicare pilot programs and the 100K Lives Campaign), may not be enough to produce a good solution.  

Given the stakes involved and that we have other crises in the pipeline, for example social security, we need to take steps to improve our ability to design solutions to social problems.  This is where cognitive design can help.  

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A key principle of cognitive design is that we design for how minds work, with the emphasis on the plural.

There are five general types of minds we can design for – individual, extended (when we think through artifacts), group, emergent ( specific type of group where cognition emerges as in the wisdom of crowds) and machine. 

Considering the needs and role of each type of mind in every design problem (no matter how mundane) is part of what makes cognitive design so unique.

Designing for the machine mind means making smart artifacts that reduce the cognitive load on humans or somehow extend our intellectual and emotional reach.  With recent advances in technology it is now possible to embed a little bit of smarts (crude perception, memory, learning, reasoning, action) in a wide-variety of artifacts to make the so-called cognitive machine.  We have smart phones, watches, calculators, desks, homes, buildings, cars and the like. Similar technologies (rules, data mining, software agents, semantic search) are “smarting up” artifacts at work. We have artifacts (e.g. business processes and computer systems) in the workplace that make decisions, control complex process, find important patterns in data and the like.  The race is on to create the intelligent enterprise. After all we already have the automated factory.

An interesting new development in this area is the transdisciplinary field,  Cognitive Informatics. CI is very ambitious as  it combines the latest thinking with how the minds works, an information processing approach to cognition and a new type of denotational mathematics to formally specify, engineer and ultimately build smart stuff ranging from simple cognitive machines all the way to the next generation of computers that think and feel (AI).

 Some worry that engineering smarts into machines will make human less intelligent. If my calculator does arithmetic I will forget how to do long division. Soon I won’t even teach it in schools. Is this an intended consequence? A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, brought this home in modern terms. Part of what they argue is that Google has dumbed down content allowing me to read just a sound bite rather than an entire article, essay or book.  This allows me to cover more ground faster but do I trade-off real understanding?

     OR…. 

Google, like calculators and other cognitive machines liberate and extend human minds if used properly. They are part of a rapidly growing type of mind known as machine mind.  I say, with an aging society that is growing more complex each day we best design for machine intelligence as quickly as we can.