Cognitive Design

 It seems these days many people have avatars or digital versions of themselves (or how they want to be) that run around in virtual worlds, live in customizable video games or otherwise inhabit cyberspace. Below is the menu from Second Life for creating your avatar for that most popular virtual world.

What does the  personalization of an avatar reveal about us and how we think and feel?  I must decide what my avatar will look like, how it will behave (interact with others) and in some cases even evolve into other forms of life.

 From a designer’s perspective, can I study avatars to determine the psychographic profile (list of cognitive needs and tendencies) of their creators? If so, avatar studies could be a valuable tool for creating high-impact products and services using cognitive design.

I think this would be a wonderful Ph.D. thesis.

This work has already started. Two social psychologists from Northwestern have conducted a field study of avatars behaving in a  complex virtual world.  A key finding:

 “You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently,” Eastwick said. “But people exhibited the same type of behavior — and the same type of racial bias — that they show in the real world all the time.”  

Although it is disappointing that we bring our racial bias into the virtual world it is a signal that studying avatars will reveal something about the psychographic needs and profile of their creator. Further evidence:

 “This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world,”

Also see a Stanford study that shows our “need for space” (interpersonal space) and eye gazing behavior shows up in virtual worlds.  

Of course, further study is needed but the idea that avatar studies could be a new power-tool for cognitive designers has some scientific momentum.

For anyone interested in doing avatar studies, two researchers from Stanford have created a method and toolkit for doing Longitudinal Data Collection in Second Life. 

The Rotman School of Management  is a world-class business school in Toronto. In my opinion they do more to understand how the mind really works and what that means for business than most of their competitors.

For a good taste of thier thinking about thinking and what it means for business, check out the Winter 2008 Issue of their management magazine (warning this is a 128 pg, 6.5mb PDF). 

In this issue they call for the extension of the dominant logic/analytic approach to thinking in business to include perceptual, integrative and design thinking in a much larger doses.

The issue is packed with big implications for any cognitive designer looking to use the latest insights into how minds work to improve organizational innovation processes and managerial decision making.