Cognitive Design

Avoiding unwanted behaviors – overeating, smoking, unsafe sex,  inactivity, acts of dishonesty, drinking and driving, not taking your meds and so on all require self control.   Self control or more broadly self regulation is a complex cognitive process.  Cognitive design (or designing based on how minds work) should come to the fore when we are creating artifacts that require self control or that try to help people avoid failures in self control.

Fighting for self control often takes tremendous mental energy – overcoming habits, smoothing out emotional responses, focusing on the future rather than the present, channeling visceral responses constructively (e.g. cravings) or otherwise using our executive function to regulate our thoughts and feelings to make sure we stay in control or reach our goal.  Many times we just don’t have enough mental energy to sustain the fight, or multiple fights, we face on a daily basis.

Designs that create mental energy and directly support the cognition of self regulation are an imperative.

 Some new scientific insights on how to do that can be found in the work of Dr. Kentaro Fujita, an experimental psychologist at Ohio State University.

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