Cognitive Design

One of the exercises that is most popular in my 3-day cognitive design workshop is redesigning signs to improve wayfinding, increase behavorial compliance (e.g. handwashing) instill pride, give the readers a little jolt of mental energy or otherwise leverage how minds actually work. It is a fairly straight forward application of cognitive design that gets an immediate response from your employees and customers. Besides it can be fun.

One of my favorite examples:

[Image source: The Semiotics of Toilet Signs] 

A good way to tell patrons who the facility is for and more importantly to hurry it up when the toilet facilities are limited.   Using images to generate empathy is often a better way of getting compliance than barking a command.  Good cognitive design!

I just found a short (7 minute) YouTube video on Emotionally Intelligent Signs that provides some great examples of using Pecha Kucha to create signage that displays and encourages empathy.  Check it out and then redesign a sign in your community or workplace.

Why does memory weaken as we age?  A brain scanning study, A Neural Mechanism Underlying Memory Failure in Older Adults  recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience claims part of the answer lies in the fact that older brains are more easily distracted when learning. We fail to recall certain things because distractions kept us from encoding them in the first place.

Background noise like a ringing phone, iPod or other distractions can interfere with encoding new memories in older brains.  We can improve memory by minimizing the distractions or focusing harder when learning new things.  Now all we have to do is remember to do that.

Resigning a pill bottle to meet specific cognitive needs doubles medication compliance.

Not taking meds properly is a major issue in healthcare.  Approximately 125,000 people die from improperly taking meds every year in the US. As much as $100B-$300B is wasted in hospital visits, tests and lost productivity associated with lack of compliance with medication regiments.

Studies show that we take our meds according to the doctor’s orders only 40-50% of the time.  The problem is we forget (or fail to remember to remember to take our meds – a prospective memory need), are boggled by the complexity of what to do (imagine taking 10-15 different meds per day) and have self esteem issues (taking meds makes us appear weak or a burden). In short, prescription pill bottles we get from the pharmacy don’t meet the complex cognitive needs (prospective memory, multi-pill complexity, self esteem) associated with personal medication management.

Fortunately a number of smart pill boxes have been designed to help us solve this problem. According to an excellent article on Medication Compliance by Allan Naditz in the November issue on Telemedicine and e-Health, these devices can take compliance from the 40-50% level to the 90-95% level.    

He discusses eight smart pill boxes ranging from simple reminder systems to personal med dispensers that provide multiple reminders and contact a service provider automatically if you don’t take your meds. A You Tube video outlining the problem and pitching the MD2 system, a top of the line model, can be found here.

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Leading Organizations are Investing in Developing Sophisticated Models of Employee and Customer Cognition. 

When talking to process improvement experts, organizational designers or IT professionals about cognitive design I emphasize that the starting point is always the “workflow between your ears”.  The idea is to understand how people perceive, remember, think, feel, learn and interact with each other in order to do work. This is not the workflow that happens between departments but it is the invisible workflow that happens between the ears and amongst our heads and employees and customers.

Making an effort to model cognition or the workflow between the ears gives us the insight into how people really think and feel. This in turn supports the redesign of business models, work processes, information systems, management policies, incentives and other aspects of the work system in a way that supports, enhances or even creates employee and customer cognition. This means serivce innovation, higher productivity, fewer errors, less turnover, faster uptake, less burnout and all the other signs of happy and engaged knowledge workers.  

Remaking our processes and organizations (not to mention products and services) for how minds naturally work is a mega innovation opportunity for the 21st century.

So how do we see the workflow between the ears, how can we model cognition? 

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Patents are supposed to cover new inventions. But how do you know if they are something new? Ideally, you search what is called the prior art or all the world’s publicly available knowledge on the topic. But how do you do that in a timely and consistent way? 

One approach, used by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is to hire and train a small army of patent examiners and give them the best search tools and content money can buy.

Another approach is to crowdsource it.  If prior art exist someone out there already knows about it so the trick is to get them to share this knowledge with the patent examiner. There are a couple of groups trying to take this approach. The most recent is Article One Partners. They offer $50K to contributors (called advisors) that are first to provide prior art that invalidates a patent study. Each patent study includes one or more patents or patent applications. Further you can earn points in various ways (including providing feedback on the beta site) that qualifies you for profit sharing. 

Traditionally philosophers make arguments about issues that cannot be resolved empirically or by checking the facts in the world. It turns out that some of these arguments make testable assumptions about how people think and feel.  An emerging branch of philosophy called experimental philosophy or X-Phil wants to go out and test those assumptions to see what is really going on.  

Philosophers doing empirical work to determine how people think and feel? Sounds like applied cognitive science in the field to me.  No matter, as a cognitive designer I am interested in any field that attempts to better understand how people think and feel.

Having a master’s degree in analytic philosophy I know that the situations experimental philosophers explore will surely be unique and provocative from a designer’s standpoint.  For an example, check out this YouTube video that exposes an important asymmetry (bias) in our moral reasoning.

Cognitive designers may have some important things to learn from experimental philosophers. I will keep you posted.

IBM and five leading universities are pulling out all the stops to create nothing short of a “global brain” based on the latest neuroscience, super computing and nano tech.  

A two-minute video overview of their cognitive computing project (with references) can be found here.

When we interact with anything – a product, a computer or other people – we burn mental energy. Interaction requires making choices, figuring things out and behavioral self control.  Literally, glucose in the brain’s blood is burned or converted into mental task energy to consciously think, decide, learn and self regulate.   

And we have a limited supply of this type of mental energy. Depleting it can lead to poor cognitive performance.  A recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, (all articles free online) reviews the latest findings on these effects as they related to buying behaviors.  One key finding:

“The capacity for self-control and intelligent decision making involves a common, limited resource that uses the body’s basic energy supply.  When this resource is depleted, self control fails and decision making is impaired.” 

Interactions also lead to the production of mental energy through stimulating emotions, meaning, metaphors, automatic inferences and the like. These effects can also burn glucose but rather than resulting in depletion or fatigue they give rise to a feeling of energy that can in some circumstances improve performance. This feeling of energy is subjective because it does not generate glucose but it is functional (real outcome) because it can improve performance.  For example, consider the impact of increased confidence, emotional pride or excitement on performance.

Complex interactions can be understood as a series of events that burn or produce mental energy at two levels – the biological level (glucose in the brain’s blood) and the psychological or cognitive level (deciding, learning, emotion, meaning, etc.). This is why it is important in cognitive to design to model user-artifact interaction as the conversion of mental energy.   

One goal of cognitive design is to support or even create specific mental states (thoughts and feelings) in people. We do this by tweaking the features, functions and forms of artifacts  or anything that is designed  such as products, workflows and customer experiences.  We don’t do this by tweaking randomly. Ideally, we use solid and sometimes emerging insights into how minds really work from cognitive science.

For example, the so-called science of happiness has been very much in the news lately. So it is not surprising when I get a question like:

How can we use the science of happiness to design organizations that make employees happier (more productive)  and customers happier (more satisfied)?

[Chinese symbol for double happiness - employee and customer]

The literature on positive psychology and happiness studies is vast. Where should you start? 

I like the approach of Hein Zegers.  As a happiness researcher at the University of Leuven, a nearly 600-year-old Belgian center of learning and research, he  stressses  the importance of  establishing evidence-based interventions.  

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