Cognitive Design

Designing for how minds really work is about discovering unarticulated cognitive needs in the workplace or the market and creating an artifact (product, business model, management approach, etc.) to meet them.

When it comes to motivating employees, especially high performance knowledge workers, it is now broadly recognized that meaningfulness in the workplace is key. Creating meaning is the chief cognitive need of employees in knowledge intensive organizations.

But how do we do that, or how do you design for that?             

[Source:  The McKinsey Quarterly, a journal of McKinsey & Company.]  

Tim Brown, the CEO of the design/innovation machine known as IDEO gave a recent interview in the McKinsey Quarterly on Lessons from Innovation’s Front Lines (free registration required) that provides some insights:

“I think organizations have a hugely unfair advantage when it comes to innovation and incentives: people want to put things out in the world to leave their mark; they want to be creative. I think it’s a basic trait of human nature—if you give people the chance to do things that have an impact in the world, that is inherently motivating to them. Time and time again, I hear people say that putting something out in the world that didn’t exist before was a life-changing experience. ” 

 We have a fundamental and pressing cognitive need to put something new in the world and thereby change it and transform ourselves.

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Almost two weeks ago I did a post on harnessing brainpower, a report by 60 Minutes on brain-machine interfaces. Now brain-machine interfaces are on the cover of Scientific American magazine. 

The lead story, Jacking into the Brain, covers the expected ground but does have some interesting speculation about the future including  the possibility of converting text into neural signals for downloading into our brains.

When applying cognitive design to organizational problems we approach change efforts, optimize work flows, implement benefit programs, facilitate decision-making meetings, plan team-building events and offer rewards and the like on the basis of how minds really work.

A classical example is the application of Kübler-Ross’s five-stage grief model to managing organizational change. Kübler-Ross observed terminally ill patients and argued that they went through five stages of grief including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 

[image source: Scientific American] 

Organizational theorists and management consultants picked this up and crafted models for employees that were doing something akin to grieving as they had to navigate a fundamental change/loss at work.  

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In cognitive design we seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel (feel in the tactile sense) to focus on creating a specific think-and-feel (feel in the emotional sense).  Cognitive design is concerned with tuning (adding, deleting, tweaking) the features and functions of products so that customers have specific thoughts and emotions (mental states).

Excellence in cognitive design is clearly important when you are designing something to change behaviors or enhance mental processes (e.g. make better decisions) but it can also be applied to differentiate even the most mundane products.

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Making smart machines promises to free us from unnecessary mental labor and trigger a productivity boom in knowledge work. But programming knowledge into machines can be costly and tedious. It seems to improve productivity only in small well defined domains. Developing large or broad scale intelligent machines (e.g. the semantic web) requires new methods.  

 One such method is croudsourcing or tapping the engine of mass collaboration and peer production to do large-scale volunteer knowledge acquisition. We can effectively “teach a machine” (program knowledge for computer use) incidentally as we do other things like play a game.

To try it out go to the site Games with a Purpose.

You can have some fun in your spare time, tag content and improve the intelligence of a search engine. 

Now that is how you design something for how minds (people and machines) really work.

Allstate Insurance and Posit Science, the cognitive training company, have teamed up to see if brain training can be used to decrease accidents in drivers 50 and over.

They hope to improve the visual processing skills that are important for driving safety and have kicked off a pilot program in Pennsylvania.

For more info see the press release, Protecting Pennsylvania Drivers One Brain at a Time or an interview with Tom Warden the leader of Allstate’s Research Center.

On Swoopo you can bid using a new model called “entertainment shopping” to buy all sorts of items ranging from consumer electronics to household items. Here is how it works:

1. You give them money, at least $20.  You buy the right to bid in an auction. It costs $1 to place a bid, win or lose.

2. Find an item you want and place a bid. This increases the price by 15 cents and automatically extends the bid clock by 20 seconds.

There are no reserves.  By paying for the right to bid this creates the possibility you can get a super good deal (lottery like effect)  and also means you will tend to bid not wanting to loose the investment you made (sunk cost bias).  

Entertainment occurs in the last 20 seconds of the auction as you score a “kill” in the bargain hunting game or pump more and more dollars into it trying to win a lottery.

60 Minutes has an excellent report (including video) on the latest use of brain-machine interfaces to help the disabled to move wheelchairs, write emails and operate computers with thought alone.