Cognitive Design

The paper I proposed to the Web Science 2009 Conference, Seeking Mental Energy On-Line, was accepted.  The conference is devoted to explaining “Society On-Line” or  the social behavior of individuals and organizations in cyberspace.  Not surprisingly, I apply the principles of cognitive design to the problem.

“In this paper we argue that to explain social behavior on-line we must understand and model interactions as the conversion of mental energy. Interaction as the conversion of mental energy is the principle that plays a special role in explaining and predicting on-line social behavior. In this context, mental energy involves the amount of cognitive work we must do to engage in an interaction compared to the psychological lift or drag we get out of it. We put energy into interacting on-line by, for example, searching, monitoring, deciding and communicating and we get energy out in terms of  meaning, emotion, triggered cognitions and other ways the interactions make us think and feel. The relationship between the mental energy that goes into the interaction versus what comes out determines the cognitive fit of the experience and our resulting frame of mind.”

I describe a 10-factor model  for mental energy analysis and show it can be used to explain a wide variety of on-line behavior. An extended abstract is available and the full paper will be shortly.

For $1.99 you can have an ad-free application that turns an iPhone into a fart machine – the iFart.  You can select from a  range of farting sounds (e.g. a wet one) and play them on-demand, on a delayed timer for a sneak attack, as a security alert or in other modes.

You can see and hear the iFart work on YouTube.

Sales have been brisk and news/blog coverage has been impressive. By why? 

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Research findings from University of Texas at Austin reported in Science Magazine, suggest that feeling in control (or not) strongly influences how effective we are at a wide range of pattern recognition tasks.

“Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.”

The perception of illusory patterns can lead to poor judgements and decisions making.  So this finding has implications for designers working on a wide range of cognitive applications from management decision-making  and consumer choice to learning and perhaps even the design of new magic tricks!

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The New Scientist has a thought-provoking article on the emerging field they call Magicology that focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of magic.  Over the last five years, magicians and scientists have found out they have something in common namely, an interest in understanding how the mind works. Cognitive designers also share that interest but seek not to trick audiences or develop scientific theories but instead create artifacts that are optimized for how minds really work. 

The article discusses three strategies – manipulating attention, forcing and false memories that magicians exploit to make it appear as though they can violate the laws of nature.  Seven specific techniques are also discussed that could be adapted by designers.   These include:

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A recent news article on a brain scanning study at UCLA suggests that using Google to search the web may in fact be great exercise for your brain.  They looked at a brain reading a book (below to the left) and then using Google to search the web (below to the right).

[Source: Dr. Gary Small, UCLA via the San Francisco Chronicle] 

 Clearly additional stimulation while Googling.   Perhaps it is not surprising that active search requires more mental energy than passive reading but there are still important implications for cognitive designers.  

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 Doing cognitive design is hard.  We don’t have many guidelines for practitioners that say “add these features and functions to your design to create this-or-that mental state or support this-at-that cognitive process”.  On the flip side, sometimes we have too many guidelines but they are grounded in strongly-held opinions rather than peer-reviewed cognitive science.

Cognitive designers must often go to the science of how minds work and translate it into a hypothesis or candidate guideline that can be tested and refined through the design project.  This makes almost every cognitive design project a research effort. Exciting but very hard to justify in a commercial design environment.  Cognitive design is clearly still an emerging field rather than an established design discipline.

 To be most effective the practicing cognitive designer must be able to get to quality science about how the mind works that is “design ready” or easy to translate into a specific and testable feature-function level guideline.

One world class source that is free on the web is the OpenCourseWare available from MIT. Of particular use are the courses in the Media Arts and Sciences section and of course the Brain and Cognitive Science section.  You get the syllabus, course notes and lectures, readings – many online, completed projects from other students and even exams but no access to MIT professors.

These courses represent the cutting edge of what world class cognitive scientists are sharing with their students.  A very good stream for cognitive designers to drink from.

Earlier this year I reserved a couple of EmotivEPOC systems, the world’s first brain-computer interface built for consumer use.  If the technology works reliably we will have an important new tool for cognitive design.  The system is both a platform for developing  products that directly incorporate cognition as well as a modeling tool for uncovering how people are thinking and feeling under a variety of conditions.

I was hoping to have them for Christmas but that seems unlikely.  Working with students I already have a pipeline of product designs to prototype and experiments to run.

 I did find an interesting in-depth article on the company, technology and founders in Inc. magazine titled Reality Bites.   Tech giants, IBM and Intel, are eyeing the technology.

 ”Some powerful partners have come on board. IBM (NYSE:IBM) is working with Emotiv to develop a corporate version of the headset that would allow, for example, virtual conferencing with avatars that represent people’s expressions and feelings — so you would know who was engaged, who was bored, who was laughing at your jokes, and, maybe, who was pretending to laugh.”

A well-structured metaphor can automatically trigger a cascade of emotions and thoughts that accelerate learning, decision-making, creativity and behavior change.  Metaphors not only move my heart and mind but can also be used as a modeling tool (e.g. Zaltman’s Metaphor Elicitation Technique) to uncover the deep mental structures and cognitive needs of employees and customers.

In short, metaphors as well as similes and analogies are a powertool for cognitive designers or anyone interested in designing for how minds actually work. 

In his recent book, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition,  Paul Thagard offers an analysis of emotional analogies that is useful for cognitive designers.  He describes three classes of emotional analogies including those analogies about emotions, that transfer emotions and that generate emotions.

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Imagine being able to measure the cognitive impact of a workspace or building design before you built it.  A group of architects and academic researchers is doing just that in California as they monitor the brainwaves (EEG) of users as they interact with a proposed design in a virtual reality (VR) environment. 

Not only do they expect to avoid costly design errors,  make way-finding easier and otherwise optimize designs for how our minds work but they expect to gain scientific insight into how we form “cognitive maps” as we navigate.  This is doing cognitive design and some applied cognitive science at the same time.

The project is described well in a post on MSNBC, Get Lost and Get Better Architecture. The end of the article is most interesting to cognitive designers. Berns a Neuroscientist at Emory University speculates that ”the relative mobility of EEG technology could lend itself to poring over the brain waves of people in existing buildings as well”.   This might open up a new level of rigor for the cognitive design of spaces.

A core principle in cognitive design is that we seek to  create artifacts based on an understanding of how minds actually work.   Further, there are five distinct types of minds we can design for including the individual, extended, group, emergent and machine minds.  Designs that combine insights into three or more types of mind into a single solution are often on the forefront of innovation.

For example, the participatory sensing projects at UCLA uses cell phones, individuals, groups and computers to gather information on decisions, behaviors and conditions across a geographic region to support a new form of collective intelligence and problem solving. Check out their Participatory Urban Sensing: Vision Video.

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