Cognitive Design

Calling all cognitive designers… gear up for The 2009 DiabetesMine Design Challenge

Design an innovation to improve the lives of those with diabetes, document (by May 1, 2009) your idea in a two-minute YouTube video or 2-3 page elevator pitch, win $10K (or other prizes), enhance your reputation as a designer and perhaps, help millions of people with diabetes!

Entries will be judged on how well they solve a problem for people with diabetes, clinical efficacy (make sense medically) and aesthetics or look and feel.   Rules can be found here.

Don’t let the product focus limit your thinking, this is really about cognition, experience and service.

Innovators retain intellectual property rights. The competition is sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, endorsed by medgadget.com and supported by IDEO.   You can check out more details including entries from last year HERE.

Searching amongst alternatives and deciding between similar options takes a tanker of mental energy. Indeed, if I have many similar alternatives, it can take too much mental work to compare them and I may defer making a choice at all, or so argues the excellent article, Testing the tyranny of too much choice against the allure of more choice, in the March issue of the Journal of Psychology and Marketing.

The entire issue is devoted to Assortment Structure and Choice and is a must read for cognitive designers. 

The words we use to explain or create designs have an enormous impact on cognition. This may seem obvious but understanding the details of the impact can help designers select words as carefully as they select other features, functions and forms.

Detailed insight into the cognitive effects of word choice is the subject of the recent article, The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perception of Illness.  The authors studied the impact of medical versus lay terminology on perceptions (e.g. seriousness) held about the underlying condition. 

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Click here to get some.  

Peer into the minds of students HERE. 

I was talking with a group of educators the other day and they were explaining how pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are becoming popular in their field. The idea is that we give students money, prizes or tokens to engage in and perform well in the learning process. 

As a cognitive designer this caught my attention –  How do extrinsic rewards support or enhance the cognition of learning? 

There is literature on the issue but it is mixed. A recent article in the New York Times, Rewards for Students Under A Microscope,  offers a brief review and confirms what I heard – the question stirs a lot of emotion and programs that pay for performance are growing at a rapid rate.   According to the article, 

“Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.”

And some are showing some interesting results.

But others are failing….  

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As we work our way through healthcare reform, innovative designs that help people with chronic conditions change their behaviors (learn self care techniques) are absolutely essential.  This point is made forcefully in a short review of the George Halvorson’s book, Healthcare Reform Now! on the Influencer Blog: 

“Halvorson’s book targets five common chronic conditions—asthma, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, depression, and diabetes. Together, these five conditions account for 75 percent of our healthcare spending. We would save $77 billion if we could successfully treat even 1 percent of the people with these chronic conditions. And the key to treatment is influencing behavior.”      

In my course of cognitive design we reverse engineer some of the most successful chronic disease management programs to see what makes them tick.

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There is a US national design policy initiative that is making a 10 point pitch to Congress to elevate design to the national agenda. Among other things they are calling for the creation of a position in the department of commerce focused on design and innovation, establishing grants for design research and commissioning a study to better understand the impact of design on the economy. All 10 proposals are discussed in a paper, Redesigning America’s Future, that opens with the position that America is in need of a redesign.  

I agree with the timing and spirit of this initiative. Indeed, I don’t see how we can deal problems like healthcare costs without embracing design thinking.

Thanks to Jessie Blank for sending this link.  

With President Obama’s signature on the stimulus bill we have decided to spend some $19B to scale up the use of electronic medical records (EMR) software across the nation.  This might not be good news.  According to a recent study by the National Research Council the current products and implementation approaches fail to provide the “cognitive support” needed to improve clinical outcomes and administrative efficiencies. 

Scaling up current EMRs will likely not produce the benefits we need to improve healthcare in the US.   We must redesign the EMR so that it supports the cognition of clinicians and behavior change in patients if we want a return from our national investment.   A true challenge for a cognitive designer!  In answer, I have developed a position paper describing the motivation, principles, building blocks and economics of a redesigned EMR or EMR 2.0.  

You can review the full paper or a one-page executive summary.

We need to move quickly if an EMR 2.0 – designed for how minds naturally work – is to be ready for the first round of stimulus incentives in 2011.   I am currently selling this vision, building a business case, recruiting a team and seeking funding to build a prototype.   Should you have any interest or comments drop me a note at mark.k.clare@gmail.com

There are literally hundreds of books, software packages and tools designed to help you manage your money more effectively. Most of them don’t work very well for many people.  They fail because they involve a lot of up front learning and setup, are often very hard to use, require constant updating, results can be complex or confusing and in general they don’t really provide the type of cognitive support we need to do personal money management. 

One exception stands out and that is mint.com. The product is an outstanding example of cognitive design or designing for how our minds naturally work.   Not only is set-up a snap, but you get an integrated view of your finances that is automatically updated, the ability to view and benchmark spending in many categories and specific advice (with $ amounts) on how to manage your money more effectively.  

You can watch a video of how it works here. Or just try it out – it is free.  They are adding some 3000 new users everyday.

Now all we need is something similar for managing personal health.