Cognitive Design

Many times in this blog I have argued that designing for a specific think-and-feel is a major source of innovation across industries. I am pulling those thoughts together into a two-hour workshop, Designing for How Minds Actually Work for the 2009 Design Research Conference  to be held in Chicago this October.  The abstract follows.  

 ”We want products, services and experiences that are useful, easy to use, delight our senses and make us think-and-feel in a certain way. This last requirement, designing for a specific think-and-feel or set of mental states is an important innovation frontier for design researchers. The question is, how can we do it in a systematic and repeatable way?

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Word choice is a giant lever for cognitive designers or anyone interested in impacting how people think and feel. But exactly how do words and phrases impact cognition?  An interesting new finding is reported by NPR.

The bottom line is:

“…native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender”

If this finding holds up it gives us a powerful insight into how to tune word choice to invoke specific mental states and models based on gramatical gender.  I won’t spoil the well presented examples in the story by trying to reproduce them here so check out the link above.  

Thanks to Gina Farag at Northwestern for pointing this story out.

Research is finally catching up with what savvy architects have known for a long time – the design of a room can have a big impact on how we think and feel (cognition). Or so argues an interesting article in April 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind.  

A few of the design heuristics include:

Raise the height of ceilings to stimulate creativity and lower them for more focused detail oriented work

Provide external views of natural scenes (greenery and natural light) to stimulate mental focus and rejuvenation

Use blue LEDs and full fluorescent lighting to stimulate alertness

Of course I oversimplify a bit.  Beyond the heuristics the article explains the cognitive science of why they work. A must read for cognitive designers. 

Time Magazine has an interesting article on how Obama and his staff are using principles from  behavioral science to make change happen on a national level.  For example, using the principle that people want to do what they think others will do shaped a key campaign message “A Record Turn Out is Expected”.  

Although this principle and the other techniques discussed in the article (e.g. Nudges) are nothing new to readers of this blog, what is new is the fact that they are being tested on a national scale. We can expect to see them put to work in healthcare reform, finance reform, education and other aspects of Obama’s change agenda.  

What an opportunity to advance our scientific understanding of behavior change!

Cognition is very resource-constrained. We only have so much energy for paying attention, remembering things, making decisions, learning and controlling our emotions before we get mentally fatigued and start making mistakes or give up. Playfully, I always ask students, how many cognitrons (units of mental energy) does their design require and how many does it produce?   

So as a cognitive designer I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into the resource-limited nature of cognition. A just published study,  Acts of Benevolence: A Limited-Resource Account of Compliance With Charitable Requests, reveals once such insight.

The researchers found that social influence techniques used to get you to sign petitions, donate money, or volunteer time are successful because they “induce a state of self-regulatory  resource depletion”.   Initial requests for donations that you resist burn up a lot of cognitrons (mental energy) and so you are more compliant with subsequent requests.  This is more than the “I will wear you down” technique as successful pitches for donation are specially designed to burn up all the cognitrons in your head!  

Violet has developed a very interesting application of RFID technology. You stick an RFID stamp on any object and then program what you want it to do.  When you wave the object over the reader, called the mirror (shown below), it triggers the programmed action on your computer.

[image source: engadget] 

This is a quick way to extend the functionality of the original object to include a wide range of computer mediated functions – pull up files, send an email, update your facebook status, run a program, show a picture or map, listen to your favorite iTunes and so on.

This could be a real accelerator for cognitive designers.

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Earlier I blogged on a design contest sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Ashoka focused on designing for better health. The idea is to design artifacts that nudge us into making healthier decisions.  Definitely cognitive design in action.

I submitted an entry on Health Change Cards and described the achieving healthy weight loss deck that Mark Pierce and I developed.  Check it out and please leave comments. You can find example cards, the workbook for achieving health weight loss (all 24 cards) and more info on the cognitive design of the change model HERE.