Cognitive Design

A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that put people in a particular mental state by using features and functions that enhance specific thoughts, feelings and cognitive processes.   One way to do this is to include features in your design that trigger a positive-affirmation-effect that causes users reflect on or even subvocalize positive thoughts about themselves. 

I read a recent article, Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others, that offers a caution when using this approach.   Here is the abstract:

“Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true. Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who “need” them the most.” 

Bottom line  for cognitive designers – include self esteem in the psychographic profile of your customers. 

Design for behavior change is a hot topic. And it should be. Nearly everyone looks to rid themselves of some unwanted behaviors. Products and services that promise to change health or money related habits are a multi-billion dollar industry. For the most part they don’t work as the engineers and designers that develop them fail to draw on the science of behavior change. 

As a cognitive designer I am always on the look out for scientific insights into how to change behaviors while respecting individual autonomy.   That’s why the recently published meta-analysis of the effects of web- and computer-based smoking cessation programmes caught my eye.  

EurekAlert! news service has a nice summary of the study and reports for example,

“When the results of the trials were pooled and analyzed, individuals assigned to use computer- or Web-based programs were about 1.5 times more likely to quit smoking than those assigned to control groups. “

The evidence supports including software as a feature/function in the design of behavior change products and services. 

The time of day can strongly impact cognitive performance. 

There has been a flurry of scientific studies into how our biological clocks and  circadian rhythms work. Most of it has to do with cell science, physiology and chronobiology but some is trickling up to the psychological-level and is therefore of interest to cognitive designers.

Most relevant to cognitive design is the idea of a chronotype where our functioning is optimal depending on the time of day.  We  are a morning person (lark), night person (owl) or are indifferent.   Chronotype correlates to being vigiliance, creative, able to absorb new information and other aspects of cognitive performance.

An excellent article,  A Time to Think:  Circadian rhythms in Human Cognition,  rigorously reviews the time-of-day effects on 20+ attentional, memory and executive functions.  These 20+ cognitive processes sweep in most of what counts for knowledge work in organizations today.

So the next time you are designing a policy, program or process aimed at improving knowledge work, be sure to consider the chronotype of the employees you are designing for.

Priming is a simple technique that psychologists (and other scientists) use to put subjects in a particular frame of mind to set the stage for doing an experiment.  They expose subjects to a primary stimulus to see how they will react to a secondary stimulus.  Priming can have a huge impact on how we perceive, remember, decide, learn and emotionally react when presented with the test conditions of the experiment.

Priming of the mental pump is also fundamental to success in cognitive design for two reasons. First, using a priming effect helps us realize a basic goal of cognitive design namely, creating specific mental states through interaction. Second, the fact that priming has such a pronounced effect on the follow-on cognition means that enhancing cognition is achievable through design manipulations!

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The disciplines of management and leadership have the most to gain from advances in the cognitive and neuro sciences that reveal how people perceive, learn, think, feel and inter-relate.  Especially in the era of knowledge work where emotional quotients are more important than intelligence quotients and  overall cognitive performance is a matter of competitive advantage, leaders must do what they can to understand and support the “workflow between the ears”.

And we have learned a lot about how the mind works but it does not seem to be rewiring our approach to management and leadership.

Why is that?

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Quick, how many tables do you have in your house? How many tables do you interact with throughout the day? For most of us the answer is lots. Desks, kitchen tables, restaurant tables, work tables, benches, coffee tables, bars and so on. The fact is you spend a lot of time “at the table” and more to the point of this blog, a lot of your cognition (perceiving, remembering, thinking, deciding, feeling, interrelating, etc.) happens at a table.  

Yet, with the rare exception, tables have been left out of the cognitive design revolution. They are functional, easy to use and delight our senses but we have not taken the next step to design tables that enhance how we think and feel.

What an opportunity!

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Learning the basics of how to manage our personal finances is an area that has cried out for reinvention for sometime. We don’t learn or practice the basics well in the US.  Given the level of consumer credit card debt and the recent sub-prime mortgage meltdown it is clear we are in trouble.

As much of the problem has to do with poor cognitive design – that is, financial products and services that ignore how our minds really work, I am always on the look out for innovations that seem to get it.

Take for example, EverFi, a start-up that is focused on teaching Generation Y about personal finance. There offering has two powerful innovations from a cognitive design perspective.

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A primary thrust in cognitive design is creating artifacts that put consumers and employees in a specific frame of mind – feeling pride, experiencing joy, luxuriating, savoring and so on.  Designing a specific think-and-feel into an existing product can produce a real differentiating effect and even contribute to competitive advantage.

For example, in the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, Jenny Cordina and others argue in The Role of Emotions in Buying Health Insurance, that the key to winning in the health insurance business is designing products and services that give consumers peace of mind.  Specifically they write:

“ Consumers shopping for health insurance today face more choice, complexity, and financial exposure than ever before. In an increasingly uncertain world, what they are really seeking is peace of mind in their choices. Insurers that address the emotional needs and biases embedded in the typical consumer’s behavior will be successful in creating and distributing effective products, earning the consumers’ trust, providing a more satisfying shopping experience, and, ultimately, helping consumers better manage their health.”

A clear illustration of the fundamental importance of designing for how people think and feel in today’s economy. 

Stanford’s Center on Longevity released a statement providing guidance on the effectiveness of products that claim to improve mental fitness. The statement has been under development for a year and is endorsed by “30 of the world’s finest cognitive and brain scientists”.  

A press release, Cognitive and Brain Experts Urge Consumer Caution on Memory Fitness Products, summarizes the statement. A full copy can be found here.

If you don’t want to read the report, here is the the bottom line:

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Exmocare offers a true breakthrough in remote physiological monitoring.  

“The BT2 is the only wristwatch that can simultaneously, non-invasively, continuously and accurately detect with infrared and tiny metallic sensors from a fully moving wrist: heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, skin conductance and relative movement.  This data gives care givers a more complete picture of the wearer’s overall physical and emotional states.“ 

The info is sent to the web via Bluetooth technology and provides enough information to to infer the emotional state of the user.

A true power-tool for all sorts of applications in cognitive design. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the device is not being sold in the US.