Cognitive Design

Occasionally I blog on the impact of food and off-prescription use of drugs on cognition.  Although not a likely tool for the cognitive designer, they may have implications for those that design events, services and workflows.  And they are certainly relevant for those interested in augmented cognition and cognitive training.

 So the item in Medical News on Medical Impairment and Alzheimer’s Reversed by Caffeine in Mouse Model caught my eye.  The effect takes the equivalent of five cups a day but I do that. Most interesting, the researchers believe caffeine could be a treatment not just a preventative measure.

 This, along with the growing number of studies on how caffeine improves your cognitive performance on tasks that involve vigilance, helps to justify the faulty belief that caffeine is good for me!

The Dana Foundation continues to make strides towards increasing public awareness and effectiveness on all things cognitive. Check out their new site Your Brain at Work focused on workplace learning challenges.  They cover many of the issues we have on this blog including learnability of devices, chronobiology (time of day effects) and more.  They provide solid tips for becoming a better learner and even offer a memory challenge.

A slogan in an advertisement for potato chips that has burrowed its way into our culture.   A great slogan from a cognitive design standpoint but according to a new book by David Kessler (Harvard trained MD and head of the Food and Drug Administration) there may more powerful forces at work.

His new book,  The End of Overeating, argues that food scientists have learned how to tap into our brain chemistry to stimulate our desire to eat more even when we are not hungry.  If you don’t want to go after the book, check out the review, How the Food Makers Captured our Brains, in the New York Times.   Here is a taste (pun intended):

“When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.”

This is an important perspective for anyone designing weight management programs.  You will have to design interventions that can overcome visceral effects far more powerful than normal hunger. Yikes.

Designing to create a specific emotional reaction, frame of mind or series of mental states (i.e. an experience) is a key area for cognitive design.  This is how you innovate, by moving your offering “up the value stream” from product to service to experience and ultimately to personal transformation for your customers.  But does this make consumers happier?

The PsyBlog reports on some interesting research that sheds light on the issue of material versus experiential purchase. Assuming you have $100 to spend, would you be happier investing it in an experience by say eating chicken at Medieval Times or buying clothing?  The research found:

Experiential purchases tend to make us happier than material purchases, unless things go bad.  If the purchase goes wrong, we are left a little less happy than if we would have bought something material.

There is a naturally symmetry to this. There is more “happiness value” (other things being equal) in an experience purchase and we feel the gain as well as the loss.

Crowdsourcing is a powerful new model of production that uses mass collaboration to generate new content, software and other products and services of commercial value using self-selected volunteer labor. Its continued success raises an interesting question for the cognitive designer – Why do highly compensated knowledge workers and talented amauters alike work so hard for free?

One answer pulls on the  so-called “big tent” theory of motivation claiming that the key comes from the fact that crowdsourcing offers a generous menu of alternative motivations. This way passionate and talented contributors are bound to opt in from the hundreds of millions of candidates on the web. Some evidence to support this comes from the interesting post on Wikinomics about LinkedIn’s Crowdsourcing Dilemma.

LinkedIn is planning to us Crowdsourcing to produce other language versions of its content. In considering the strategy they asked potential crowdsourcers – What incentives would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?  This is what the found:

From a cognitive design standpoint the implication is clear – I will trade valuable labor for recognition, meaning and fun. Of course, some free services (upgraded account) would also be nice.

Our inability to make behavior changes is driving health care costs through the roof. Employers have responded by ramping up wellness program around the US.  This makes the research, completed by Kori Lusignan a recent graduate of the Masters in Learning and Organizational Change Program at Northwestern University, very timely. She identified seven factors that are key considerations in the design of organizational wellness programs aimed at improving individual health. These include:

coaching,  self-efficacy, group/environmental support, convenience and automation, stress reduction, self-regulation and company satisfaction. 

A powerful blend of organizational and individual factors and specific enough to guide program design.  For an executive summary of here capstone research project click here.

This site offers a good catalog of communication methods for service designers.  Cognitive designers will find some of them very useful. Check out service maps, customer journey maps, Lego serious play, experience prototyping and mood boards.

Source:   Student Design Project

The Fire Pit: Making Cognitive Sparks 

Seed and the Council on Competitiveness recently convened a diverse group to discuss the future of innovation. It is an interesting read.   A sample for cognitive designers:

“Mullainathan said that this “last mile problem”—where people have all the information to act in an effective way but fail to do so—can be solved through innovations that adopt lessons from the social science of human behavior. As an example, Mullainathan used Clocky, a motorized alarm clock that jumps to the floor and rolls away while ringing, ensuring that users get out of bed to turn it off. An alarm clock has one piece of information to convey; adding wheels makes that information much more difficult to ignore. That kind of lateral thinking could be applied in many different contexts and at much larger scales, such as global health or poverty. “There are high returns to innovation in this kind of area because there are a lot of low hanging fruit—situations where behavior change can drive a huge return,” Mullainathan said.

Just in case you wonder what Clocky looks like,  I’ve include a photo. It is also interesting to note that “design” is an explicit part of the discussion on the future of innovation. Ten years ago that would not have been the case.

Modern living has gotten so complex that we now have a pronounced prospective memory challenge.  The demands on prospective memory, or remembering to remember something (calling your spouse before leaving work, watering your plants, or checking your calendar when you get into work, etc. ) have exploded over the last 30 years. I post from time to time on the latest cognitive science research and techniques for managing prospective memory.

Just found a relevant post on The Human Factors Blog, Smart Phones as Event-Based Prospective Memory Aids.  Simple but effective, check it out especially if you have a smart phone.