Cognitive Design

I have blogged many times on various designs aimed at improving medication adherence. Remembering to take your meds and remembering to refill your perscriptions are serious cognitive design challenges, especially for the elderly taking many medications.

Enter the GlowCaps product from Vitality. You use special caps:

and this gadget that plugs easily into a wall socket.

The gadget pulses orange when it is time to take a pill, sends a weekly update to someone you designate (for social support), connects to your pharmacy and automatically reorders and sends a monthly report to you and your doctor indicating if you missed, met or exceeded your compliance goals. You are provided an incentive to exceed your goals.

I imagine there is some set up involved. Although I have not tested it yet, this appears to have a lot of the right stuff from a cognitive design perspective.

Mobile phone use and texting have spread like wild fire around the globe. Likely faster than any other technology we have seen (except perhaps for the internet).  Texting is a unique style of communication especially when it includes predictive software that provides word completion.  Some worry that it teaches us to be fast but inaccurate. The question is, how does texting and mobile phone use in general impact cognition, especially in school-age children?

A new research study from Monash University in Australia found:

 “This study provides evidence that using mobile phones is changing children’s behaviour. However, we have not found any serious or long-lasting effect on the way that they think or learn.”

This is good news, opening the door for the cognitive designer to explore the upside – How can we use texting and mobile phones to accelerate the learning and thinking of school-age children? We have seen how other forms of new media such as the web and gaming have been embraced as enablers of educational innovation, why not the mobile phone and texting?

We mimic the behaviors around us especially those in our “in group”.  Behaviors spread through groups sometimes as swiftly as a contagion. Yawning, laughing, happiness, skipping school, smoking, obesity, cheating, and bullying are a few of the behaviors that have been shown to spread contagiously.

Some of these vector through biology, others direct influence and still others through social network effects. Contagious behavior, like an idea virus or viral product (e.g. a video clip) has a unique design pattern or set of features and functions that make it irresistible and effortless.  But what is the design pattern for contagious behavior? How can we for example, invent contagious behaviors for achieving and sustaining health weight loss, managing chronic illness and the like?

Some have offered answers on how to design and seed contagious behavior (e.g. The Tipping Point) but none that have led to reproducible results. Until the design pattern for contagious behaviors is discovered we will have to follow the advice of mothers and effective leaders – hang out with the good kids and surround yourself with talented people.

Check out the article, Eye Candy of the Day: Wall Stickers for Grown Ups over at Fast Company. Something to consider adding to your rapid prototyping kit for cognitive design.

Marketers group people into target markets using demographic profiles. Cognitive designers do the same thing only using psychographic profiles or sets of common cognitive characteristics, needs and biases.  I am often ask if there are generic psychographic profiles along with instruments and surveys for using them. I believe the answer is no, but I do find the following styles of value:

* Kolb’s four experiential learning styles

* Hermann’s four whole-brain thinking styles

* Gregorc’s four mind styles

Each style is rooted in theory, has good empirical support and includes easy to use instruments for segmenting. Most importantly, the resulting profiles have strong implications for the types of features and functions you need to include in your design.

One goal of cognitive design is to create products, services and other artifacts that put people in a particular mental state or set of mental states (experiences).   But how do we determine when someone or a group is in a particular mental state to know if our design is working?

One answer is to analyze what they write.  Check out this intriguing web science article by Dodds and Danforth on Measuring the Happiness of Large Scale Written Expression. As they point out in the intro:

“The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena.” 

 They look at song titles, blogs and State of the Union addresses and use analytical techniques that can easily be adapted to other applications.   Some of the findings are interesting (happiness of song titles trended downward from the 60s to the mid 1990s) but it is more the technique that is relevant to cognitive designers.

Recently, a group of cognitive design students at Northwestern University set about the task of creating behavior change programs aimed at lowering the carbon footprint of the typical American home.   A fascinating array of programs were developed which I will blog on later.

Just saw an announcement from EurekAlert! on how Psychological factors help explain the slow reaction to global warming.  It provides strong support for the approach the students took, namely, focusing on unmet cognitive needs.  A task force from the American Psychological Association (APA) looked at decades of psychological research and isolated these cognitive factors (and I quote): 

• 1. Uncertainty – Research has shown that uncertainty over climate change reduces the frequency of “green” behavior.
• 2. Mistrust – Evidence shows that most people don’t believe the risk messages of scientists or government officials.
• 3. Denial – A substantial minority of people believe climate change is not occurring or that human activity has little or nothing to do with it, according to various polls.
• 4. Undervaluing Risks – A study of more than 3,000 people in 18 countries showed that many people believe environmental conditions will worsen in 25 years. While this may be true, this thinking could lead people to believe that changes can be made later.
• 5. Lack of Control – People believe their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.
• 6. Habit – Ingrained behaviors are extremely resistant to permanent change while others change slowly. Habit is the most important obstacle to pro-environment behavior, according to the report.

They also reviewed interventions that worked including, for example,  providing immediate feedback on energy use rather than waiting for a monthly bill and combining financial incentives with other forms of behavioral influence (e.g. peer pressure). For those that want to dig deeper there is a 230-page PDF covering the research available from the APA.

A Northwestern student sent a link to Think Faster, Remember More, one of the themes we discuss in the Cognitive Design class I teach there.  The post is a “how to guide” and contains a number of interesting insights into memory, including why we can’t remember being born, how memories are formed and why we forget our keys.

Unfortunately, reading the post won’t give you super memory, but it does provide useful context and pointers for designers working on memory-related challenges.

Check out the latest from the National Institute of Health on the new Human Connectome Project:

“The National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research is launching a $30 million project that will use cutting-edge brain imaging technologies to map the circuitry of the healthy adult human brain. By systematically collecting brain imaging data from hundreds of subjects, the Human Connectome Project (HCP) will yield insight into how brain connections underlie brain function, and will open up new lines of inquiry for human neuroscience.” 

What is exciting, especially from a cognitive design perspective, is:

“In addition to brain imaging, the HCP will involve collection of DNA samples, demographic information and behavioral data from the subjects. Together, these data could hint at how brain connectivity is influenced by genetics and the environment, and in turn, how individual differences in brain connectivity relate to individual differences in behavior. ”

This means it should be a treasure trove of insights for improving how the things we design fit and enhance the human mind.

Image a device, implanted in your brain, that allows you to tune the neurochemistry of motivation to make difficult tasks easy and even immensely enjoyable. That is the idea behind, iPlant, a conceptual design for Human application (10 years out?) but already working in some mammals.  The device generates dopamine (reward drug)  or a powerful motivator to repeat what you just did such as exercise, avoid eating a cookie (self-regulation), study a difficult passage  and so on.

Check out this YouTube that introduces the concept.   For a more robust introduction, check out this longer video that explains how iPlant relates to deep brain stimulation devices already in human use.

It will be interesting to see which hits the market first – brain implants (or hopefully a less invasive device) to control motivation or the so-called “self control” pill. No matter, it looks like good old fashion will power may soon be supercharged by some application of augmented cognition. I am sure that is a good thing.