BusinessWeek has a report out on Design Thinking. It covers the debate over how to teach it, 30-top programs, 21 leading design thinkers, Asia’s play in design thinking and how business is using it. The only top program to emphasize cognitive design appears to be the MBA program in emotional design in Brazil. It includes courses titled “Cognition and Emotion in Design”.
Tools of the mind is an interesting approach to teaching young children to improve their capacity for self regulation (control of social, emotional and cognitive behaviors) via dramatic game play.
The approach, based on the work of Vygotsky, is highlighted in a NYT article, Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self Control.
“In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.”
It is easy to imagine extending this effect with a properly designed video game. My real hope it that some if this will transfer to building self regulatory strength in adults
With design thinking on the rise, prototyping is getting a lot of attention. Check out the excellent post on Box and Arrows on Integrating Prototyping into Your Design Process. I especially like the the fidelity grid (reproduced below).
[click on the image to increase its visual fidelity!]
It describes different flavors of prototypes based on their visual and functional fidelity. Clearly each will have a different impact on or fit with the user’s cognition and therefore render a different insight into the effectiveness of the design.
The Mayo Clinic recently sponsored the symposium, Transform: On Innovation in Healthcare experience and delivery. Videos of the talks given by leading lights in design thinking (Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO) and innovation (Clayton Christensen author of Disruptive Innovation and the Innovation Prescription) are available. No breakthroughs but a good overview of some of the latest thinking.
Sentiment analysis, or doing web mining to determine how a given population feels, may morph into an important tool for designers. For the latest check out the post, Charting Emotions, on the Wikinomics blog. It covers some of the techniques we have discussed before but there is some new stuff. For example, We Feel Fine, has built of a big database on “human feelings” from content in the blog sphere.
Happily they offer an API for any ambitious designer that may want to adapt this technology to gain insight into how groups feel.
There is an interesting post on the PsyBlog on How Long Does it Take to Form a Habit? After exploding some myths (it takes 21 days) and dashing the hope that we can just google an answer (21- 28 days) they review a recent study that shows (not surprisingly) that it varies by the complexity of the new habit you are trying to form.
Two key findings caught my eye:
1. It takes on average 66 days of practice to form simple new habits such as eating a piece of fruit daily. Something becomes a habit when we no longer need to exert self control to do the behavior (it becomes automatic).
2. There is significant individual and sub-group variation. For example the variation in one experiment was 18 days to 254 days for the same habit.
Both of these finding offer factors to consider any time you are designing a behavior change program, especially one focused on a small steps approach. The first offers a guide line on the amount of repetition that is involved. Turns out missing a day is not too bad but being consistent early on the new habit curve has the most value. The second, highlighting variation, underwrites the importance of developing a psychographic profile or segmenting those you are designing for into new habit champs and new habit resistors.
The standard model for driving organizational change is to tell employees a compelling story of why they must change; have leaders model the new behaviors; create reinforcing mechanisms (systems, processes, incentives) and build capability or the employee skills required to enact the new behaviors. Despite it common sense appeal and academic grounding, this model rarely if ever fully works. But why?
According to the authors of The Irrational Side of Change Management in the McKinsey Quarterly, the answer is that change leaders fail to take into account the “irrational but predictable” aspects of how employees interpret their environment and decide to act. This is of course just another way of saying that they don’t factor the cognitive needs of employees into the implementation and therefore fail to produce results.
The authors offer nine suggestions and insights, and I quote:
For those involved in the design of weight loss programs, check out the post, Brain’s response to seeing food may be linked to weight loss maintenance, on the brain mysteries blog. First, they summarize very nicely the problem of maintaining behavior change versus achieving behavior change:
”Long-term weight loss maintenance continues to be a major problem in obesity treatment. Participants in behavioral weight loss programs lose an average of 8 to 10 percent of their weight during the first six months of treatment and will maintain approximately two-thirds of their weight loss after one year. However, despite intensive efforts, weight regain appears to continue for the next several years, with most patients returning to their baseline weight after five years.”
Second, the investigators found via a brain scan study, that to maintain weight loss, the self-regulation that is learned to lose the weight must become hardwired or automatic over time. The effort must shift from a conscious, energy intensive, effort to one that is automatic or effortless.
Small, light, dry, and wireless neurofeedback system for $1300. Looks like a simple single-channel EEG system but might be enough to do some basic cognitive training with. The vendor, ICAP Technologies, has a strong “new age” orientation that may turn some people off. However, if the technology is reliable it could be a great way to give people a quick path to their first experience in using technology to externalize and modify mental states.
Here is a screen shot:
Would love to talk to someone that has made the purchase.
but don’t know how to ask for….
Today’s workplace is dominated by knowledge work, relationship management, innovation and constant change. To successfully lead you must understand, leverage and influence the cognitive needs of employees. Designing the workplace based on how employees think-and-feel makes for happy, productive and loyal employees.
Historically managers, product developers and organizational designers have viewed “thoughts and feelings” as far too subjective and variable to design and run a business on. Fortunately, that is changing. We are beginning to uncover deep and stable patterns in the mind – cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors, learning mechanisms, emotional processes and psychological needs – that provide requirements. When these requirements are met through good management or design they release blockbuster products and high performance workplaces.
