Cognitive Design

Cognitive designers seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel to create specific mental states or a “think-and-feel”. Designing for pleasure, emotion, meaning, pain relief and improved decision making, learning and behavioral self-control are only a few of the application areas.  The goal is to optimize our designs for how minds work. 

Taking a systematic approach to cognitive design requires that we can somehow get between the ears of the people we are designing for and understand inner mental life and how it is shaped by features, functions and forms.

So I am always on the look out for new tools and techniques for modeling mental states and processes. The holy grail is neural decoding or the ability to translate measurable data on brain activity into the meaning of thoughts, emotions and actions. In short, directly reading the mind. The state of the art in neural decoding was discussed at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.  The New Scientist offers an excellence synopsis in Brain Scanner Can Tell What You are Thinking About.

Nothing yet for the designer’s toolkit but some very interesting developments:

“He (Jack Gallant) and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.” 

Being able to accurately and cost effectively translate biometric information from our nervous systems into the corresponding thoughts, feeling, motivations and intentions will be one of the major innovations of the 21st century.  Among other things, it will provide the foundation needed to take an exacting approach to optimizing our designs for how minds really work. Cognitive design unleashed.

Crowdsourcing or the use of a volunteer group to work asynchronously through the web to design something or solve a problem for free or a prize is an important new production model.  It offers a unique position on a number of hard cognitive design problems like how to optimize the match between individual motivation and organizational task requirements. 

Answer – don’t try let highly motivated people self-select.

It is a radical and disruptive model – first we insource, then we outsource, eventually we offshore and now we crowdsource.  The field of design should be especially open to this type of approach. Fast Company disagrees. They have a recent blog post arguing that when it comes to design, Crowdsourcing is a one-way ticket to blah.  Further, they reference an earlier article where there was considerable professional backlash against a firm that used crowdsourcing to do logo design:

 ”To create a logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo, they’re crowdsourcing the design, for a reward of $1000. The winner will be announced in six days, and over 700 people have submitted work. But no matter: To many professional designers, so-called “spec” assignments–that is, exploratory work, done for free–is taboo. Many designers think it undercuts them, and denigrates the profession.”

Yikes.  No matter, crowdsourcing will continue to grow. It has produced breathtaking results in many others instances. Our time in design will come. Ironically, it is just a matter of good design, of the crowdsourcing architecture that it.

Designing artifacts that generate deep personal meaning is tricky work.  

Autobiographical memories (AM) or memories about our personal history are a key component of self identity. As such designs that activate AM can often generate waves of deep meaning and mental energy.  Tokens, mementos, family heirlooms and retro designs are common examples. But the opportunities for cognitive design go deeper.

Some designers go further and make use so-called flash bulb memories  or AM burnt deeply and in rich detail into our brains. These range from the first encounter with our true love to presidential assassinations.

However, an exciting new book on the development of AM suggests that there is far more to the story because the development of conscious self, integrated personality and AMs are all intertwined.  That being the case, designs that leverage autobiographic memory should tap a mother load of meaning.

I’ve extract 8 design guidelines from the book and am going to test them out.

One of the challenges I give students in my cognitive design class involves taking an existing product or service and giving it a “cognitive makeover” by reworking key features and functions to create s specific think-and-feel. Check out this Pediatric Imaging Solution from GE that remakes scary into an adventure.

And it is not all just for show. They report a significant decrease in the need to sedate kids before an MRI.

Check out the article in Technology Review on Time Travel Through the Brain. It explains how our ability to see inside the brain has evolved over the last 100 years. Included are 10 visualization (one shown below) that just might inspire you to think differently when designing for how minds really work.

A mad dog gamer is my affectionate description of someone who plays between 35 and 45 hours of action video games a week. There is some interest in understanding the cognitive needs of this group and more to the point, how that much gaming impacts their cognition. Found a blog post that nicely summarizes some of the key preliminary findings so far.

Mad dog gamers have:

1. Increased visual processing ability (reaction to rapidly appearing events or objects in the visual field)

2. Normal reactive attention control (engaging attention just in time as event occur).

3. Decreased proactive attention control (managing your own attention to stay engaged in activities or events that are not automatically engaging).

And of course there are the recent studies that suggest a positive correlation between being addicted to game play and ADD but the causation is far from clear.

Finding 3 is very interesting. Some worry that it will make these folks less effective in the classroom and the workplace. On the other hand, their demand for “low mental  load” experiences and products might force us to make a bigger investment in cognitive design.

One of the things that makes cognitive design so timely is that we have a wide variety of tools for modeling the workflow between people’s ears.  Tools vary by what is measured, cost, intrusiveness and level of expertise needed to use them effectively.  Found a good article that describes the pros/cons of eye tracking studies.  

Interested  to hear from designers that have used eye tracking studies, especially outside the area of software interface design.

 From the works of designer Stephen Casico

Great Leadership

Or so argue the authors of the book Resonant Leadership.  The book has been out for a while but I am blogging on it to show that the levels of cognitive fit - agitate, tolerate, resonate, accelerate and integrate hold between people not just people and artifacts. Effective relationships have a higher level of cognitive fit. I get more mental energy out of them (my heart and mind is moved) than I have to put into them.  Said more directly:

Great leaders are masters at meeting the cognitive needs of the people they influence.

In a more recent book on the same topic, Becoming a Resonant Leader, the author lays bare the cognitive effects at work:

“Through resonance, leaders become attuned to the needs and dreams of people they lead. They create conditions where people can excel. They sustain their effectiveness through renewal.” 

As resonance is only the third level of cognitive fit, I invite you to wonder what types of leaders provide a level four (accelerate) or even a level five (integrate) of cognitive fit.

Students that take my cognitive design class are often surprised to find that we use many techniques straight from cognitive therapy. And why not, a cognitive therapist has to “get inside the mind” of their patients just as a cognitive designer needs to get inside the minds of their clients.   For instances, The New Handbook of Cognitive Therapy Techniques is required reading. We make use of the ABC technique for modeling a person’s environment in terms of antecendents (A) or activating events, the beliefs (B) generated in response to the activating events and consequents (C), that both emotionally and behaviorally flow from the beliefs.  It is a very simple technique but if applied with discipline produces authentic design-relevant ideas nearly every time. I’ve blogged on this before including a link to some slides.

So I am always on the look out for new insights from the cognitive therapist that are relevant to designers that focus on how the mind really works. A new and promising source is the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy. For example, they recently had a special issue devoted to mental control. Here is a sample from one of the articles on Mental Control of Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts:

 ”…analysis revealed that students primarily reported worry-related intrusive thoughts, suppression was used frequently despite limited success, distraction strategies were used most often and “do nothing” least often, and failures in thought control were attributed to personal failures of willpower or strength, or to the importance of the thought.”

Good insights into the cognitive needs and coping strategies for any designer working on a project involving intrusive thoughts.