Cognitive Design

A New York Times journalist interviewed 200 design experts and wrote a book on design thinking, titled Glimmer: How design thinking can transform your life, and maybe even the world.  It is an interesting piece of work that is distilled into 10 design thinking principles.  Check them out. I have used variations of all of them in many settings. They work.

Although design thinking is certainty entering its hype phase, it won’t get any real traction as a management problem solving or innovation tool until there is a simple, proven and differentiated methodology to make it go. This is how lean, six sigma, process re-engineering and other management innovations got traction. The lack of such a methodology is why other management innovations such as knowledge management and systemic thinking failed. Where is the DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve, control) for design thinkers?

I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop at the Design Research Conference 2009.  I focused on designing for how minds really work. My pitch:

A dash of cognitive science + design thinking = innovation breakthrough!

The workshop started with a personal example on how to make it rain.   A large insurance company had a few sales people that could really out produce (sell) the others. These were the rainmakers. The management of the insurance company wanted to create a “program” that could transfer the secret sauce of rainmaking to other sales professionals to increase their production.

A classic problem and many solutions were attempted – training, best practice databases, coaching, new incentive systems and so on.  Not much happened.

Finally, we tried a dash of cognitive science in the form of talk-aloud protocol studies. These were awkward at first but did uncover the secret sauce.

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I was recently asked to provide input on a new procedure and communication materials a hospital had designed to support family members when they were faced with a decision to discontinue life support for a loved one.  Clearly a serious issue and one that warrants a full-on cognitive design.  I was glad they asked.

One of the things we did was look to the literature and  found an excellent study, Tragic Decisions: Autonomy and Emotional Responses in Medical Decisions.  Click here for a full version (no diagrams) pre-publication copy. The researchers uncover the cognitive (intellectual, affective, volitional and motivational) needs of the decisions makers.  What they found was:

1. Guilt and self-blame, or the anticipation of it, generates more negative feelings than having the decision made by someone else.

2. High degree of ambivalence about decision autonomy or reports that family members were glad to have had the opportunity to participate in the decision but wish they had not had not.

3. Strong preference for information about the situation.  Even though there was ambivalence about making the decision there was none concerning the information needed to make it.

 As they point out:

“Consequently, participants disliked making decisions but also resented relinquishing their option to choose.” 

A difficult cognitive need to design for.  I am open to any ideas readers may have.

One of my favorite challenges to give cognitive design students  involves a bar of soap. They are tasked with redesigning soap so that we can have the viscerally rich experience of the bar but the convenience and zero mess of liquid soap.  Part of the project involves trying to get inside the head of soap users and understanding the mental models, emotions and sensory aspects of the experience and designing to achieve a specific mental state.  I don’t give much direction just turn them lose to see how they naturally approach cognitive design.

This problem is harder than it may seem and I am always on the look for excellent solutions to share with students.  I just found an exceptional solution that has been taken from concept to product by the multi-disciplinary designer, Stephen Cascio.

The solution involves pressing a metal cap into a bar of soap and then attaching it to a stylized soap holder that contains a hidden magnet.  There are six designs - Bloom, Humm (shown), Lean, Petal, Sunrise and Swing but there is no reason to stop there.

I asked Stephen to comment on his work from a cognitive design standpoint. Here is what he said:

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 Easy to read overview of some recent topics fat with design implications.  Unfortunately, you need to buy a hard copy. Also of interest to cognitive designers is the Mind Brain online section of Discover.

A recent study found that using surrealism or other devices to create “meaning threats” (e.g. fire that feels icy cold), pushes us into an enhanced cognitive state that can improve learning outcomes. In one study, subjects read Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” (filled with strange and nonsensical events) and were given an artificial grammar learning test where they were asked to find hidden patterns in text. Researchers found:

“People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure,” said Proulx. “But what’s more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did.”

See  Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

The implication for designers is that meaning threats can be a useful device for priming user’s cognition.

Brainwaves has a post offering an interesting hypothetical scenario where the president signs, in 2019, a Neuro Information Nondiscrimination Act (NINA) that might contain the following provisions:

“- Explicit right to cognitive liberty, brain privacy

-Bans discrimination in hiring based on neuroimaging profile

-Bans all local, state ‘drug vaccine’ programs

-Bans ‘neuroprofiling’ for travel and attendance at public events

-Subsidizes accelerated learning with neuroenablement technologies

-Legalizes use of neuroenablers

-Bans denial of health coverage based on neuroprofile

-Bans cosmetic memory erasure”

The more effective cognitive design becomes the more likely it will be regulated.

This may seem far fetched to some readers, but check out the worry stream about in implications of neuroimaging  in the recent Forbes article, Is My Mind Mine?

Check out David Rock’s new book,  Your Brain at Work. The format is perfect for cognitive designers looking for potential insights into the needs of psychologically overtaxed professionals. It is in story form and infused with basic brain and cognitive science.  The book offers an array of tactics for copying with uncertainty, conflicting priorities, difficult relationships, information overload, unfairness, ego, the constant flow of emergencies and so on. The tactics are interesting but the real value for designers is the psychographic read-out of some deep, unmet cognitive (intellectual, emotional, motivation, volitional) needs in the workforce. This is a potential goldmine (or at least a good starting hypothesis) for those interested in remaking organization to fit how our minds work.

I will blog later offering a taxonomy of cognitive needs I extract from the book. I also plan to understand his research methods and do a literature search to seek supporting or countering views.

Mindset by Neurosky is selling for $209 ($199 + $10 shipping). A simple and easy to use wireless brain-computer interface. The software development kit that was selling for $9000 a year ago is now free!  Although advanced research tools are $500 and premium support is $1500. They are creating a community for developers to sell apps.

It is engineered to reliably detect changes in mental focus/relaxation. This is a very limited readout of mental states but if it works as advertised it should provide a new platform for commercializing a wide variety of cognitive design innovations.  I have ordered mine.

BumpTop has released an amazing new way to transform your Window’s desktop into a true-to-life 3D, gesture-based desktop complete with a physics engine, widgets and social networking. The idea is to make your computer desktop be more like your real desktop… only computer enhanced. You can get a fully functional but limited use version for free or pay $30 for the real deal. The file is 10 Megs.

BumpTop is geared much more for how minds work and therefore may be a big step forward in the cognitive design of PC interfaces. To see this clearly watch a three minute YouTube demo on Desktop Zen.

Although optimized for touch-screen technology and Windows 7, I was able to see immediate high-cognitive impact effects on my point-and-click machine.   It will be interesting to see how people use this – it could reveal a lot about how with think about information.  They have half a million downloads so far.

Thanks to Gina for pointing this out and sharing a link to a Fast Company blog post on  BumpTop.

I’ve included some example desktops on the next page.

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