Cognitive Design

Brain chemistry drives a lot of human behavior. Some of the natural drugs or chemicals that play key roles are dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol and insulin.  So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that link brain chemicals to cognition and behavior that can have implications for designers.

For example, the ScienceDaily just reported on a study that shows how levels of dopamine impact decisions around self control. Higher levels of dopamine lead to impulsive. behavior. To quote:

“The researchers found that every subject was more likely to behave more impulsively — choosing the ‘smaller, sooner’ option — when levels of dopamine in the brain were boosted. . On the whole, the number of sooner options chosen increased by almost a third, although each subject varied on this measure.”

This is a significant effect.   How can designer make use of it?

Perceived weight, texture and hardness of an object unconsciously shapes our interpretations and judgments especially in situations involving interpersonal communications. That is the conclusion of recent research at Harvard and MIT on How Touch Influence Judgments.

Specific examples given include:

 ” Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain.”

Hard, rough and heavy – all sensory states we can design for in a wide variety of circumstance.

In developed countries the top survival skill in the early 21st century looks to be the ability to self-regulate or control your own behaviors, appetites and emotions. The simple form of this argument points to otherwise avoidable health risks being the number one cause of death. Lifestyle choices (eating, exercise, drugs, stress, etc.) leading to chronic conditions and eventual death.  

In a recent New York Times article Dysregulation Nation, Judith Warner, chronicles the details:

“Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.”

“Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too.”

“We read about dopamine fiends sitting enslaved to their screens, their brains hooked on the bursts of pleasure they receive from the ding of each new e-mail message or the arousing flash of a tweet. “

“Mental-health professionals report seeing increasing numbers of kids who are all out of sync: they can’t sustain attention, regulate their rage, moderate their pain, tolerate normal types of sensory input.”

“The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. “

As dark as this seems I firmly believe we can design our way out of it. (more…)

The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago includes a Center for Decision Research. The work they do is cutting edge and full of designable insights.  To see what I mean browse the papers in the Behavioral Science Workshop Section.

For example, there are many insightful articles on behavior and habit change.  Consider the general conclusion of Can’t Control Yourself:

“Are people stuck hopelessly repeating their bad habits? Our answer, from research on what people do in their everyday lives when trying to change their responses, is not necessarily. Participants in our studies were reasonably successful at exerting control over unwanted responses when they used self-control strategies that are tailored to the specific cuing mechanisms that produced the response (i.e., temptations vs. habits). Thus, as suggested in earlier research on delay of gratification, having sufficient control strength is not a guarantee of successful control. The participants in our diary and laboratory studies were most successful when they exerted control in ways best suited to inhibiting the habit mechanism that activated the unwanted response.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear – emphasize avoidance strategies (staying away from the stimulus that triggers the unwanted behavior) over motivation and self-regulatory strength.

Met yesterday with an ASTD professional development network (PDN) on cognitive learning.  A great group of people very much focused on cognitive design issues:

“The Cognitive Learning PDN focuses on the rapidly expanding field of Cognitive Neuroscience: How do people think, learn, master skills, and gain competencies?” 

I gave a brief talk,  Redesign Your Knowledge Blobs to Accelerate Behavior Change!  If you are in the Chicago area check them out.

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Converse has set up a mass customization capability for their shoes. Working from their website you can design your own shoe and get one or more pairs in just 4-6 weeks. You can control shoe type and color/print on many parts of the shoe including toe, outside body, sole, lace, tongue, stitching and so on.   You can even add text.

There is enough flexibility to create some truly distinctive effects. For cognitive designers, this could be an opportunity to test ideas about how to create a specific think-and-feel via shoe designs. For example, can you design shoes that would cause people to reminisce, give thanks, feel centered or experience other specific mental states? Try it out.  If you do try it out be sure to share your results. I am especially interested in thoughts on how to link shoe parts to color/patterns to generate specific thoughts and feelings.

Core77 has a post on the results of the betacup competition. A $20,000 open innovation design contest to develop a way to eliminate paper coffee cup waste.  According to the post we generate some 58 million cups a year which tend to end up in landfills.  The goal is to design something to change our behavior from using paper coffee cups to doing something else that still gives us coffee but avoids the environmental impact. The tag line is to drink sustainably.

The winner is the Karma Cup - “A chalkboard sitting by the register. Every guest who uses a reusable mug marks the chalkboard. Every 10th guest receives a free item.” 

A great example of an attempt to use ordinary materials to create extra ordinary behavior change. But will it work? From a cognitive design perspective do you expect the Karma cup to produce lasting behavior change in coffee drinkers?

One of the major lessons learned about how the mind works over the last couple of decades is that it is fully dependent on the body. Cognition is embodied or at least partially determined by bodily actions, interactions and so-called “memories”.   Talking with our hands, solving a problem by walking or pacing, moving to learn and so on.  Now there is new evidence that we blink as an embodiment of day dreaming.  The idea is that we blink to help shut out perceptual input that would otherwise require attention and interfere with our wandering mind.  ScienceDaily has a nice summary of the study, Out of Mind, out of Sight: Blinking Eyes Indicate Mind Wandering. To quote:

 ”What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain,” says Smilek.

This is part of a shift in how scientists are thinking about the mind, he says. Psychologists are realizing that “you can’t think about these mental processes, like attention, separately from the fact that the individual’s brain is in a body, and the body’s acting in the world.” The mind doesn’t ignore the world all by itself; the eyelids help.”

Designs that support mind wandering can be important for stress management and creativity.

The Scientific American has an excellent article on Alcoholics Anonymous as it celebrates its 75th year. The article highlights success stats. Not surprising the ability to stay sober correlates to the number of meetings you attend and how long you stay with the program. To quote:

 ”Of those who dropped out of A.A. after the first year, only 43 percent were still sober at year five. Of those who went to 60 meetings a year 73 percent continued to abstain. And 79 percent of those who attended 200 meetings annually had gone into remission by year five. Maybe most surprising, is that 61% of those who attended 200 meetings in their first year but dropped down to six meetings in year five, were still able to stay dry.”

 Staying sober is a powerful behavior change. AA’s 12 guiding principles warrant serious study by cognitive designers working in any area of behavior change.