Cognitive Design

Imagine surfing online and running into a banner that reads “click now to contribute $1 to your nest egg. It will more that triple by your retirement age!”.  A buck and a click now for three bucks when I am old, sounds a bit boring. Would I do it?  I asked that to a group of 20 middle-age surfers (45 – 55) and 85% said yes.  They also wanted a widget to track contributions, projected returns and performance relative to others (friends) that are using from this surf-and-save offering.

Once you used surf-and-save for a while the pull to save impulsively will magnify.  For example, the widget would use historical data (online behavior) and your profile to illustrate the financial impact of saving a $1.5 instead of $1.  This could be big money if you spend considerable time online and don’t plan to retire soon. Plus it would likely let you zoom ahead of your friends!

A prototype of surf-and-save does not require a major investment. It would be interesting to find the online contexts and widget behaviors that produced the greatest conversion rates for saving impulsively.

Why can’t  savings be like experience points in social games? Millions of people spend hours a week in online virtual worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) earning experience points so they can upgrade their avatar, buy virtual goods or enter a new region of the game. Why not use the same mechanism to save real dollars for retirement?

We are already spending a billion real dollars for virtual goods and sponsors are giving virtual dollars to online citizens willing to do simple tasks such as watching videos and completing quizzes. The virtual and real economies are colliding.   Being online means the cost of doing simple financial transactions approaches zero. This means saving a little impulsive many times can be done cost effectively.

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Online or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are a new type of socio-technical system. They are technical platforms that provide computer-mediated social interactions of serious depth and breadth.   Literally millions of people participate many spending in excess of 20 hours per week online.  Users stay loyal for years. Some online worlds support virtual economies that spill over into real dollars. Over a billion real dollars have been spent on virtual goods, skills, experience points and level ups!

The opportunities for cognitive designers are vast.   Testing new designs in a virtual world and using online worlds to tackle hard cognitive design problems (lasting behaviors change, knowledge worker productivity, product/service innovation, enhancing brain function) are two major areas of opportunities.  Another is that online worlds have matured as socio-technical systems enough to offer some deep insights (design patterns) for cognitive designers.  To get a taste for that I suggest you spend sometime in country. Join a community and earn some experience points.  

Another approach is to look at the growing literature. One of my favorites is Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and Virtual.  Chapter eleven reveals an important design pattern:

“Most MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) attempt to foster interactions between their players by using a common template, which could be stereotyped as follows:

(1) the player creates a “level 1” character who enters the world with a limited set of abilities and equipment;

(2) the player is presented with “quests” (missions) to accomplish;

(3) successful completion of the objectives generates “experience points” (or any other similar reward), allowing the character to acquire more powerful abilities and/or equipment;

(4) (this is the most important design element) as a player gains in levels, quests become increasingly difficult to accomplish alone, reaching a point where a coordinated group of players is required to move further;

(5) the size of the group required, the length of the quests or dungeons, and the complexity of the encounters make it nearly impossible to succeed with an ad hoc group assembled on the spot, creating the need for more formal and persistent social structures: the guilds (or clans, teams, etc. in other game worlds).”

There are many ways a clever cognitive designer can put this to use even in the real world.

Interested to hear from readers with some significant virtual world time. What opportunities for cognitive designers do you see?

If you have not seen the video, Social Media Revolution 2, check it out. It  is a little over 4 minutes long, has uplifting music, draws on the new book Socialnomics and summarizes the factoids behind the revolution nicely.

Most forms of social media have exploded over the last several years because of the unique mental energy proposition they offer users. Never before have I been able to exert so little mental effort to get so much mental energy (meaning, emotion, ego boost, etc.)  in return. And the effect is even more intense in social games or online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The annual meeting of the cognitive science society starts on the 11th in Portland, Oregon. There are some workshops and tutorials that look to be of special interest to designers including an introduction to agent-based computer modeling for cognitive research and several others that deal with Bayesian inference. There are also many relevant (but highly theoretical) papers with designable insights into education, decision making and social cognition.  A fairly complete version of the proceedings are already available online. (select the HTML version and scroll down to see links to abstracts and papers).

One thing that is notably missing from the entire program (as in years past) is focused attention on cognitive design. As this is a scientific conference on cognition, sometimes spilling over into cognitive engineering, the lack of focus on design is likely a programmatic decision.

No matter, I am planning to submit a proposal for tutorial or workshop to next year’s meeting focused on design thinking for cognitive scientists.

The goal is two fold. First to demonstrate that cognitive scientists can make a much bigger impact by directly contributing to innovation efforts involving the design of socio-technical systems to improve organizationation performance, products and services that impact mental processes and programs for improving brain health and enhancing cognitive performance.  Second, cognitive design is ripe with many worthy research problems that are scientifically hard and hold great commercial potential. This session will be an undisguised attempt to accelerate the development of cognitive design by enlisting more direct participation of the cognitive science community.

If you are interested in developing and possibly co-presenting this type of workshop please contact me at mark.k.clare@gmail. com.

The Sekai Camera is a free smart phone App that locates, tags and provides information about the scene in your camera view. It also lets you “air tag” or provide descriptions and comments (text, pictures, icons, etc.) on the scene.  Additional features include a life-log.

A bit crude but it is an important first generation augmented reality application using the mobile web. One more example of how we are breaking down the barrier between the digital and physical worlds.

I invite cognitive designers to experiment with the Sekai Camera and suggest ideas for how it can be adapted to create lasting behavior change, improve organizational performance,  create a differentiated think-and-FEEL for existing products and services or enhance an individuals cognitive performance.

Quickly building low-cost prototypes is a great way to test design concepts especially early in the innovation process.  I’ve seen robust insights developed from on-the-spot mock ups created from simple materials. One of my favorite materials for doing this is Play-Doh. That’s why the 1 hour design challenge: Play-Doh kicks on Core77 caught my eye.

“Your task is to recreate or reinterpret your favorite pair of shoes in play-doh, in one hour or less. Cut loose and give your imagination a stretch. Maybe you’ll create a miniature tribute to your favorite sneaker designer of all time. Or, honor your humble, beat up kicks by sculpting their likeness, busted soles and all.” 

Grand prize includes a $100 gift certificate.   If nothing else you get to practice your prototyping skills to see if you can demonstrate the soul of a shoe in clay in a hour or less.

For some time over 70% of the GDP in the US (and 57% of global GDP) comes from services not products. About half of IBM’s revenue comes from services not computers or software. It turns out that creating, delivering and managing services is very different from doing the same for products. Yet our economic, management and innovation models are nearly all geared towards technology and products not services.  Little wonder IBM is championing the development of a new field they call Service Science, Management and Engineering or SSME.

IBM was instrumental in creating the field of computer science in the 1950s and that turn out to be a genius business move. They hope to repeat that move in the early 21st century but with SSME or service science not computer science.

Services are intangible, require the co-creation of value between the provider and the consumer and are driven by the application of knowledge and skills. This means cognition is a key factor in the “production of services” and cognitive design could play a key role in service system innovation.  More specifically, we should optimize the design of our service systems for how minds naturally work.

Unfortunately, the more traditional fields of management science, industrial engineering, computer science, operations research and the like are lining up to dominate the new discipline.  There is some attention being paid to the role of social sciences (see for example MIT’s Center For Engineering Fundamentals) but that might miss the mark. One exception I found was the chapter, The Psychology of Experience: The Missing Link in Service Science in the book (complete version online),  SSME: Education for the 21st Century (see page 35).  Hopefully there are others.

I am interested to hear from readers working in or considering the field of SSME and how cognitive design can play a role.