Cognitive Design

In my neighborhood you will see signs in some yards with kids in an action pose running toward the street.  The signs are part of a campaign to get folks to drive more safely. The images are very life-like. I have often wondered (as a cognitive designer) what could be done to maximize their effectiveness.

Recently, I received some photos from the The Crowski in Lafayette that might begin to suggest an answer.   It turns out the city of Vancouver is painting a special image of a little girl chasing a ball in the middle of the street as part of a drive safe campaign.  The image is special as it looks three dimensional (3D) when you are close.  For quick introduction check out, Vancouver Uses Image of Girl to Slow Drivers.

From a distance the image looks like a blob.  As you approach, it slowly emerges in 3D as a little girl chasing the ball.  The goal is to increase driver vigilance but not cause people to swerve or slam on their brakes.  A post on Preventable.CA  provides more details:

“* The 2D decal gradually appears 3D to drivers approaching the image. A risk assessment of this project shows that drivers do not mistake this image for a real girl and can see the image 100 feet away. The image does not “jump-out” at drivers and there is no “startling effect”, the road conditions on 22nd Street are very good for this project, which is precisely why this location was selected.  Sight lines are perfect northbound along the road and to the cross streets.  Although the community continuously grapples with unsafe driving behaviours in this particular school zone, twenty-second (22nd) Street in West Vancouver has a very good vehicle crash record.”

What do you think?

McKinsey just released 2010 results of their global survey on innovation and commercialization. It is all good news for the cognitive designer.

First, 84% of the executives asked indicated that innovation was extremely or very important for their firm.  This should create strong demand for designers able to create new products, services and experiences that meet the cognitive needs of customers in simplified or unique ways.

Second, as firms turn towards innovation-based growth strategies they are facing the same organizational barriers that they have tried to overcome many times before. According to the survey:

Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.

While the suggested improvements  in the article are strong – formalize the prioritization process and link innovation to strategic planning – they miss the mark. Past efforts to enable organizational innovation have failed because we have neglected the cognitive factors. From a cognitive design standpoint the key questions are:

How do the minds of organizational innovators really work? What psychological needs, work practices, cognitive biases and mental models make them tick?

We need to answer these questions for all the key stakeholder groups – executives overseeing innovation, employee innovators, customer co-innovators and supplier collaborators.

                       Image source: Innovation Playground 

Not having these answers will result in poorly designed innovation programs and processes. Take for example this survey finding:

 As in the past, executives have the most difficulty stopping ideas at the right time, with only 26 percent of respondents to this survey saying they do this well.

I can try to stop ideas at the right time by designing a formal approach to prioritization but that will have little impact if I don’t understand the cognitive biases at work in setting and following priorities especially when “pet ideas” are involved.

Innovation at both the individual and organizational level is an inherently cognitive-political process.  No matter what programs and processes we design to stimulate it, the cognitive (intellectual, emotional, volitional and motivational) needs and political realities of the key stakeholder groups must be well understood and satisfied. This puts the cognitive designer center stage.

Entries for Scientific American’s World Changing Ideas Video Contest are due September 15th. They are looking for 2-5 minute videos that describe innovative ways to build a cleaner, healthier and safer world.  Winners get written up in Scientific American (great exposure).   Entries are judged on impact, scientific merit, originality, entertainment value and production quality. You can read about last year’s 20 winning entries to get an idea of what made the grade in 2009.

This contest is an excellent opportunity to exercise your talent in design thinking. For example, imagine how much cleaner, healthier and safer the world would be if we had low cost, high reliability, easy to use and noninvasive brain-machine interfaces?

We are fast becoming a culture of self trackers. We have smart phone apps, widgets, software packages and hundreds of gadgets for monitoring every aspect of daily life.  We measure and track our eating, walking, shopping, sleeping, exercising, socializing, child rearing, medication-taking  and online activities. We measure moods, weight, calories, ounces, blood pressure, heart rate,  time spent on tasks, the number of cups of coffee we drinks, our geographical locations during the day and many other personal variables. According to Wired Magazine we are Living by the Numbers.

Motivations for self-measuring vary but it is exploding because technology is making it easier to do and personal informatics feeds the core cognitive need to know about ourselves over time and how we compare to others.

The cognitive design blog has covered a couple dozen personal informatics tools and gadgets and how they can be used in behavior change. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of some 200 popular tools for collecting and analyzing information about yourself.  My favorite blog on the topic is The Quantified Self.  For a good general overview check out the New York Times article, The Data Driven Life or the piece in the Wall Street Journal, The New Examined Life.

The field of personal analytics and informatics offers significant opportunities for the cognitive designer. There is the challenge of how to collect the most relevant personal data in or near real-time while keeping the cost and cognitive load down.  Also, cognitive designers can contribute to defining products, services and experiences that leverage the personal data that is collected to create value in new ways.

The field appears to be wide open. Very interested to hear from readers that are active in the area and have opinions, lessons or resources relevant to designers.

When we are trying to change behaviors (smoking, spending, eating, etc.) it is natural to think about doing the very things we are trying to change. This has led some to advocate thought suppression as behavior change strategy. If you want to stop smoking for example, every time you find yourself thinking about smoking, stop and think about something else.  The idea is that if you are not thinking about it you are less likely to do it.

This is a common sense strategy but it will backfire.  

There is plenty of evidence that suggests suppressed thoughts reassert themselves with a vengeance.  If I try and avoid thinking about smoking I just end up thinking about it more!  But worse, recent scientific studies show there is also a behavioral rebound.  For example, the Research Digest Blog reports in Stubbing out thoughts of smoking leads smokers to end up smoking more:

 ”The main finding was that smokers in the suppression group smoked less than others during the middle week while they were suppressing smoking-related thoughts, but ended up smoking significantly more than the other smokers in the final week. In other words, trying to avoid thinking about smoking had a short term benefit but ultimately led to more smoking later on.” 

The same researchers also reported suppressing thoughts about chocolate leads to eating more of it.   The fact that it produces a short term win but fails in the longer term is especially important. This has clear implications for cognitive designer working on behavior change programs.

If you are looking to gain experience in the new open source community-based approach to design check out Open Planet Ideas.  The goal is to use existing Sony technology to create breakthrough solutions to environmental challenges. To stimulate thinking they offer a technology showcase as  a collection of building blocks to construct design ideas.

This is not a design contest with an open innovation prize but instead an opportunity to work with a community of designers and innovators (including Sony engineers) through inspiration, concepting, evaluation and realization.   They are not looking for new product ideas, or ideas on how to make consumer electronics greener.  Instead the challenge is to determine how to use existing technologies to achieve sustainability.

A video explains how the process works. They have collected 22 inspirations so far that include views of the most pressing environmental issues as well examples of clever uses of technology. Concepting will start in 29 days.

I strongly encourage readers of this blog to participate.   From a cognitive design perspective I am very interested to see how removing the element of competition with a cash prize impacts the outcome.