Cognitive Design

Good magic and placebos clearly illustrate the power of cognitive design.   Magic explicitly uses an understanding of how minds work to demonstrate to us in plain sight something we know is impossible. Placebos on the other hand accidentally play off of how minds work to demonstrate to clinicians something that should be biochemically impossible.   In both cases our minds are fooled. Optical illusions and sugar pills that none the less create real effects not because of how the world works but because of how our minds work.

That’s why I was especially intrigue by claims made by Canadian researchers that they created a machine that produces hand illusions that significantly reduce osteroarthritis pain. The machine captures a real-time video of your hand and uses some optics and simple sensors to trick you into believing your finger is being stretched or shrunk.  I captured an image of their YouTube video below.

It feels and looks real and is enough to reduce joint pain by 50% in 85% of the members in one test group.  There is other literature related to the use of optical illusions to relieve pain.

What else can we design optical placebos to do? How can the emerging technology of augmented reality (visual overlay of information on real objects) be used to create applications that leverage these cognitive effects?

I have bee reviewing the findings from the 2011 Temkin Customer Experience Ratings. You can access the entire report for free. Across 12 industries the average rating was on the cusp of poor. We have a long way to go when it comes to creating an excellent customer experience.

Creating a customer experience is mostly a cognitive design challenge.  It is driven by the think-and-feel your ads, product interactions and customer service process creates.   It is as much about the psychology of customer-facing employees as it is understanding the mind of the consumer.  Most businesses are run on a transactional basis and are not optimized to meet psychological needs. Indeed, very little cognitive psychology has worked its way into the management paradigm.  So I am always on the lookout for studies that demonstrate the transactional importance of psychological factors.

For example, a recent study at Ohio State University, Got Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed,  demonstrates that the mood you start your work day with can impact performance.

 ”Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers’ moods.”

The impact on performance was measured by a change in both volume and quality of work.  Cognitive factors were key. For example, high-positive mood produced greater verbal fluency (fewer pauses, stumbles and “ums”) which reduced call time and received a higher rating. The study was done with telephone customer service personnel.

The researchers suggest a little mood management might go a long way towards improving the customer experience. What does your organization do to lift the mood (or avoid souring it) at the start of each day?

The Rotman School of Management and Mayo’s Center for Innovation recently sponsored a business design challenge for graduate students. The idea is to deeply integrate MBA style business acumen with the creativity of design thinking to produce breakthrough insights. The challenge was to:

“Develop a new offering targeted at a specific patient population that will enable that population to improve their prospects for a healthy future.”

According to the post, The Rotman Design Challenge, the contest attracted some 19 teams from around the US and Canada. Five students from the Masters program in strategic foresight and innovation at the Ontario College of Art and Design won with the concept of Mayo Moms:

“Overlooking the intense emotions so often sparked by the topic of breastfeeding, the project envisioned Mayo as a facilitator, not a provider of healthcare per se. By certifying women who’d previously breastfed successfully as “Mayo Moms” and partnering them with mothers-to-be within the community, the students both leveraged Mayo’s brand and pointed to the creation of a potentially limitless social network.”

It will be interesting to see if this program is implemented. Getting individuals and groups more directly involved in wellness and prevention is something we clearly need to figure out – STAT.

Psychology Press, a leading publisher of books and articles on all aspects of cognition, has open up some of their content.  Over 40 articles from 14 top journals are available online for free. The journals include for example, Memory, Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition.  They plan on updating the content on a regular basis.

Although the articles are theoretical in nature, many of them have implications for cognitive designers. For example:

How to Gain Eleven IQ Points in Ten Minutes, demonstrates that talking aloud while thinking improves the general intelligence of older adults but fails to have an impact on other cognitive tasks (e.g. visual memory) or boost cognition in younger adults.

Have You Got The Look? demonstrates a bias in visual cognition for faces that look directly at us rather than away. More specifically, a direct gaze (instead of averting your eyes) makes you more attractive to others.

The Influence of Affect on Higher Level Cognitive Functions reviews the literature on how emotion impacts interpretation, judgment, decision making and reasoning.  They found a pronounced and complex impact, challenging the dual-mode or hot (emotion-based) versus cool (reason-based) model of cognition that is popular now.  Instead they found a “dynamic interplay” of affect and cognition present in all higher cognitive functions.  They over a specific model of this interplay that has clear design implications for applications in interpretation, decision-making and general reasoning.

If you read any of the articles please share your insights and any design implications you see.

The ethical consumer movement recognizes that people want to buy products and services that align with their values and moral beliefs.  They want to do business with firms that demonstrate a high degree of social responsibility. Globally fair labor practices, low-environmental impact, no animal testing and other cause-related issues are at the heart of the matter.

Value alignment, moral beliefs and ethics are all powerful psychological stuff.  That is why I was a bit surprised by the findings presented in a recent strategy+business article on Values versus Value.  In it they argue that ethical products and services (with some notable exceptions) occupy a niche and more importantly the reality of values-based purchasing might be mostly a myth:

“Proponents of ethical consumerism want to believe that people’s socially oriented choices are somehow different — perhaps made at a higher level of consciousness — from their general product choices. This is a delusion. Product ethics are more important only when individuals, comparing such ethics to all the other things that have value to them, determine that they are more important. And our research shows that for many people, this is seldom the case.”

While the points raised in the article appear valid, I am concerned that they might be generated by a lack of good cognitive design rather than anything more fundamental. It is a bit like appreciating Art. It is often difficult to do with out proper context or orientation. The authors may agree:

“For more ethically oriented consumption to really take hold, the consumer needs to become a knowledgeable participant, not a reader of labels. Rather than relying on traditional market research techniques, firms need to help their existing and future consumers become more socially conscious in their purchasing.”

Bottom line – we need to use a more sophisticated view of moral cognition in the design of ethical products and services, if we want them to change the world.

Self control is complex cognitive process that is fundamentally important for personal, professional and social success. We use self control to avoid temptations, delay immediate gratification for longer term rewards and achieve lasting behavior change.

I have studied or implemented a little over 100 programs that make use of the cognition of self control to achieve behavior change. In each case,  a key feature of the design included simple tactics or corrective actions participants used to avoid failures in self control.  An interesting article on How Self Control Works, makes the same point.  In reviewing Mischel’s  famous marshmallow study, where children are asked to chose between receiving a marshmallow now or more later, researchers made a critical observation:

“Some children sat on their hands, physically restraining themselves, while others tried to redirect their attention by singing, talking or looking away. Moreover, Mischel found that all children were better at delaying rewards when distracting thoughts were suggested to them.”

Simple tactics that can be taught to others to improve self control.  This is great news for anyone in the business of making behavior change (all of us).  The key is to discover and teach simple corrective actions that help avoid failures in self control.

Very interested to hear from readers that have used this strategy. What teachable tactics for improved self control  have you discovered?

Over the last 30 years cognitive science has revealed a new and significantly different understanding of how minds work.  Little of this new view has been factored into management, education, healthcare, communications and other cognition-intense activities.  This creates opportunities for those interested in translating the science into new frameworks, methods and products aimed at creating more brain-smart practices. And the science continues to advanced – it is a moving target!

Take for example, the idea of dual-processing models of cognition that were popularized so well by the book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The key idea is that we have two types of mental processes – automatic and deliberate – and most of what we do between our ears is automatic.  Now more and more researchers are calling this simple distinction in question, claiming sub-classifications within both deliberate and automatic processing.  One clear example is the work being done at Max Planck Institute.  It is summarized nicely in Beyond Dual-Process Models.

The researchers focus on the automatic or intuitive processes and argue for four classes based on the cognitive process involved. The classes include association, matching, accumulation and constructive.

Such refinements suggest a number of possibilities for the design of education or decision-making applications.   For example, the researchers talk about the different role of affect (emotion) in each model. Further, leveraging these sub forms of intuition might also be a way to lower the cognitive load of various activities.   While these model are very much in the research phase, they signal the start of an important refinement in the science used by cognitive designers.

One way to create preference for something is with lighting.   We like things better when they are illuminated  from the left.  This is true for many things from paintings to advertisements.  The position of the source of light  also impacts cognitive task performance. For example, left side lighting improves our ability to identify shapes and perform visual search.

The leftward lighting bias is strong enough to factor into a cognitive design. For evidence, take the article just published in the research journal, Laterality on Leftward Lighting in Advertisements. The authors claim:

 ”Overall, participants indicated that they preferred advertisements with leftward lighting and were more likely to purchase these products in the future than when the same products were lit from the right.” 

The article provides an excellent synopsis of other leftward lighting biases with pointers into the literature.

 Interested to hear from readers that have used this bias in an application.

Design thinking, like quality thinking, process thinking, systemic thinking, lean thinking and the other “think like this” movements before it, is knocking on business’s door. It promises everything from more insightful strategy, to higher levels of innovation, truly agile operations and planned organizational change that works.

Design thinking as an early-stage management innovation is in a state of disarray.  But that’s natural. Basic questions about definitions, methods and even if it works dominate the conversation.  And these are the questions that you must answer to get traction in business.  And they must be answered in just the right way.  What is it? How do I do it? How do I know it works?

Indeed, when you look at the history of management innovation there is a clear signature to those that get traction and those that don’t.  A manifesto is required that provides answers to the three questions that are powerful, simple and easy to retell. A compelling position that declutters the conversation and readies the management mind for action.  While there are many fine books on design thinking for business, none come close to being a manifesto.

Manifestos are of special interest to cognitive designers that study management innovation and social change. They have a design that moves the heart and extends the mind.  So I am always on the lookout for manifestos anxious to understand their content and deconstruct their design and figure out what makes them tick.

Take for example the fourth coming book -Designing for Growth: a design thinking tool kit for managers.  It shows some signs of being a manifesto. I base that on  reading the first two chapters and looking at the cover art. The authors are good at creating cognitive dissonance and then resolving it in creative synthesis. This changes thinking.

For example, in the section on: Design and Business: A Match Made in Heaven – or Hell, they present a contrast table:

Runs deep and to the point but does not overload.  They also present a 4-step method and 10 tools which they build up graphically over time with a grand finale of:

While too complex to share easily the wave form and some of the catch phrases (e.g. what WOWs) could vector.

Interested to hear from readers that are aware of manifestos on design thinking or have insights into the cognition of why they work.

Some objects, activities and rituals are naturally soothing.  For example, a favorite shirt that is torn and tattered.  They decrease stress and help us feel centered, relax and sometimes even happy. Understanding how these soothers work and injecting that capability in other designs is a great opportunity for cognitive designers. So I am always on the look out for scientific insights into how artifacts can relax us.

Take for example, the study soon to be released in Psychological Science, Comfort Food Fights Loneliness.

“The study came out of the research program of his co-author Shira Gabriel, which has looked at social surrogates—non-human things that make people feel like they belong. Some people counteract loneliness by bonding with their favorite TV show, building virtual relationships with a celebrity or a movie character, or looking at pictures and mementos of loved ones.  Troisi and Gabriel wondered if comfort food could have the same effect by making people think of their nearest and dearest.”

And they found that it did.   As the quote above indicates, comfort food is not the only way we relieve social stress.   TV, celebrity admiration, family photos and other social surrogates work too.   From a cognitive design standpoint we need to understand the features and functions that cause soothing and why they work.