Cognitive Design

About 25% of the queries I get for consulting work in cognitive design have to do with ethics.   Employers large and small are worried about the lack of ethical behavior in the workplace.   Ethics is an interesting area to work in because it pulls on everything from moral philosophy to cognitive science and behavior change. Business ethics has been the biggest boom of all time for the applied philosopher.

How to design and implement a successful workplace ethics program is an open issue.  So I am always on the look out for new scientific research into moral cognition, ethical behaviors and value-based decision making.  Found an interesting post on Futurity about research done at UC Berkley on the connection between your attitudes about greed and your propensity to cheat, lie and otherwise engage in unethical behavior. Specifically they:

“… consistently found that upper-class participants were more likely to lie and cheat when gambling or negotiating, cut people off when driving, and endorse unethical behavior in the workplace.”

However, upon further investigation they found it was not socio-economic status that was the primary driver of unethical behavior but participants’ attitudes and beliefs about greed.   Participants that were primed to see the benefits of greed tended to act more unethically.

While this might not be too surprising, having scientific evidence for any predictive factor of unethical behaviors is critical to designing effective workplace ethics programs.

In cognitive design we place primary emphasis on using features and functions to create thoughts and feelings.  Objects and artifacts are interesting only in so far as the mental states they create.  It is all about think-and-feel especially in domains where having psychological impact is the primary objective as in education, healthcare, communication, improving knowledge worker productivity, entertainment and many other areas.

We need to design and engineer products, services and even organizations so that they are optimized for how individual and group minds really work. While this statement is a given for regular readers of the Cognitive Design blog, is it far from broadly accepted.

So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that demonstrate the value created by think-and-feel. Take for example, the recent study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that shows we place more value on experiential purchases than we do material purchases. More specifically, they found experiences such as vacations hold more value than products such as clothes.  Experiences are easier to integrate with our identities and can be savored and shared more flexibility than possessions. They require active participation and naturally tend to be more transformative than objects.

Importantly, the researchers:

“show that the tendency to cling more closely to cherished experiential memories is connected to the greater satisfaction people derive from experiences than possessions”

This reveals the primary importance of cognitive design.

Nearly everyone agrees that the K-12 educational system in the US is in trouble. High dropout rates, poor international rankings, high cost and an industrial age focus on teaching rather than a knowledge age focus on learning all signal the model has run its course.  A regulated, political  and fragmented market, K-12 has traditionally been closed to the normal forces of creative destruction that remake service/business models that go bad. All that may be changing.

According to the report Acceleration Innovation in Education Week, the pace of innovation in the K-12 market is seeing an unprecedented uptick.  Foundations and VCs have poured in a record amount of cash, incubators have sprung up and a small but diverse portfolio of start-ups are in motion. Key areas include hybrid charter models that combine online with face-to-face delivery and all facets of educational technology.

All of this is great news for cognitive designers that want to be entrepreneurs. After all,  successful innovation in K-12 requires a good deal of luck or a deep understanding of the cognitive needs of learners.