Cognitive Design

Cognitive design makes an unique contribution to improvement and innovation efforts by focusing on the workflow between the ears. By discovering and documenting mental processes and psychological needs cognitive designers bring important new requirements, constraints and opportunities to the table.   There are five ways to get at the workflow between the ears:

1. Search the literature and develop a hypothesis. If someone else has already developed a cognitive model of the domain you are working in make use of it. This can include general processes such as recognition-primed decisions making or something more specific such as threat detection in battle field management.
2. Do some fieldwork. This means going out and watching and making inferences about what people are thinking and feeling. Ethnographic methods and empathy mapping used in design thinking are popular examples.
3. Use lightweight modeling techniques. These often include using validated psychological assessment instruments to measure individual’s strengths, weaknesses and needs against a known model. For example, two instruments that are very useful for cognitive designers are the learning style inventory that gives insights into how individuals learn from experience and the sensory profile that provides a measure of how sensitive an individual is to sensory stimulation.  Both these instruments are very useful when you are designing for behavior change.
4. Use heavyweight modeling techniques.  These are cognitive engineering and artificial intelligence techniques and include for example cognitive task analysis and protocol analysis.   With these techniques experts are sometimes asked to  think-aloud while they are doing the mental work of interest. These verbal reports are treated as data and are analyzed and scored to develop a model of the mental process.  Another technique is the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique  that focuses on the collection and analysis of images that users provide to infer the mental models and metaphors that are guiding their thinking.  While the use of these heayweight techniques requires considerably more expertise than the previous techniques, they are essential for many application of cognitive design.
5. Lab and Clinical Modeling: These are often the most expensive and complex to use and include for example eye-motion. EEG and brain scanning studies.  The idea is to directly measure brain states or related psychological states to understand how people think-and-feel when interacting with a product or other artifact.  Usually this happens in a cognitive or neuroscience lab but over the last few years companies have formed to make the techniques more accessible especially in advertising, marketing and brand management.  See NeuroFocus for example.

It is best to work these in order as each provides context and insights for how best to scope the next one in line.

While many current innovation methods stress field work and rapid prototyping with users, it is often necessary to use light-and-heavy weight modeling methods to generate real insights into how to move hearts and minds.

Yes, claim the authors of  God is Like a Drug: Explaining Interaction Ritual Chains in American Megachurches,  a paper being presented today at an American Sociological Association Meeting.   According to the authors churches with 2000+ members (a megachurch) create a powerful emotional experience using charismatic leaders, stagecraft, small group dynamics, sensory rich pageantry and environments  and deeply positive and consistent messaging.  All key elements of cognitive and experience design. To quote:

Many participants used the word “contagious” to describe the feeling of a megachurch service where members arrive hungry for emotional experiences and leave energized. One church member said, “(T)he Holy Spirit goes through the crowd like a football team doing the wave. …Never seen it in any other church.”

I am interested to hear from readers that attend megachurches. What can they teach us about cognitive design?

Everyday you decide many times that you need to remember to do something in the future.   You might want to remember to buy flowers for your wife on the way home from work or take the trash out after dinner. At work you might be in a meeting and decide you need to call another client or update a file after the meeting.  The process of deciding to remember something in the future and then remembering it or not is called prospective memory.

Lapses in prospective memory are frequent even in young adults. We get busy and forget to remember. Fortunately, most lapses don’t do much damage.  Some however, as with a surgeon or airline pilot, can be very serious. So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that have practical insights into how to avoid prospective memory lapses.

For example, new research by NASA reviews the literature on prospective memory and offers a good list of suggestions for how to avoid lapses.  The key method includes using a checklist and being very specific about when and where you must remember something (implementation intentions). The impact can be dramatic:

“Dismukes points out that having this kind of concrete plan has been shown to improve prospective memory performance by as much as two to four times in tasks such as exercising, medication adherence, breast self-examination, and homework completion.”

Other ideas include using reminder systems (phone/calendar reminders or another person), do important tasks now (avoid need for prospective memory if it is really important), do not multitask or allow for interruptions, link task to a well established habit and create reminder cues that are hard to avoid (note on your mirror).

While we have covered these suggestion in other Cognitive Design posts it is good to see them collected together. You can access the full article here (need to pay) or read a related (free) article from the same researcher,  Remembrance of Things Future: Prospective Memory in Laboratory, Workplace and Everyday Settings.

The Francis & Taylor publishing group offers many books and journals relevant to cognitive design.  Checkout their new digital catalog that provides easy access to their behavioral science journals including access to 100 free articles.

Interested in taking a cognitive design oriented class from a world class university and instructor? How about doing it online and for free? Check out these options from Coursera:

• Gamification
• Drugs and the Brain
• Basic Behavioral Neurology
• Networked Life

and more.

I am interested to hear from readers about other free (and top quality) resources for learning about cognitive design.

Over 75% of the healthcare spending in the US goes to chronic conditions.  One reason for the high cost is that they are not managed well.  Recent studies show the ability to keep chronic disease in check is very difficult when patients have multiple conditions.

Keeping chronic conditions in check, and better avoiding them in the first place, requires a range of patient behaviors and choices. This point is dramatically illustrated in Living Not with One, But Six Chronic Conditions:

“It’s estimated that 80% of heart disease and stroke, 80% of type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancers could be eliminated if Americans were able to do three things: stop smoking, eat a healthy diet, and get regular exercise. These same behaviors may also prevent exacerbations of existing chronic conditions.”

Fortunately, we don’t lack the science needed to manage these diseases well. What we do lack are programs that deliver the required evidence-based care in a cost effective and psychologically compelling way. We need programs that deliver a think-and-feel experience with enough power to shift smoking, eating and activity behaviors as well as support learning new condition specific self-care routines. Such programs must be based on understanding and meeting the cognitive needs of patients as they manage limited self-regulatory capacity and struggle to learn from experience which routines will fit-and-stick-with their personal circumstances.

In short we need a cognitive design initiative focused on managing multiple chronic conditions.

And the audience for such an effort is fairly well defined.  One report emphasizes how concentrated healthcare costs are.  The sickest 5% of citizens account for nearly 50% of all healthcare costs. More dramatically, just 1% (3-4 million people) account for 22% of the cost! Most suffer from multiple chronic conditions.

I am interested to hear from readers that have insights into deeply-felt and unmet psychological needs (cognitive, affective, motivational, volitional) of patients that are failing to manage multiple chronic conditions.