Cognitive Design

How often do you really pay attention to what you see, touch, smell, taste and hear? And when you do pay attention how do you do it? Do you use specific tools and techniques?   If you want to be an effective designer or innovator you need to be an active observer. Indeed, good observation skills are important for all professions and everyday life.

One way to get better at making observations is to practice using a proven technique for a few minutes everyday.  I have assemble 25 proven techniques in a deck of knowledge cards.  Each card briefly introduces the technique and then suggests a specific way to practice it. An example is given below.

A simple practice that teaches you to engage and integrate odors into a perceptual stream that is normally dominated by sight and sound.

You can access all 25 knowledge cards for building observation skills in NewHabits, a free iPhone and iPad application. Give the deck a try and let me know how they work for you. Especially interested in your ideas for new knowledge cards for observation skills and other topics.

Self regulation includes the mental processes we use to manage emotions, drive states (hungry, thirst, need for sleep, sexual urges), cravings and thoughts in order to control behavior and reach a goal.  It is fundamental for success and well-being especially when we need to make and sustain behavior change.

Often called self control for short, these mental processes play a key role in many cognitive design projects.  But how can you measure it?  One approach is to use the 63 item Self-Regulation Questionnaire.   It has been vetted on  clinical challenges and there are some suggestions that it is a good general measure.

Further work has validated a short form (13 to 16 items) of the questionnaire but I have not been able to find a free copy of it on the Internet.

Interested to hear from readers that use instruments to measure self control and regulation in an applied setting.

The former CEO of Zeo, a personal sleep management company, has an interesting blog post on using personal health data to change behavior.  The post summarizes  advice from five years in the trenches and is specific enough to be useful to cognitive designers.

The bottom line is that health  data and advice will change behavior if it is personalized, presents a new view on health,  relates to an immediate concern (e.g. how I look) and is presented in a comparative and visual way.

Devices like Zeo’s have another important feature for changing behavior. They close the loop quick enough to hold my attention. They use sensors, devices and software to measure my behavior and then show me how the adjustments I make produce a change I want or not. If this happens in a fast and visually stimulating way (like it does in video games or speed limit signs that display my driving speed) then behavior change is more likely to take place.

How are you using personal data to drive behavior change?

The Global Women’s Leadership Network  has joined forces with others to launch a major effort in developing women and girl leaders around the world.  They posted an open innovation challenge and are looking for fresh thinking on how to quickly build leadership capacity in women and girls.   Their stretch goal  is to develop 5 million women change agents improving our world in 5 years.

This is an important effort for many reasons. As they point out in the preamble to the challenge:

“There is a growing recognition that there can be no peace, security, or sustainable economic development without women’s equal participation in all spheres of society.”

You need to register with Innocentive and electronically sign an agreement to see the details of the challenge.  I signed up as a solver and suggested an approach (copied below) based on knowledge cards and NewHabits.

I hope you too will take up the challenge.

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Most people reading this blog post will have an avatar. Many will have several. These include the images and characters we upload and create for our blogs, email profiles and on the social networking and game site we frequent. Avatars range from traditional photos (e.g. head shots)  to custom images all the way to personalized animated characters.  Many of the people we interact with on-line will only know us visually through our avatars.

The avatars we select or create can impact how we think, feel and behave in cyberspace.  The effects can be pronounced.  For example, recent research at Penn State suggests that when we customize our avatars we impact our perceptions on the virtual environments we are in. More specifically:

“A group of students who saw that a backpack was attached to an avatar that they had created overestimated the heights of virtual hills, just as people in real life tend to overestimate heights and distances while carrying extra weight…”

This leads to the belief that you would have more difficulty climbing a virtual hill.

Students that were assigned an avatar with a backpack did not feel this way. This suggest we are really putting ourselves into our avatars (agency) as we customize and design them.

Bottom line for designers-    tuning when and how people can customize their avatars may produce specific cognitive effects.

The internet of things is made up of our current computer-based internet plus a wide range of other devices that have a sensor and can send or receive information.  These other devices include cameras,  personal health monitoring devices,  phones, cars, parking spaces, Christmas trees, appliances in your home, dog collars, power meters, traffic sensors, toys, fire alarms  and many others.  One estimate sees 24 billion devices on the internet of things by the year 2020. That’s more than 3 devices for every person on the planet.

By connecting all  of these things to the internet we enable direct machine to machine (M2M) interactions.  That means one machine controlling or at least communicating with another via the internet. This will also create a river of big data the likes of which we have never seen and enable new services, marketing opportunities and even business models.

Take for example, Budweiser’s Red Light. This device links to the internet via your WIFI and monitors the games of your favorite hockey teams. When a goal is scored it goes off. This enhances the experience of watching the game. A nice example of cognitive design- creating experience value and building brand.  To quote:

“Our mission to get every Canadian closer to the game one goal at a time”

How can you build brand on the emerging internet of things? More generally, what new service and business opportunities does it present?

Internet of Things graphic: IEEE Communication Society Blog

Red Light image: The Classic Install

At Cornell University they have been investigating what type of small changes in eating habits produce lasting weight loss. Several years ago researchers ran a Mindless Eating Challenge involving 2000 participants to try and figure it out. They recently published an article that found:

“The results of this study suggest that online interventions based on small changes have the potential to gradually lead to clinically significant weight loss, but high attrition from publicly available or “free” programs still remains a challenge.”

More specifically, 42% of the participants lost about one pound during the program. Approximately 7% of the participants saw a significant weight loss of 5% or more.  Some gained weight. Impressive results when you realize how small the changes are. Examples that participants found most effective include:

1. Don’t eat directly from a package,  always eat from a dish
2. Put down utensils between bites
3. Keep food out of sight except for healthy items.

These types of changes are easy to make but not for everybody. As pointed out in a Science Daily blog post:

 ”Common barriers that prevented people from making changes included personally unsuitable tips, forgetting, being too busy, unusual circumstances such as vacations, and emotional eating.”

I am working with a physician to develop a solution that addresses most of these barriers.  The solution is a deck of 24 knowledge cards that document  the small changes you can make to achieve healthy weight loss.

You use the cards through a free App called NewHabits.  You can browse through the deck picking the cards that best fit your circumstances. That way the tips are always suitable.  Because the cards are on your iPhone or iPad it is much easier to remember to use them. Cards are designed to fit everyday activities as well as special circumstances (e.g. vacations) and take just minutes to use. That way you can use them no matter where you are or how busy you might be.

Three sample healthy weight loss cards are available in NewHabits.  One is shown above. Download the App (it is free), go to the store and look in the coming soon section for Healthy Weight cards. Give them a try and let me know what you think. We expect to publish the rest of the deck in June.