Cognitive Design

In cognitive design we look for specific features and functions that reliably produce a given psychological impact or mental state. For example, the facial features of big round eyes, a prominent forehead and pudgy cheeks generates the psychological response that what we see is cute, adorable and even squeezable.

I have cataloged 310 such design patterns and the theories behind them.   But I am always on the lookout for more. A new entry I am considering is based on the research, Rituals Enhance Consumption, recently reported in Psychological Science.

The researchers conducted four experiments that suggest adding rituals and delays to food consumption more deeply involves us in the experience of eating and has a significant impact on how much flavor and enjoyment we experience.  And the rituals do not need to be complex. Here is what they used:

“Without unwrapping the chocolate bar, break it in half. Unwrap half of the bar and eat it. Then, unwrap the other half and eat it.”

Of course, the experimental situation is contrived and so applying this result requires establishing a personal ritual. Personal rituals have meaning and create a state of mindfulness and thus enhance the experience.  But how do we break that down into the features and functions of a design pattern?  Saying we need to ritualize is too vague.

To empathize means we not only understand the thoughts and feelings of others but we actually have or share them. Achieving empathy is a source of inspiration for innovators and designers as it reveals unmet needs, especially psychological ones. Of course achieving empathy is not always possible but you should work hard to get as close as you can.

For example, a couple of years ago in my cognitive design course at Northwestern University, I had a student team working in the area of obesity. To gain empathy, one of the team members wore a backpack with 20 pounds of extra weight in it for a day.   Wanting to go further, they wore padding to increase their body size and added elastic bands to decrease their mobility.  And they did not stop there.  It took  quite some effort to assemble the materials and make the wearables to simulate the experience of being obese. They even consulted friends in the movie business.  The result was a multi-day empathy exercise that was transformational.

I recently read of another example focused on innovating for the elderly (see image above).   The Ageing Empathy Exercise, is one of 20 concepts  in the evaluation stage of OpenIDEO’s design challenge, How might we all maintain well being and thrive as we age?    In this empathy exercise they have you put cotton balls in your ears and noise and wear glasses with dirty lenses to dull you senses. You also wear latex gloves with rubber bands around your knuckles to impede your hand dexterity. Once suited up you try and perform simple everyday activities such as buttoning your shirt, getting coins out of your wallet or opening a pill bottle.

Give it a try.

How have you used designed empathy exercises and experiences as an innovation technique? What materials and procedures did you use? How far did you have to push it to generate usable insights?

A 2-person firm Supertoy Robotics is looking for 30K pounds on Kickstarter to build the world’s first natural talking teddy bear. They already have a pledge of more than 58K pounds with four days to go.  You can get more details on how it should work HERE.

The toy bear is supposed to go beyond Q&A and engage in continuous conversation, read stories and role play in a character. It even moves its mouth.

If the technology works and is affordable it will open up a wide range of interesting applications for cognitive designers and other innovators.

The M-prize is a management innovation contest run on the MIX and sponsored by McKinsey & Co and the Harvard Business Review. It is actually a series of prizes aimed at reworking our management models and practices for the 21st century. I submitted some cognitive design work I did with knowledge cards for the leadership everywhere M-prize. It was picked as a finalist!

Here is the entry:

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders

Please take a moment and check it out.  

Any likes, shares or comments it receives should help in the final leg of the competition which ends August 30th. You can like or share with a click but leaving a comment requires registering with the site.

Read about the other finalists on the Harvard Business Review site:

What does post-bureaucratic leadership look like?

Cognitive design has a big role to play in the management models for the 21st century. You can see aspects of it at work in many of the entries.

Our brains are hardwired to process verbal messages in specific ways. Recent research, suggests that one of those ways has us believe a speaker more when we sense that they have the ability to act on the message they offer.  This is one reason change agents insist that messages about big company transformations come from top leaders. Employees naturally believe top leaders are the only ones capable of producing such change.

It is important to note that this effect is nearly immediate and based in neurophysiology not psychological-level dynamics.  You can count on it every time.

Having the power to act on what you say has an immediate and deep impact on how well you will persuade listeners, especially when you are telling them about something new.The implication is clear – taking the time to make listeners aware of your social status and potency to act as it relates to the matter at hand is essential for influence.  Try this out the next time you are introducing someone to a group or using a story to illustrate a point.

Every year organizations and individuals spend billions of dollars and countless hours to develop soft-skills. These include personal productivity and interpersonal skills such as communication, teamwork, creativity, assertiveness, influence, self control, time management and the ability to work well under pressure.  Often developing soft-skills are part of a larger attempt to build even broader competencies in areas such as leadership, innovation, emotional intelligence or personal effectiveness.

Building soft-skills means reading how-to books, taking seminars, being coached and doing developmental exercises or projects. While such efforts can  lead to increased motivation and conceptual knowledge they often fail to produce behavior change and improved business or personal outcomes.  I have dramatized the situation for a hypothetical training class below.

While most participants in the training class will give high marks to the experience (happy! score on evaluations) and pass a quiz demonstrating conceptual knowledge, few will achieve lasting behavior change that translates into improved organizational or personal outcomes (e.g. increased sales or weight loss).

The question is what are the people at the lower right of this graph doing that others are not?

They are showing a positive deviance that we need to understand. They have mastered a technique or small set of vital behaviors for converting general advice and how-to knowledge that they glean from reading and training  into new outcomes.  If we can understand and replicate that we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the impact of our investment in soft-skills.

I have conduct several studies aimed at answering that question. The results are clear.  People getting the most out of soft-skill development efforts are able to take the macro-scale concepts and techniques taught in books and seminars and break them down down into small short experiments they can try in a real setting on a regular or daily basis.  In short, they are natural born micro-learners or they have coaches that are.

I am going to discuss these studies and how we can use the results to improve the impact of soft-skills development at the Online Learning Conference in Chicago that runs September 17-19 at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. I will be doing three speed sharing best practice sessions on Thursday morning 8:15-9:00 am. You can access the supporting handout HERE.

Hope to see you there.

There is growing interest by educators, managers, designers and other professionals in applying the latest thinking in neuroscience to their discipline. They want to know how findings about mirror neuron, brain plasticity, the neurochemistry of emotions, reward circuits and other insights into brain structure and dynamics can help make them better educators, leaders and innovators.

 This is good news for cognitive designers. Not only does it create market demand but applying neuroscience requires a good deal of design thinking and informed speculation about psychological-level impacts, two things cognitive designers do for a living.

To see this point in action, check out the excellent post Your Brain at Work. Two respected business scholars look at some of the recent results in neuroscience and what they might mean for organizations and management.  Specifically, they discuss creative thinking (innovation), the role of emotions in decision-making, designing rewards that motivate and multitasking.

To improve innovation they suggest we need to better understand the brain’s default network.  This is a network of brain regions that is at work even when we are not focused on an external task.   The default mode appears to be always running and uses up much of the energy our brain consumes. It may be linked to introspection and could account for the seemingly spontaneous generation of useful ideas when we least expect it.

The authors stress that the default network is also essential for “transcendence” or our ability to shut out the external world and mentally simulate or visualize what it would be like to be in a different place or time.  All good stuff for improving creativity but how do we take advantage of it?

The authors are quick to point out that the policy some companies have that allow employees to use 10-20% of company time for their own purposes is not necessarily the best way to leverage the default network. This is true because employees will spend this time working on tasks that require engagement with the external world, not the detachment and reduction of external stimuli needed to unleash of the creative power of the default network.

But what to do? Sit and let your mind wander? Meditate? The authors bring this issue to a fine point:

“But embracing detachment as a work policy is difficult, because it’s extremely hard to quantify the results of practicing it (which also may explain why the free-time programs that do exist are bound by parameters like time frame, percentage of time, and delivery deadline). Nevertheless, you should experiment with total detachment, because it’s a better way to generate breakthrough ideas.”

And this is where the cognitive design comes in. What experiments can you suggest? Please explain how they will leverage the default network to enhance creative thinking in a business setting.

Image source:  Business person icon was designed by Honnos Bondor from the Noun Project