Cognitive Design

Compassion typically involves the recognition of someone else’s suffering on both an intellectual and emotional level and a real attempt to address or alleviate it. Acts of compassion are widespread ranging from one friend consoling another about a loss, or an oncologist coaching a cancer patient to a relief organization striving to help an entire community struck by a natural disaster.

Compassion is about helping others in an emotionally connected way.   We expect compassion to happen naturally but sometimes it is difficult to make the emotional connection and keep your balance especially if you are exposed to intense suffering on a regular basis. Think about about acute healthcare for example.  On the other hand, acts of compassion can naturally generate tremendous energy for positive transformational change.  Consider the success of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers for example.

Understanding the psychology of compassion can be useful in many cognitive design challenges so I am always on the lookout for scientific studies with practical insights. Take for example, the recent research by the University of Rochester Medical Center, What Does Compassion Sound Like? They completed a study of how doctors talk with patients in a compassionate way looking for language use and behaviors that defines the experience.  The researchers looked at tone of voice, humor, non-verbals, pauses, sights and a wide-range of other factors. Their general conclusion is important:

“It became apparent that compassion is not a quality of a single utterance but rather is made up of presence and engagement that suffuses an entire conversation,”

The implications for designers or anyone seeking to  improve compassion-driven experiences is clear.   Compassion frames the entire experience and unfolds during the course of the interaction.

Most adults have watched thousands of hours of movies. I’ve often wondered how that impacts long-term memory. Do the movie memories mix with the real-world memories and change how we interpret the world, learn and make important decisions and judgments? I bet it does, big time,  but I have not been able to find any detailed studies of the effects.

I did recently see a study on how taking photographs of an object can impact memory for the object.   According to point-and-shoot memories,  if you take a picture of an entire object you are less likely to remember details about it. However, if you zoom in on a part of the object and take a photo of the details, your memory is unaffected.  The study concludes:

“This finding highlights key differences between people’s memory and the camera’s “memory” and suggests that the additional attentional and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.”

With cameras in our phones and popular ways of manipulating sharing photos (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pic Stich, and Pinterest) camera memories are becoming a significant part of  our Next Brain.

Sourced from the Next Brain Blog

Being an effective workplace coach means you understand how people’s minds work especially when they learn and change. That’s the focus of a powerful new coaching program being offered in the learning and organizational change program at Northwestern.  You will:

“Look deeply at the theory and practices behind learning and human performance in organizational settings while building a consulting “toolkit” that will help you be a more effective change leader.”

To earn a certificate you need to complete four courses. You can do that in a year from anywhere in the US.   The program begins in March 2014 and there are two virtual information sessions in January.

If there is one coaching program I can recommend for cognitive designers this is it!

Metaphors play an important role in learning, communication, creativity, decision-making and all nearly all of our mental processes. Metaphors are a power tool for cognitive designers.

They are a window in how our minds are actually working and when properly designed they can shift behaviors and bring cognitive performance to new levels.

That’s why I am always on the lookout for new scientific results on cognition and metaphors.

Take for example the article, What do love and jealously taste like? just published in the journal Emotion. Interestingly, the researchers found that those primed for the emotion of love reported  that water tasted sweeter than normal or when they are primed for another emotion such as jealously or happiness.   This provides some evidence that the metaphor “Love is sweet” impacts our perception of taste.  Another case of expectations and psychology shaping senses and physiology.

In cognitive design we create artifacts that are optimized for how minds really work.   There are five types of “minds” that are important in cognitive design.

1. Individual (between the ears) including mental processes and structures in a given person’s brain.
2. Extended (in the hand) including objects that we think, learn and create with. For example, an artist’s favorite paint brush or an architect’s model of a building.
3. Group  (among the heads) including any collection of individuals. For example, a partnership, product development team or therapy group.
4. Machine  (in a black box) including hardware and software that automates one or more mental processes or structures. For example, the buzzer on your clothes dryer or an expert system a car mechanics uses to diagnosis a problem.
5. Emergent (beyond the heads) including a group and/or machine intelligence the delivers a new mental state or level of performance. For example, a prediction market that forecasts a presidential election or the success of a new product better than any individual.

A robust design seeks to distribute cognitive load across the five types of mind. In some applications we look to off-load the mental work that individuals have to shoulder on to groups or machines. In other cases we look to  boost mental capacity by creating machine or extended minds that outperform individual or group minds in an important way.

For example,  Wikistrat  is an example of how to use an emergent mind  effects to outperform a group of highly trained individuals. They are using gamification and crowdsourcing  to produce high quality reports and forecasts on complex geopolitical and economic issues 5 times faster and for 1/3rd the price of traditional consultancies.

The architecture that creates the emergence is similar to massively multiplayer online games.   Wikistrat assembles a group of analysts to develop scenarios for a client’s strategic challenge and then lets gamification kick in:

The chief analyst synthesizes the results and the client has access to all the intelligence via an interactive platform.

Definitely a new way to support the cognitive work needed to generate  strategic insights into economic and geopolitical issues.

I get a good number of calls and emails from people wondering what cognitive design can do to help meet the challenge of improving engagement  in  high-quality science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.  The concern is, at least in the US, that enrollment is down just when we need more STEM educated citizens to innovate and compete in the global economy.

Teaching is a hard cognitive design challenge, especially teaching STEM so I generally have a lot of advice to share. Indeed, I have been teaching a physics class to learn more first-hand and experiment with specific cognitive design ideas.  One suggestion I often make is  create/buy and give cool science toys.

Technical play, often early in life, appears to be a common theme among STEM professionals that are making notable contributions to our economic prosperity.

For a sample across age ranges check out – science is creative and good toys reflect that.   The idea is simple. Play by adults or children reveals the magic and power of science and will inspire us to learn more.

Interested to hear from readers that have experience with science toys.