Cognitive Design

We are fast becoming a culture of self trackers. We have smart phone apps, widgets, software packages and hundreds of gadgets for monitoring every aspect of daily life.  We measure and track our eating, walking, shopping, sleeping, exercising, socializing, child rearing, medication-taking  and online activities. We measure moods, weight, calories, ounces, blood pressure, heart rate,  time spent on tasks, the number of cups of coffee we drinks, our geographical locations during the day and many other personal variables. According to Wired Magazine we are Living by the Numbers.

Motivations for self-measuring vary but it is exploding because technology is making it easier to do and personal informatics feeds the core cognitive need to know about ourselves over time and how we compare to others.

The cognitive design blog has covered a couple dozen personal informatics tools and gadgets and how they can be used in behavior change. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of some 200 popular tools for collecting and analyzing information about yourself.  My favorite blog on the topic is The Quantified Self.  For a good general overview check out the New York Times article, The Data Driven Life or the piece in the Wall Street Journal, The New Examined Life.

The field of personal analytics and informatics offers significant opportunities for the cognitive designer. There is the challenge of how to collect the most relevant personal data in or near real-time while keeping the cost and cognitive load down.  Also, cognitive designers can contribute to defining products, services and experiences that leverage the personal data that is collected to create value in new ways.

The field appears to be wide open. Very interested to hear from readers that are active in the area and have opinions, lessons or resources relevant to designers.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Related Fields. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.