Cognitive Design

The most urgent cognitive design problems we face today have to do with creating artifacts that help us make and sustain the lifestyle changes needed to improve health. Much of the cost of healthcare and the morbidity and mortality we experience in advanced countries (especially the US) can be linked to lifestyle choices and otherwise avoidable health risks.

Designers that work in this space need to be aware of the enormous range of literature on causes, assessments, interventions and effectiveness that have grown up over the last 20 years or so.  A great source is the new initiative on lifestyle medicine launched by the American College of Preventative Medicine. They focus on lifestyle interventions (nutrition, physician activity, smoking cessation, safe sex, stress reduction, etc.) and the effective management of chronic diseases (asthma, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.).

Of special interest to cognitive designers  is a set of evidence-based guidelines and a supporting  literature review  for making health-related behavior change.

It is a single source for generating scientifically-grounded design insights and evaluating competing designs across the full range of health-related behavior change challenges.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 6:47 am and is filed under Behavior Change, Related Fields, Technique. 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.