Cognitive Design

There is a lot of attention on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM education in the US these days. Declining US student enrollment and performance in STEM disciplines spells a decline in the nation’s technology-oriented innovation capability.

Reversing these trends requires a heavy dose of cognitive engineering and design.

We need to modernize the infrastructure, pedagogy and practices used to teach and learn STEM. So I am also on the look out for new models based on insights into the cognition of learning STEM.

For example, Seed Magazine has a recent article highlighting Globaloria’s STEM Games competition. The idea is that students learn STEM by developing their own video games.   This is an example of a broader trend of infusing art and design into STEM education to make it more exciting and naturally enhance innovation skills.  Here is a snapshot:

“Participants have research various STEM topics, blog about what they’ve learned, work in teams, produce video presentations, draw paper prototypes, design sample screens and graphics for game demos, and program webgames that teach others about science issues or mathematics concepts.  This year, 411 students signed up for the competition, and the games they created illustrate the power of CS-STEAM learning. These students never programmed before. But this method of combining art and design with science and computer science generated impressive results.”

Learning by constructing a video game and competing in a contest, that is outstanding cognitive design.  Note too that the learning goes far beyond domain knowledge in a technical field to include teamwork (virtual and on site), writing, drawing, project management and social media skills. All good stuff for success in the 21st century.

We behave differently when being watched.  When watched most people will more consciously follow expected social norms.  This ranges from not littering and begin polite to working harder on a production line.  Now, according to research reported in the Scientific Amercian, this effect is induced when we are watched by eyes staring at us from a poster.  

“A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.” 

They put the posters in a cafeteria and found that they caused twice as many people to bus thier own trays and otherwise clean up after themselves.  This is a statistically significant effect with strong implications for designers.

Source of Image: Sky News

The Economist and the global innovation marketplace Innocentive, have teamed up to offer a $10,000 prize to anyone that develops a novel metric for measuring tends in Human Potential.

More specifically, the metric or index should measure how well a region or a country is able to unleash and leverage intellectual energy for social and economic progress.

One example is the Gross National Happiness metric. Your metric does not have to be fully developed but you need to be able to explain how to collect that data to calculate it.

 The deadline for entries in June 20th and the winner will have expenses paid to present at the Ideas Economy conference on Human Potential in September.

The web, social media, mobile apps and online worlds/games have created a small explosion of new communication forms with unique cognitive impact. Tweets, blog posts, short homemade videos, cell phone pics, text messages, tags (like, friend, stumble, vote, etc.), emoticons, animations and avatar interactions are just a the few examples.

In addition to creating new communication forms, the mobile social web takes older forms to new heights. Take for example, the listicle.  A combination of a list with an article or more precisely, an article written as a number list, is getting a big boost on the web.  To see them in action check out some of the entries on Listicles.com:

• 8 Actors that Bailed on Superhero Movies
• 4 Reasons You City Might Ban Plastic Bags

 Or Cracked:

• 6 Things from History that Everyone Pictures Incorrectly
• 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes Thanks to the Movies 

These have 4-5 million views each. Well-written listicles have strong cognitive design. They offer cool information (unique, interesting or even shocking) that can be important to us or just plain fun. All in an easy to consume package. We like lists because they offer high content with low cognitive load. You get a lot of information for very little work. By starting each listicle with a number, we signal the reader’s brain exactly how much info and mental work is in play. Interestingly, many start with the number of 7 plus or minus 2, or the number of items we can hold in short term memory at any one time.

I am interested to hear from readers that use listicles in organizational change or workplace communication efforts.  Want to learn to write good listicles and make some money? Check out Cracked’s writer forum.

Experience is a four layer cake.  For example, experience with products and services is shaped by the interaction we have with them and how:

1. useful they are (meet core needs)
2. easy they are to use (usability)
3. they delight the senses (sensory design)
4. well they authentically move hearts and extend minds (cognitive design)

We use cognitive design to shape the fourth layer of the experience by creating interactions with a specific think-and-feel.   Market leading firms in every industry seek to differentiate their offerings with a think-and-feel and therefore compete through fourth level innovation.

Take for example, drive-thru service in quick serve restaurants.  Billions of dollars of food is served from the drive-thru windows at McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wendy’s and other fast-food or quick serve restaurants every year. Indeed, more money is made from drive-thru than the dinning room in the quick serve business.

Customers want fast and accurate drive-thru service. Market leaders have invested plenty in menu modifications, technology, lean, six sigma and other process excellence methods to insure customers get fast and accurate drive-thru experiences.

They have done the engineering to meet core needs (layer one). Ease of use is paramount and is achieved through clearly marked ordering lanes, readable order board displays and features such as price and order confirmation (layer two).  The sensory design can make or break the experience.  Speaker volume, digital displays, smell and an environment that appears clean and safe are a few examples (layer three).

But all of that is all table stakes (excuse the pun), as QSR magazine points out in their special report on the Drive-Thru Experience:

 “Customers tell us that the status quo is not OK anymore. They want a drive-thru experience that is positive and personal,” Del Taco’s director of operations Kevin Pope says.

That means doing cognitive design (layer four).  Some examples:

1. Speaking casually during ordering to let customer drive the pace and tone
2. Allow customers to enter their own orders through a digital pad
3. Give out free dog biscuits to cars with dogs
4. Use outside order takers with hand-held computers when lines get long

While these efforts are preliminary, they do signal that fourth level innovation is at work at the drive-thru. The question is, what type to think-and-feel do customers want?  

There has been a strong positive response to functionality that increases the level of customer control. Order and price confirmation and casual rather than structured ordering dialog are two examples.  Surveys have found that customers even want to enter their own orders on digital pads. Customers may be expressing the cognitive need for more comfortable control in the drive-thru process.  The idea is to allow customers to determine the level of control they want in the process so that they are psychologically comfortable.   

Sometimes it is important to know what they don’t want. One survey found:

“When asked whether or not they wanted more entertainment from the quick serve while waiting in the drive-thru lane, all participants agreed that they were comfortable with sticking with their own devices. “

It would be interesting to know what people do as they sit in their cars in a drive up.  Do they worry or relax? Do they check emails and Facebook on their phone?  Is there some way to enhance or integrate what they are doing with the drive-thru experience?

Could this be an opportunity to positively encourage behavior change and select healthier items on the menu?

The horror and numbers involved in acts of genocide should cause outrage, compassion and action but often don’t.  And this appears to be true for other forms of unthinkably bad news that impacts large groups of people such as public health issues or industry-wide safety problems.

This phenomenon, called psychic numbing, is important for anyone designing communications that involve bad news at a large-scale. There are strong cognitive biases involved.  A nice summary is provided by J.E. Robertson in his post, Why Does Mass Suffering Cause Mass Indifference:

“The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.”

While these claims are grounded in research, more research is required to explore the psychology of processing bad news about large numbers of people. Fortunately, these preliminary findings  offer designable insights. We can test and refine them through the communications we create as cognitive designers.

For most organizations knowledge management (KM) means trying to get employees to share knowledge amongst each other or for codification into an on-line repository. By one report, firms spent $70 billion dollars on KM systems in 2008. A huge investment in knowledge sharing with little to no return. The reason? Generally employees don’t want to share knowledge, or if they do they have already figured out how to do it.

This issue is explored rigorously for the first time (as far as I know), in a just published article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on Knowledge Hiding in Organizations. The researchers found that employees tended to engage in three modes of knowledge hiding including evasive hiding, rationalized hiding and playing dumb.  While engaging in knowledge hiding is driven principally by mistrust there are individual and organizational psychographic factors involved as well.

The prevalence of knowledge hiding despite a huge technology investment to the contrary signals that we cannot ignore the underlying cognitive psychology of knowledge work if we want to create value with KM.

It is time to step back from our technologically-driven and psychologically oversimplified approaches to KM and ask – what is knowledge and how can we manage it based on how minds really work?  KM needs a good dose of cognitive design STAT.

On the cognitive design blog we usually talk about ways to create irresistible think-and-feel-experiences, facilitate behavior change, crank up knowledge-intensive performances or deliver mind moving communications.  But there is a darker side.  The lack of doing good cognitive design combined with the tremendous mental stresses of modern life contribute to many problems. These range from wasting mental energy to making poor decisions and failures to self-regulate behavior to more serious and clinical mental health issues.

How much of a design-related issue is mental health and how big is the problem?  To begin to understand the scale of the problem check out Richard McNally’s new book What is Mental Illness? In it he argues that mental illness is an epidemic:

 ”Nearly 50 percent of Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives, and more than a quarter have suffered from mental illness in the past twelve months. Madness, it seems, is rampant in America.”

The study behind this claim can be found here and reveals the nature of the problems including anxiety, mood, impulse-control and substance abuse disorders.  

While the foundation for addressing these challenges should rest on evidence-based practice from behavioral medicine, design has an important role to play.  We know this to be true from other healthcare examples. Medicine creates drugs and treatments to cure a wide range of problems but lack of compliance and adherence runs rampant because the way they are delivered is not designed for how the patient’s mind work.   My hypothesis is that the effectiveness of programs designed to maintain and restored mental health are even more sensitive to cognitive factors.

We hardly speak of mental health let alone design broad-scale programs to protect it. Interestingly, this is not the case when it comes to brain health or protecting our selves from age related cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.   For example, check out the CDC’s Healthy Brain Initiative.

Given the scale of the problem, there is a wealth of opportunity for cognitive designers interested in creating programs to protect and restore mental health. Prevention is a natural place to start.  As that will no doubt entail behavior change, it might be possible to make small adjustment to ”mental health proof” other behavior change and wellness programs. Now that would be good design.

We are clearly a nation of spenders not savers in the US. You can see that at both the national level (current federal debt = $14.7 Trillion) and the individual level (total personal debt = $16.7 Trillion).   Our total debt (federal, state, local, household) is some 55.7 Trillion dollars! At the individual level this is primarily a behavior change challenge. I need to spend less and save more. It is very similar to losing weight. I need to eat less and be more active.

Consciously changing behaviors takes a lot of effort. We must learn what works from experience. This means trying a lot of small experiments with ideas that have proven practical for others.   We must fail many times before unlocking the simple tactics that work for our specific circumstances. Learning to change behaviors from experience is a major cognitive design challenge. One way to meet that challenge is to be sure to provide a fresh supply of small steps that aspiring changers can try.  Each step should be an easy but potent way of experimenting with the desired new habits.

A good example is the attempt by the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts to help us develop the saving habit. They created a website called Feed the Pig  that includes a section on savings tips. These tips cover everything from buying makeup to dining out and using premium cable. Note how they are structured:

Each tip offers three experiments you can try.  This is a good way to stimulate the personal learning from experience that is so essential for effective behavior change.

In many ways, the X Prize sits at the top of the heap when it comes to prize-based open innovation.  Anyone can enter, they offer large prizes (typically $10M) and are framed to create breakthroughs in important areas.  X Prizes have been won for creating super efficient cars and getting people into orbit and back safely. Right now there is a lot of buzz as 29 teams officially compete for Google’s $30M Lunar X prize. The goal is to send a robot to the moon that can travel at least 500 meters on the surface and send data, including images, back to Earth.

X prizes present serious scientific and engineering challenges.  Cognitive engineering and design typically do not play a key role. Until now. Qualcomm and the X prize foundation just announce the $10M Tricorder X Prize.   The goal and naming of the prize is inspired by the Tricorder, a hand-held device on the series Star Trek that quickly figures out what injury or medical problem you have.

To win the Tricorder X Prize, a team will need to demonstrate a mobile device that can ”diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians”.  It will also advise consumers on the next steps including the need to seek professional help. Meeting this challenge requires not only significant hardware and software engineering but cognitive engineering and design as well.  

Success turns on understanding the knowledge and cognition of  medical diagnoses and using technology to automate and maintain it.  

This is a hard artificial intelligence and expert system problem.  Furthermore, doing medical diagnosis on a mobile device in a way that will be accepted by consumers acting on their own presents a serious cognitive design challenge.

The prize is in the design phase. This means it is not yet officially funded. It will be further defined this year and if Qualcomm decides to, it will be funded and launched in 2012.   I strongly encourage readers of this blog to contact Qualcomm and the X prize Foundation and encourage them to move forward.