Cognitive Design

I am spending time writing chapters for a new book on the Five Pathways to Lasting Behavior Change. A major theme is the living room or household entrepreneur. This is an individual that has learned from hard experience how to influence behavior change in themselves or those around them. Like garage entrepreneurs, they sometimes develop innovations that will scale and impact the lives of millions.  Good examples are the 12-steps programs and Weight Watchers. These behavior change programs were hatched by individuals working in their living rooms (a metaphor) not from a corporate R&D lab.

In my research I have found that nearly every case of lasting behavior change has involved some form of consumer innovation. That happens when consumers modify existing products or create new ones to meet their individual needs.   It made me wonder, if consumer innovation appears rampant in services designed to change behavior, how much does it happen in other cases?

A colleague sent me a link to Comparing Business and Household Innovation in the Consumer Sector.  You can download the full paper for free. The study was national in scale and was done in the UK. Key findings include:

* Over a 3 year period 2.9 million consumers in the UK (6.2% of the population) have innovated by making a change to an existing product or creating their own. On average they did so 8  times over the 3 years.

* Consumers invested twice what all the business in the UK did on innovation. More specifically, “In aggregate, consumers’ annual product development expenditures are 2.3 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the UK combined.”

* Males with a university degree and technically trained dominate the process, especially if they are college aged or 55 years old and not working.

The table below (taken directly from the article) gives examples of what counts as a household or consumer innovation.

For students and practitioners of innovation the key findings and examples provide important insights into what looks to be a major source of practical creativity. But this is just the beginning of the research.

I am interested to hear from readers that have their own examples of consumer innovation to share. I am considering a website dedicated to the topic and designed to collect, promote, diffuse and study consumer innovations big and small.

We seek to change behavior (stop, start, avoid starting) in order to achieve some outcome such as better health, more savings, superior customer service, killer communications and the like. There are only five pathways for achieving and sustaining a behavior change:

1. Eliminate the need to change behavior but still achieve the outcome.  For example, healthy foods well disguised as your favorite snack. I can continue to eat the same food but am now emulating healthier eating habits.

2. Engineer hard stops or gos into the environment that make it impossible to do unwanted behaviors or avoid desired behaviors. For example, no more vending machines in schools.

3. Engineer soft stops or gos into the environment that nudge us towards the preferred behaviors. For example, making healthy choices easier to see and access in the lunch line.

4. Provide guidance or support to individuals as they go through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience. For example, joining Weight Watchers.

5. Observe individuals with advanced skills in self-regulation as they work solo through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience.  For example, losing weight on your own.  20-25% of the population have this capacity and more can develop it.

From a cognitive design standpoint we can see how the different pathways leverage insights into the nature of decision-making, self-regulation or control, learning from experience, self efficacy and individual autonomy.  For example, the first three pathways (eliminate,  hard and soft) focus on changing the environment. As such the need for self-control is minimized and learning is at the stimulus-response level. But ethical issues can emerge as these pathways may impinge on individual liberty and personal choice. They work well in case were there are clear safety concerns and behavior changes are not complex (e.g. healthcare workers washing their hands).

The last two pathways on the other hand (guided, solo) involve the much higher cognitive load associated with self regulation and learning new mental models from experience but are unavoidable when we need to master more complex behavior changes.

I have yet to find a behavior change program that does not follow one or several of these pathways.  Even work on the cutting edge seems to fit. Take for example, the recent story in the Wall Street Journal about how food scientists are designing foods to trick our brains into thinking we are full:

“Nestle, one of the world’s largest food companies, hopes to develop new types of foods that, essentially, seek to trick the gut brain. The foods could make people feel full earlier, or stay full longer, in order to curb the desire to eat more. For example, cooking french fries in oil that gets digested more slowly than regular oil could confer a longer-lasting sense of satiety, researchers speculate.”

The gut brain refers to the large neural mass in our gut sometimes called the second brain. Designs that satiate in this way are an example of the first pathway – eliminate. I am redesigning the environment to eliminate the need to change behavior. It happens automatically.

Very interested to hear about behavior change programs or approaches that don’t seem to fit into the five pathways framework.

We have covered retro design, or creating artifacts that trigger/satisfy nostalgia, many times in the Cognitive Design blog. And why not? As our population ages a “yearning for the past” will naturally increase. Meeting that yearning through cognitive design is an important source of innovation that has been tapped in many product and service lines ranging from suits and cars to Coke bottles and office equipment.

 So I am always on the lookout for new insights into why or how nostalgic designs work. Recently found a post on the blog innovation playground that provides some insight into how Nostalgic Clues Create Emotion Connections.  My favorite part:

“A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad. It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!”

High-end (and old school) stereo amplifiers use to sport big blue meters to display information. They got burned into many peoples’ brains. This example also illustrates how we can wrap existing artifacts in a retro skin. A powerful technique.

Many product and some service innovators have embraced retro design but few if any organizational or workplace designers have.  A clear opportunity. For example, how might we retain talent or improve knowledge worker productivity by satisfying a yearning for the past on the job?

Watch someone deeply engrossed in a good novel, video game, Sudoku math puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. They are happily, even joyfully exerting massive mental effort. They do so without apparent stress because each of the items  mentioned delivers more mental energy in the form of novelty, meaning,  emotions and associations than it consumes in the form of decision making, cognitive load and self control. These effects work for group activities too as the all-to-addictive smart phone and online virtual worlds have demonstrated. The mental energy we get from technology-mediated but instant and robust social interaction is tremendous.  Millions of people are spending more time with their phones and in virtual worlds than any place else!

Organizations are still struggling to figure out how to harness mental energy and design work that release the potential of the Human brain.

The best results recently are crowdsourcing and open innovation.  In this case tasks and jobs are thrown open to anyone with an Internet connection and those that get net mental energy from doing them will self select. Efforts to gamify work, or redesign processes to include game-like features that drive up mental energy, are also on the rise.  Gamification is a powerful generator of mental energy and will surely impact the nature of work.

If you have any doubts on the importance of understanding the details of mental energy for improving knowledge work check out the post: Vastly Improve Mental Focus with Switching. It reports recent research that suggests maintaining cognitive performance on a task over time is more about spending a few seconds switching to a task that gives us a burst of mental energy or novelty than it is taking a rest break.   Deactivating and then reactivating goals rather than decreasing focus actually generates mental energy to help maintain focus.

We are hardwired from our brain chemistry up to our social nature to relentlessly seek mental energy.  In the life sciences mental energy is defined as the capacity and motivation to do cognitive work coupled with a subjective feeling of fatigue or vigor. Researchers in cognitive science and human factors have identified a handful of key variables that drive mental energy.  Tapping this emerging science to improve organizational performance is what the cognitive design blog is all about.

New psychological research shows that encouraging the use of hand gestures improves spatial visualization.  When trying to mentally manipulate an object,  using hands to “see” the shape and behavior of the object improves our ability to make judgments and learn.

 We have known about this in science education for a while. For example,  in my physics classes I always teach specific hand gestures and pencil gestures to use to think clearly about forces, fields and vectors.

This finding has clear implications for teaching in every field (e.g. design) and thinking in the workplace.  Hand gestures are natural and spontaneous but are sometimes discouraged in more formal workplaces.  We often teach people to minimize the use of their hands during presentations. This finding suggest it might be far more effective for both speaker and listener to learn to use topic-specific hand gestures, especially when mental or spatial visualization is required.

Interested to hear from readers that have specific hand gestures they use individually or in groups to stimulate thinking.

Our brains are designed to parse experience into three second windows.  It is a natural temporal unit of life.  Some psychological functions and basic human acts tend to take place in 3 second bursts – taking a breath, giving a hug, waving good bye, making a decision and how long an infant babbles. Of course not everything lasts just 3 seconds but it is the temporal unit we break longer processes into.

Researchers at Dundee University have recently confirmed that the 3-second-rule holds true for giving and receiving hugs:

“This research confirmed that a hug lasts about as long as many other human actions, and supports a hypothesis that we go through life perceiving the present in a series of about three-second windows.

The three second window defines an important constraint for those interested in designing communications or other artifacts for how the mind works.  It defines a natural maximum length for a single sound bite.

Childhood obesity is alarming.   Creating lasting changes in eating and activity habits is the way to resolve it.  But how do you change a child’s behavior?  The Research Digest reports an interesting new study that claims Bribing Kids to Eat Their Greens Really Does Work.

Bribes in this case include a sticker or positive comment (social reward). This was a large-scale study and defeats the worries that bribes can backfire.

“They conclude that rewards could be an effective way for parents to improve their children’s diet. ‘…rewarding children for tasting an initially disliked food produced sustained increases in acceptance, with no negative effects on liking,’ they said.” 

Understanding how to use rewards to change eating habits is one dimension of designing an effective choice architecture.

Talk about out doing the change in millennium.

With population growth, the use of fossil fuels, atomic bomb tests and the like human activities are having a deep and lasting impact on the Earth.  No news here but some leading intellects are arguing that the impact is so deep we must declare a new epoch of geologic time. They call it the Anthropocene (Man made) era and it:

“…represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet.”

For a great overview check out the theme issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time? Follow the link to the journal and all the articles are free on-line.

The introduction might be of most use to designers. Assuming the Anthropocene has merit, there is likely no stronger argument to be made for the value and importance of design. We could even be so bold as to call it the Design Epoch.  Less technical but meaning the same thing, namely made by people.

In cognitive design we focus on psychological moments of truth or those critical junctures of interaction where deep bonding or full-hearted rejection can occur. Every product, service or experience has them, and like first impressions, designers that ignore them often fail. Moments of truth are relatively small and can be very short in duration. All design challenges have at least three of them and some design problems can have more than a dozen.

For example, a product or service designed to change behavior and help us form new habits must be especially adept at handling psychological moments of truth. Motivating an initial attempt to change, helping us avoid self-regulation failures and springing back from a relapse must all be managed to create lasting behavior change.  A central variable in managing all of these moments of truth is mental energy. It takes energy to do work and behavior change requires a lot of mental work.

Recent research reported in the Journal of Consumer Research makes this very clear:

“When we feel fresh it’s relatively easy for us to focus on the primary features of a product, consider the outcome of a choice, and value the long-term benefits of an action,” the authors explain. “However when we feel depleted from exerting self-control, we start to attend to the non-central minor aspects, think about how feasible it is to engage in the choice, and sometimes emphasize short-term rewards.”

The idea of “feeling fresh” or the subjective experience of fatigue or energy, is one of the three components that make up mental energy.  The question is, how can we fail-safe the design of change programs against low mental energy events and circumstances?

There is an art to simplification. In the ideal case to simplify X you:

1. Compress X without loss of information

2. Render X so that it can be experienced with a lower cognitive load or greater mental stimulation.

In my leadership class at Northwestern students practice simplification all quarter by taking a draft deliverable that is 7-15 pages of rich ideas and data and rendering it as single page document that meets the criteria above.   To get a good result they must find deep patterns – semantic, graphic, temporal, etc. in the content and use that to compress the complexity of their deliverable.

It is interesting to note that the best results are not just easier to understand they are striking (mental stimulating), a bit like a work of art.  Indeed, works of art may generate an aesthetic experience in part because they present sensory complexity that is easy for our brain to compress.  For example, BMC Research Notes recently published, Musical Beauty and Information Compression.  The key idea:

“Deep cognitive insights are reported as intrinsically satisfying, implying that at some point in evolution, the practice of successful information compression became linked to the physiological reward system. I hypothesise that the establishment of this “compression and pleasure” connection paved the way for musical appreciation…”

The experiments done found that random noise, rock music and Beethoven’s 3rd symphony compress to 86%, 60% and 40% of their original information content respectively. This implies that musical masterpieces present compressible complexity.  I have seen similar studies about the visual arts.

Perhaps the key to the high art of simplification is not to simplify at all but instead to express complexity in a compressible form.