Cognitive Design

The psychological need to share is a powerful force, especially when it involves trust.   Cognitive designers that are able to create new ways of sharing or more shareable products, services and experiences are achieving success.  To see how this is working in some detail check out the new book and website, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.The book illustrates a mega shift from hyper consumption to collaborative consumption driven by peer-to-peer sharing networks enabled by the Internet. We can now efficiently share everything:

“From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa) and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.

New marketplaces such as Swap.com, Zilok, Bartercard, AirBnb, and thredUP are enabling “peer-to-peer” to become the default way people exchange — whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world.”

We have looked at many of these sites on the Cognitive Design Blog before but not as an emerging design pattern.   Designing for shareability (collaborative consumption) not only satisfies deep cognitive needs it is a powerful way to tap underutilized capacity, dramatically lower costs, shift behavior patterns and bring people closer together.

Very interested to hear from readers that have insight into how we can transform traditional products and assets into something that is collaboratively consumable.

Check out the new game on Facebook called Healthseeker.  It was designed to use the psychological power of social game play to encourage healthier eating habits and lifestyle choices. 

The picth is that getting healthier (more specifically managing diabetes risk) can be fun and happen with a little help from your friends.  You select goals, chose a mission, earn experience points, give kudos, win badges, send challenges to friends and all the other social network dynamics that move heart-and-mind so well for hundreds of millions of people.  The game is new. It has approximately 4000 members and 400 fans.  The best description I have found so far is on Technology Review:

The challenge of this kind of game isn’t to convince people of something but to get them to act. “People are already emotionally committed to their health,” says Michael Fergusson, the founder and CEO of Ayogo. “They know they need to eat better and exercise.” But approaching that challenge all at once can seem overwhelming and thankless. “We pay them to take healthy actions,” says Fergusson. Reinforcing those small actions could turn them into habits that add up to better health.

They also discuss how other social games are changing behaviors.  Healthseeker is an important experiment. We need more like it.

How can we use the features and functions of online interaction (social networks, online 3D worlds, etc.) that have proven cognitive impact to encourage behavior change for individual and social good?

When creating designs optimized for how minds work it is important to recognize that any solution can include five types of minds – individual, extended, group, emergent and machine.  An emergent mind includes any group of minds where collective intelligence develops. But is there really any such things as collective intelligence that makes emergent minds functionally different than just a group of people working together?  Recent examples such as prediction markets and various crowdsourcing models clearly imply the answer is yes but no one has demonstrated collective intelligence scientifically – until now.

A recent article in Science, Evidence of Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, not only demonstrates a general collective intelligence for groups (much like we have already demonstrated a general intelligence for individuals) but the results have strong implications for cognitive design.   You can get a good overview of the work from an MIT press release.

“We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks,” says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Our hypothesis was confirmed,” continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in many situations.”  

Further they found that the strength or amount of collective intelligence:

*  did not correlate strongly to the individual intelligence found in the group

*  correlates strongly to the average ability of group members to recognize emotional states (social sensitivity) and how well the opportunity to make conversation was shared amongst group members.

There should be no surprise that groups that work better together will have a higher collective intelligence. What is useful is the empirical evidence that suggest to get that effect you need higher individual emotional intelligence on average and a mechanism that promotes a broad distribution of conversational turn-taking. This is very different than other architectures that support collective intelligence such as prediction markets and certain types of  crowdsourcing.

In an earlier post, we explored PatientsLikeMe, a unique site for crowdsourcing patient data in great quantitative detail.  The idea is that patients share tons of personal health data by tracking symptoms, lab results, interventions and the outcomes produced in quantitative form. This creates a river of data for helping each other and is invaluable for researchers, insurers, drug companies and medical device companies looking to develop better health solutions.   An exciting and potential disruptive way to crowdsource health innovations.

But will an open source approach to clinical research catch on, especially will all the concerns about privacy?  It looks like it is. Check out CureTogether. They have 13,000 members in 112 countries contributing 1.2 million data points on 600 conditions.  All the data is supplied by patients. They are actively leveraging that it in 6 university-based studies. It is interesting to note that the most active area is anxiety with some 2000 members.

Patient sourcing (patients working on cures through a crowdsourcing model), especially when it is quantitative can change the time, cost and quality of clinical research by a factor of 10. As they point out on the website capturing quantitative is the key:

“CureTogether is about quantifying the collective patient experience. While most other patient support sites have focused on stories or information from experts, we focus on quantitative data across over 600 patient-contributed conditions. Individual data is kept private, but the anonymized aggregate data is shared openly to maximize discoveries that can be made.”

Obviously this involves considerable work for patients.  But the return on effort is outstanding.  Members get unique advice, daily encouragement and the opportunity to contribute to something of major importance. Powerful cognitive design.

Reading is a powerful and much used cognitive process.  We use it to communicate, learn and have fun. It involves perception, pattern recognition, language comprehension and other mental processes. The experience of reading is strongly shaped by how knowledge is structured – story, book, memo, billboard, etc.

We can improve how well and fast we read through training. Much has been learned about the cognitive science of reading over the last 25 years.  A number of technological innovations ebooks, e-readers, Google books and tablet computers has finally positioned the book for reinvention.

For example, IDEO has presented three interesting iPad-based concepts in The Future of the Book:

Nelson – Topic content is organized in information layers including time, impact, fact check, discussions and recent media coverage

Coupland -  Reading materials is organized around who is reading what in your social or professional network

Alice – A narrative reading experience that is shaped by user interaction.

Each of these concepts satisfies a different cognitive need by changing how I read.  Nelson satisfies my need for completeness, Coupland my need to know what others know and Alice my desire to co-create the story.

There are other ongoing attempts to reinvent thn e book to change how we read and satisfy cognitive needs in new ways. For example,  Flatworld offers the remixable textbook so instructors cacustomize content and students can engage in social learning.   Knowledge cards (my own effort) seeks to reorganize the content of books into a set of linked cards designed to translate concepts into new habits and accelerate behavior change.

No matter, the timing is right to rethink how we structure and deliver knowledge in books to support, accelerate and even integrate with the psychological (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) needs of readers.  Given the central role it plays in our mental life, even a small improvement in the cognition of reading could have strong society-wide implications.

Looking forward to hearing from readers that have cognitive design ideas for shifting how we read books to change the world.

Emotional intelligence is our ability to spot, understand and manage emotional states in ourselves and others.  It has been a topic of increasing importance to leaders but has yet to have a game-changing impact on workforce management.

Our level of emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), can be measured and has been found to correlate strongly to high performance in some domains.  An interesting recent study by the University of Haifa looked at 809 employees in four companies and found:

“Meisler says the study indicates employees with a high level of emotional intelligence were more satisfied with their jobs and were more committed to their organizations. They also had fewer undesirable work attitudes — such as burnout, intention to leave and negligent behavior.”

This suggests that measuring EQ may be a useful tool for general workforce management. For the cognitive designer it implies that EQ measurements may provide insight into the unique cognitive needs and characteristics of employees.

Very interested to hear from designers that use EQ measurements as way to uncover cognitive needs.

Trying to control our own thoughts and behaviors especially as they relate to consumption, procrastination and truth-telling can be a real struggle.  Turns out that framing our self-control challenges as a struggle or a work task versus something that will be fun and pleasurable is self defeating. A new study reported in ScienceDaily as  Could Learning Self Control be Enjoyable?, reveals:

“Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,” write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).

The study also found that reframing self control as an opportunity to have fun improved outcomes even for impulsive individuals.  Why? A pleasurable task brings intrinsic motivations and mental energy especially when it is completed. An obligation to work requires extrinsic motivation and depletes mental energy increasing the chance for a failure in self regulation.  As cognitive designers know, changing the mental energy of a task or interactions can make all the difference when it comes to shifting behaviors.

To dig in check out the free 57-page early version of the study. The details are revealing but unfortunately there is no guidance on how we can frame our thinking about specific self control tasks to take advantage of this effect.  I did find one suggestion on the CalorieLab Blog:

 ”It’s me versus the doughnut. If I resist eating this, I have won the game. Let yourself know that the cards are being dealt and the game is about to begin. Keep score and give yourself a point in your food journal. Every time you succeed, you have strengthened your healthy habits.”

Interested to hear from readers that have other ideas on how to take our self control challenges and reframe them as something fun to do.

For a $100 you can buy a headset that takes your brainwaves (EEG) and uses them to control various iPhone apps.  Make a ball float, play tug-of-mind with someone, sync your brainwaves with a song or just learn to relax. More are in the works.

Xwave runs on Neurosky’s technology so they are introducing nothing new in terms of a brain-to-machine interface.  Bringing brain interface technology to the mobile platform could really help this technology take off. Especially since ambitious cognitive designers can participate in the Brainwave Developer Program and create some game changing apps!

Hope they make one for the Droid soon.

David Rose gave a very interesting talk on how to change behavior at Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Healthcare.  He found (through 10 years of work) that if we scrap the right information off the screens of our computers, smart phones and tablets and make it available in everyday objects behaviors will change.  This allows us to monitor things we are interested in – stock market, weather, our health- more frequently with very little cognitive load. It also means creating a special purpose device or remaking existing objects so that they are capable of information display. He calls these enchanted objects:

“The best metaphor that’s really driven me over the last 10 years or so is the idea of the “enchanted object.” This is the next logical step from Ishii’s “Things That Think” concept of ubiquitous computing: the functionality of computation and the representation of information and of communication will be embedded in many everyday objects. They will seem to be a little bit magical—delightfully easy to use and adding value to our lives a little bit at a time.”

One example, covered previously on the the Cognitive Design blog is GlowCaps or remade drug bottle caps that flash and play a ringtone when you need to take a med, automatically reorders and sends email alerts and reports to doctors and family members all designed to maximize medication compliance.

Other examples include – displays at bus stops that shows when the next bus is due to arrive, umbrellas that beep when rain is likely and a personal orb that glows to deliverable a signal the is customized to your behavior change needs.

Sometimes in my cognitive design class I will ask students to identify one picture that produces a big cognitive impact on them. I create a collage of the results and then we figure out as a group what is happening to produce the impact.

The exercises always produces a lot of energetic discussion and personal reflection on what makes the mind work. Occasionally we get some insights that are useful for project work.

Last time I did this a student suggested forming a Flickr group and throwing this task out to the crowd. Thought that was a great idea and found an existing group that fits the bill. Check out ThinkPhotos.  Upload what you have and offer comments on why you think the others photos may be turning mental gears.