Imagine you sit down to enjoy some TV and discover the remote control is across the room. Can you design a way/device to fetch the remote without getting up? If so you may want to submit your idea to the Grab the Remote Contest and try to win a 3-D TV. Be sure to check out the ideas that have already been submitted on YouTube.
According to SapientNitro we have special and happy memories of eating ice cream. To tap those memories they created the world’s first smile-activated machine that vends ice cream. The machine Share Happy, can sense your presence, lure your closer with sounds and graphics and then, with permission, take and analyze your picture. Those with great smiles are rewarded with an ice cream bar. Facial recognition software reads your smile and also infers your gender and age. The goal? And I quote – “… to encourage people everywhere to share life’s small moments of happiness.”
The plan to to deploy Share Happy in high traffic areas (e.g. malls) around the world over the next 18 months.
You cannot achieve service excellence without meeting the cognitive (intellectual and emotional) needs of your employees and customers. For a great billion dollar example of this check on the new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.
If you want to get a free taste, read the excerpt provided by Strategy+Business (registration required). Here is my favorite part:
“At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer.”
From scripts, measurement of the “average handle time” and upsell to personal emotional connections. That is a shift from meeting the cognitive needs of managers trying to control the service to the employees and customers that are experiencing the service. Bravo!
A supernormal stimulus is any stimulus that has evolved or has been engineered to elicit a stronger than normal reaction. A puzzle or mystery that you compulsively need to solve. A game you cannot stop playing (literally). A toy so cute you just must cuddle, nurture and protect it. A food or drink so tasty that you cannot “eat just one” but will literally eat or drink it until it is gone. A photo so sexy that….
These stimuli are created by exaggerating the features of normal stimuli that we are hard wired to respond to. For example, oversize, and super sad eyes to elicit the instinctual response to nurture. Or foods engineered with unnaturally high levels of fat, sugar or salt will stimulate us to eat compulsively. Why else would triple patty hamburgers with cheese and bacon sell in the millions?
This gives us one formula for creating irresistible artifacts. Understand which features and functions are wired to instinctual responses and super size them.
You can super-size by literally making them bigger or by increasing the frequency of the effect.
Artifacts with supernormal stimuli tend to be irresistible and require considerable self control on the part of the consumer. Indeed, two recent books, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose and Waistland: The R/evolutionary science behind our weight and fitness crisis, argue that such artifacts are so irresistible that supernormal stimuli may be a root cause of our health, spending and anger related problems in the US.
Both books are a must read for cognitive designers interested in behavior change. They catalog examples of supernormal stimuli in both nature and human society and give some insights into the features that are so effective at driving deep instinctual reactions.
Let’s try to harness supernormal stimuli to makes use healthier, happier, smarter and more financially secure.
When meeting with a prospective client I am always asked – What is cognitive design and what can it do for me? I explain that CD is dedicated to using the latest science and clinical practice to design products, services and organizations for how minds really work. The value is to achieve lasting behavior change, product/service differentiation, improved organizational effectiveness and peak cognitive performance. Usually the conversation quickly focuses on behavior change or designing a “think and feel” into a product or service. More recently, I have seen interest in how individuals can achieve peak cognitive performance to drive success at work, school and life. Little wonder, according to a recent marketing report by SharpBrains the market for brain training and cognitive health solutions grew by 35% in 2009.
The report, Transforming Brain Health with Digital Tools is filled with insights for cognitive designers but it is very pricey. For example, the report reveals what those surveyed (1900 decision-makers and early adopters) view as effective ways to preserve and boost brain power:
“Professional and intellectual challenges were rated very effective by 61% of respondents, aerobic exercise and reading books by 42%, meditation by 38%, computerized brain training by 26%, taking prescription drugs by 13%, taking supplements by 12%, and self-medicating with drugs by 1%.”
This leaves plenty of room for innovation. I am reporting on such innovation (large and small) in YourNextBrain!.
Brain chemistry drives a lot of human behavior. Some of the natural drugs or chemicals that play key roles are dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol and insulin. So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that link brain chemicals to cognition and behavior that can have implications for designers.
For example, the ScienceDaily just reported on a study that shows how levels of dopamine impact decisions around self control. Higher levels of dopamine lead to impulsive. behavior. To quote:
“The researchers found that every subject was more likely to behave more impulsively — choosing the ‘smaller, sooner’ option — when levels of dopamine in the brain were boosted. . On the whole, the number of sooner options chosen increased by almost a third, although each subject varied on this measure.”
This is a significant effect. How can designer make use of it?
Perceived weight, texture and hardness of an object unconsciously shapes our interpretations and judgments especially in situations involving interpersonal communications. That is the conclusion of recent research at Harvard and MIT on How Touch Influence Judgments.
Specific examples given include:
” Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain.”
Hard, rough and heavy – all sensory states we can design for in a wide variety of circumstance.
In developed countries the top survival skill in the early 21st century looks to be the ability to self-regulate or control your own behaviors, appetites and emotions. The simple form of this argument points to otherwise avoidable health risks being the number one cause of death. Lifestyle choices (eating, exercise, drugs, stress, etc.) leading to chronic conditions and eventual death.
In a recent New York Times article Dysregulation Nation, Judith Warner, chronicles the details:
“Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.”
“Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too.”
“We read about dopamine fiends sitting enslaved to their screens, their brains hooked on the bursts of pleasure they receive from the ding of each new e-mail message or the arousing flash of a tweet. “
“Mental-health professionals report seeing increasing numbers of kids who are all out of sync: they can’t sustain attention, regulate their rage, moderate their pain, tolerate normal types of sensory input.”
“The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. “
As dark as this seems I firmly believe we can design our way out of it. Read the rest of this entry »
The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago includes a Center for Decision Research. The work they do is cutting edge and full of designable insights. To see what I mean browse the papers in the Behavioral Science Workshop Section.
For example, there are many insightful articles on behavior and habit change. Consider the general conclusion of Can’t Control Yourself:
“Are people stuck hopelessly repeating their bad habits? Our answer, from research on what people do in their everyday lives when trying to change their responses, is not necessarily. Participants in our studies were reasonably successful at exerting control over unwanted responses when they used self-control strategies that are tailored to the specific cuing mechanisms that produced the response (i.e., temptations vs. habits). Thus, as suggested in earlier research on delay of gratification, having sufficient control strength is not a guarantee of successful control. The participants in our diary and laboratory studies were most successful when they exerted control in ways best suited to inhibiting the habit mechanism that activated the unwanted response.”
The implications for cognitive designers are clear – emphasize avoidance strategies (staying away from the stimulus that triggers the unwanted behavior) over motivation and self-regulatory strength.
Met yesterday with an ASTD professional development network (PDN) on cognitive learning. A great group of people very much focused on cognitive design issues:
“The Cognitive Learning PDN focuses on the rapidly expanding field of Cognitive Neuroscience: How do people think, learn, master skills, and gain competencies?”
I gave a brief talk, Redesign Your Knowledge Blobs to Accelerate Behavior Change! If you are in the Chicago area check them out.
