Cognitive Design

Just organizations treat employees fairly. Generating feelings and thoughts of fairness in employees requires making decisions and taking actions that produce favorable outcomes and/or use processes that involve employees, create a level playing field and provide clear explanations of why.   To maintain a sense of fairness when everyone cannot receive a favorable outcome means using processes that are inclusive, consistent and clear.  Up to a point, high process fairness is very important for maintaining organizational justice at crunch time or when outcomes are very unfavorable - layoffs, budget cuts and work-life imbalances.

Crunch time in organizational justice presents many cognitive design challenges.   Such situations carry a strong emotional charge (guilt, sympathy, fear) and can have subtle cognitive side effects.  For example, you can accidentally and negatively impact employee self esteem or create survival guilt with high process fairness.

Further, bad news carries tremendous cognitive load. One that authorities delivering the news might not be able to handle well enough to maintain high process fairness.  There are several other cognitive factors inhibiting manager from following high process fairness including lack of belief that they will do much good and a natural reluctance to surrender power. These issues are covered well in the new book Contemporary Look at Organizational Justice: Multiply Insult Times Injury. It is a bit academic but the free chapter is on practical applications.

When outcomes are bad our brains go into overdrive on many levels. Not attending to the cognitive factors at crunch time strongly diminishes our ability to treat employees fairly and maintain a sense of organizational justice. This is especially the case if we design high-fairness processes that fail to account for how the mind of the managers naturally works. They won’t get implemented.  

The case for this is made fairly strongly in the book. Indeed, the author calls it the Paradox of Process Fairness.  It is a paradox because the business case for process fairness during crunch time is good yet the evidence suggests we don’t use it. We don’t use it because we have failed to design high fairness processes that meet the cognitive needs of managers. We create the conditions of fairness for employees - involvement, level playing field, clarity of explanation but leave managers with a sometime unbearable cognitive load, no response to their belief that it does not work, naive demand to share power and the like.

The challenge for cognitive designers working in the field of organizational justice is to create high process fairness that meets the psychological needs of both employees and managers.

Believe it or not, the blue dot on the top of the cube and the one on the shaded side to the right are exactly the same.   I borrowed this image from  Wrong By Design. There are other examples that are fun to check out.

The image illustrates an important concept in cognitive design namely:

when designing for how minds work there is nearly always at least one powerful cognitive bias at work. You need to uncover it and decide to mitigate, leverage or ignore it.

Perception, memory, learning, decision-making, problem solving, creativity and all other mental processes are loaded with limitations, quirks and biases that must be understood if we are claiming our designs are optimized for how minds work.  

Magic, music you cannot forget, lottery tickets, movies that make us cry and viral videos all leverage well-known cognitive biases. Cognitive biases left unchecked lead to poor decision-making, the high failure rate of planned change and safety issues.   We now have catalogs of dozens of known biases. Our first step as cognitive designers is to make them as visible as the blue dot in the cube.

IDEO has recently started a site, OpenIDEO, to apply crowdsourcing to social innovation. This is your chance to participate in all phases of the innovation process (inspiration, concepting, evaluation and development) for a big question that is posed by a sponsor. There are two big questions currently in the hopper:

1. How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools & services for students in the developing world?

2. How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices?

Both are excellent challenges for cognitive designers.

Systems that remotely monitor the movements, weight, blood pressure, compliance with medication schedules and other daily behaviors of older adults are springing up. For children with older parents experiencing failing health such systems mean high-tech eldercare from afar. For the parents it means a chance to age in place.

Take for example, the BeClose system.

Add some smart software into the mix as they do in the QuietCare system and you can infer a lot about what is going on:

“Have they gotten out of bed in the morning?

Have they navigated the bathroom safely?

Have they eaten?

Have they taken their medicine?

What’s their overall activity level?

Are they sleeping well?”

But technology is only part of the story. Successful deployment and use requires close attention to human factors and good cognitive design.   A recent article in the New York Times brings this to a sharp point:

“Many of the systems are godsends for families. But, as with any parent-child relationship, all loving intentions can be tempered by issues of control, role-reversal, guilt and a little deception — enough loaded stuff to fill a psychology syllabus. For just as the current population of adults in their 30s and 40s have built a reputation for being a generation of hyper-involved, hovering parents to their own children, they now have the tools to micro-manage their aging mothers and fathers as well.”

The article makes the point that remote monitoring eldercare systems are meeting cognitive needs on both sides of the fence:

In addition to giving him peace of mind that his mother is fine, the system helps assuage that midlife sense of guilt. “I have a large amount of guilt,” Mr. Murdock admitted. “I’m really far away. I’m not helping to take care of her, to mow her lawn, to be a good son.”

The article does a good job of raising some of the key cognitive design issues but it is far from clear how they can be resolved.

MIT’s journal, Sloan Management Review, has an outstanding article that highlights why we must do cognitive design to get excellent customer service. The article, Designing for the Softer Side of Customer Service,  demonstrates how three psychological variables - trust, emotions and feelings of control shape the modern service experience.  They provide a good theoretical frame, new research and many specific suggestions such as:

“Service providers should categorize events based on the type of emotion and the source. When negative events are caused by the company, quick recovery is vital. When they are caused by external agents, the company can generate good will by either being supportive when the emotions are negative or celebrating with the customer when the emotions are positive”.

Interested to hear from readers that have implemented service innovations designed to leverage  trust, emotions or feelings of control.

Imagine surfing online and running into a banner that reads “click now to contribute $1 to your nest egg. It will more that triple by your retirement age!”.  A buck and a click now for three bucks when I am old, sounds a bit boring. Would I do it?  I asked that to a group of 20 middle-age surfers (45 - 55) and 85% said yes.  They also wanted a widget to track contributions, projected returns and performance relative to others (friends) that are using from this surf-and-save offering.

Once you used surf-and-save for a while the pull to save impulsively will magnify.  For example, the widget would use historical data (online behavior) and your profile to illustrate the financial impact of saving a $1.5 instead of $1.  This could be big money if you spend considerable time online and don’t plan to retire soon. Plus it would likely let you zoom ahead of your friends!

A prototype of surf-and-save does not require a major investment. It would be interesting to find the online contexts and widget behaviors that produced the greatest conversion rates for saving impulsively.

Why can’t  savings be like experience points in social games? Millions of people spend hours a week in online virtual worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) earning experience points so they can upgrade their avatar, buy virtual goods or enter a new region of the game. Why not use the same mechanism to save real dollars for retirement?

We are already spending a billion real dollars for virtual goods and sponsors are giving virtual dollars to online citizens willing to do simple tasks such as watching videos and completing quizzes. The virtual and real economies are colliding.   Being online means the cost of doing simple financial transactions approaches zero. This means saving a little impulsive many times can be done cost effectively.

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Online or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are a new type of socio-technical system. They are technical platforms that provide computer-mediated social interactions of serious depth and breadth.   Literally millions of people participate many spending in excess of 20 hours per week online.  Users stay loyal for years. Some online worlds support virtual economies that spill over into real dollars. Over a billion real dollars have been spent on virtual goods, skills, experience points and level ups!

The opportunities for cognitive designers are vast.   Testing new designs in a virtual world and using online worlds to tackle hard cognitive design problems (lasting behaviors change, knowledge worker productivity, product/service innovation, enhancing brain function) are two major areas of opportunities.  Another is that online worlds have matured as socio-technical systems enough to offer some deep insights (design patterns) for cognitive designers.  To get a taste for that I suggest you spend sometime in country. Join a community and earn some experience points.  

Another approach is to look at the growing literature. One of my favorites is Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and Virtual.  Chapter eleven reveals an important design pattern:

“Most MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) attempt to foster interactions between their players by using a common template, which could be stereotyped as follows:

(1) the player creates a “level 1” character who enters the world with a limited set of abilities and equipment;

(2) the player is presented with “quests” (missions) to accomplish;

(3) successful completion of the objectives generates “experience points” (or any other similar reward), allowing the character to acquire more powerful abilities and/or equipment;

(4) (this is the most important design element) as a player gains in levels, quests become increasingly difficult to accomplish alone, reaching a point where a coordinated group of players is required to move further;

(5) the size of the group required, the length of the quests or dungeons, and the complexity of the encounters make it nearly impossible to succeed with an ad hoc group assembled on the spot, creating the need for more formal and persistent social structures: the guilds (or clans, teams, etc. in other game worlds).”

There are many ways a clever cognitive designer can put this to use even in the real world.

Interested to hear from readers with some significant virtual world time. What opportunities for cognitive designers do you see?

If you have not seen the video, Social Media Revolution 2, check it out. It  is a little over 4 minutes long, has uplifting music, draws on the new book Socialnomics and summarizes the factoids behind the revolution nicely.

Most forms of social media have exploded over the last several years because of the unique mental energy proposition they offer users. Never before have I been able to exert so little mental effort to get so much mental energy (meaning, emotion, ego boost, etc.)  in return. And the effect is even more intense in social games or online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The annual meeting of the cognitive science society starts on the 11th in Portland, Oregon. There are some workshops and tutorials that look to be of special interest to designers including an introduction to agent-based computer modeling for cognitive research and several others that deal with Bayesian inference. There are also many relevant (but highly theoretical) papers with designable insights into education, decision making and social cognition.  A fairly complete version of the proceedings are already available online. (select the HTML version and scroll down to see links to abstracts and papers).

One thing that is notably missing from the entire program (as in years past) is focused attention on cognitive design. As this is a scientific conference on cognition, sometimes spilling over into cognitive engineering, the lack of focus on design is likely a programmatic decision.

No matter, I am planning to submit a proposal for tutorial or workshop to next year’s meeting focused on design thinking for cognitive scientists.

The goal is two fold. First to demonstrate that cognitive scientists can make a much bigger impact by directly contributing to innovation efforts involving the design of socio-technical systems to improve organizationation performance, products and services that impact mental processes and programs for improving brain health and enhancing cognitive performance.  Second, cognitive design is ripe with many worthy research problems that are scientifically hard and hold great commercial potential. This session will be an undisguised attempt to accelerate the development of cognitive design by enlisting more direct participation of the cognitive science community.

If you are interested in developing and possibly co-presenting this type of workshop please contact me at mark.k.clare@gmail. com.

The Sekai Camera is a free smart phone App that locates, tags and provides information about the scene in your camera view. It also lets you “air tag” or provide descriptions and comments (text, pictures, icons, etc.) on the scene.  Additional features include a life-log.

A bit crude but it is an important first generation augmented reality application using the mobile web. One more example of how we are breaking down the barrier between the digital and physical worlds.

I invite cognitive designers to experiment with the Sekai Camera and suggest ideas for how it can be adapted to create lasting behavior change, improve organizational performance,  create a differentiated think-and-FEEL for existing products and services or enhance an individuals cognitive performance.