Cognitive Design

Modern science tells us cognition is pattern-driven, metaphoric, unconscious, biased, mostly emotional and embodied. A far cry from the symbol manipulating computer seeking to maximize utility and juggling weighted alternatives that the more classical theory of rationality gave us.

This blog will take the modern characterization of cognition and unpack it to expose the implications for designers. For example, what does the fact that cognition is “embodied” mean to me as a designer? How will it help me to design better products, services or organizations?

Just a few days ago the Boston Globe published a news story that brought some attention to the idea of embodied cognition. The core idea is that we develop, learn and think using our bodies (motion, gestures eye movements). It is not just the brain but also our bodies that are the engines of thinking. In this way, cognition is “of the body” or embodied.

From a design standpoint, this puts a premium on sensorial, interaction and experiential design approaches but with an important spin - how can we use these techniques to engage the sensorimotor capabilities of the user to support and enhance cognition?

Consider for example how well Apple’s ClickWheel (or scroll wheel) on the iPod connects thumb/finder motion to the cognition of searching large lists and making a selection.

Engage the senses, engage the body and then engage the brain as a natural progression. This is what we are hardwired to do.

This means every cognitive designer (no matter what project they are working on) must answer the question:

How do the users think with their bodies?

Not your typical design stance.

The fact that we think with our senses and bodies and insist on doing so even when we a put in abstract situations (nearly all the metaphors we use are grounded in direct experience), creates some real challenges for design intangible products. Said another way, lack of embodiment is a major reason why the design of intangible artifacts fail. For example, think about the design of financial products or organizational change programs. They deal more with abstract concepts, delayed benefits and darn if I can hold one in my hand or even see it. Not very supportive of embodied cognition.

But you can change that through good design. My favorite example comes from the folks at the Institute of the Future and their work on prescient products . These are products that don’t really exist (that is intangible) but might in the future per the forecasts developed by the institute. So the product here is potential product concept based on a research-based forecast. Rather than just selling the intangible product as a written report, they mock them up and enhance the embodied cognition of their clients. Prescient products can now be touched, manipulated, smelled and so on. Check out the example of pharmaceutically enhanced fruit

Or another (source Wired Magazine) of the concept of soft drinks that burn calories when we consume them:

Imagine passing cans of this around to stimulate thinking and discussions on trends in nutrition, weight management and soft drinks. This reflects maximum respect for embodied cognition.

The design priority is to make the abstract concrete in a way that naturally engages the embodied brain.

Video games and virtual worlds are great at doing this — they give us bodies (or let us create our own) in simulated worlds and where we interact flexibly in real-time in rich and engaging contexts. A hyper-stimulant for the embodied brain. Adapting this effect to design non-entertainment applications (training, self development, etc.) is what the “serious game” movement is about. We will explore serious games and other techniques that promise to inspire superior designs for embodied cognition in future posts.

Cognitive design is about creating artifacts that support and accelerate our thinking and emotions. Check out this new video site Big Think designed to engage you with some of the leading thinkers and deepest questions of our time.

The big think YouTube style!

Here is a description from the site:

”When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today’s leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy’s views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar’s assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring. ”

There was an excellent article yesterday by Shari Roan, a staff writer for the LA Times, Cue the Gluttony, on the role of environmental triggers in Americans’ overeating.

Part of the argument is that we are hardwired to overeat so when we are in an environment that offers easy access to giant portions, a constant flow of snacks and drinks and specially designed flavors, smells, packaging and displays that say “eat” most of us will get fat. Cognitive design has played no small role in getting us into this problem. Consumer research pulls on the latest findings in cognitive science to influence our behaviors and choices. It has been especially effective with food.

Most of the experts quoted in her article call for changing the environment to help elevate the problem, after all as one expert said, “it is easier to change the environment than it is to change people.” In this way we might be able to design our way out of obesity with the right regulations (e.g. portion size restrictions), package designs (e.g. 100 calorie packs) and environmental designs (e.g. no fast food outlets in High Schools).

These ideas will in fact lower the mental work I have to do to influence and ultimately control my eating behaviors. Lowering cognitive load is good cognitive design. The concern is that it limits public choice and business freedoms (which we often do for the public good). It also does not really get at the core of the problem.

The core problem is that many in the US are unable to influence their own behaviors (self-regulate) sufficiently to maintain health, happiness and financial security. Not just eating but exercise, drinking/drugs, following treatment plans and other health-related behaviors are clearly outside of individual control. Indeed this is a driver the bulk of the cost problem in healthcare. Further, I over spend for a lot of the same reasons I over eat and therefore threaten my financial health. When you stack all these up the strategy to re-engineer our environment to compensate for failures to self regulate becomes something we want to approach very cautiously.

A complementing strategy is to use design to support and enhance the ability of consumers to self-regulate (influence their own behaviors) despite the well-engineered temptations that are everywhere in the environment. I am not talking about designing healthly choice alternatives (although that is essential) but more about using a deep understanding of cognitive science to develop programs that build our self-regulatory strength. We need to restore our capacity to act as captains of our own ships - that is how we design our way out of obesity and other lifestyle problems.

The question is what is known about the cognition of self regulation and how can we use it to better influence our choices and behaviors in tough situations?

Check out the on-line encylopedia on interaction-design.org. Clear writing on some of the cognitive aspects of design.

Of particular interest is the article on Cognitive Ergonomics.

Cognitive ergonomics (sometimes called cognitive engineering) is focused on understanding and supporting the cognition of work especially when it is complex, time-constrained or related to public safety. The focus is on process or work redesign (e.g. to lower cognitive load), human-machine interfaces, training programs and technologies to augment cognition.

Cognitive ergonomics is about remaking work to better fit the human mind. One of the core pursuit of cognitive design.

In the US, cognitive ergonomics is now flying the flag of cognitive engineering and decision making (CEDM) a large technical interest group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

We will track CEDM in this blog and report on specific findings and tools useful for cognitive designers.

Prospective memory or remembering to remember is an important cognitive function especially in an interrupt driven, complex, demographically aging world.

For example, you are driving home from work and remember that you need to water the plants. How will you remember to do that when you get home?

We typically think about memory retrospecitively as the encoding, storage and recall of past events. Prospective memory is about the encoding, storage and recall necessary for carrying out intended actions at the right time in the future. We are trying to set an internal reminder for ourselves.

Of course there are more serious examples - a nurse remembering to double check the type and dose of a medication before administering it to a patient, remembering to buckle your seat belt up before driving your car and remembering to file your taxes on time.

Defining artifacts that support and enhance the prospective memory of users in everyday situations at home and at work is fundamental to good cognitive design.

And it is happening everywhere. To bring this point home one of the things we ask students to do in the Cognitive Design course at Northwestern University is to go out and look and make a list of the artifacts they find that support prospective memory. Here is what they bring back:

Built into artifacts I otherwise use:

• -Dryer and oven alarms

• -Low battery alerts in smoke alarms, cell phone, computers

• -Seat belt, required maintenance and low fuel alerts in your car

• -Show reminders in digital TV

• -Formal or inform bulletin boards (posting items on the fridge)

• -Vendor reminders (service your car, furnace, etc.)

• -Electronic health reminders from physician’s office

Artifacts dedicated to supporting prospective memory:

• -To do list
• -Calendar or planner (paper or electronic)

• -Programmable reminders on your watch, phone and PDA

• -Programmable reminders in exercise equipment

• -Medication/pill organizer and dispenser

• -Electronic memory aids for Alzheimer or brain injury patients

There are even Internet-based general purpose reminder service (e.g. Memo to Me) that will automatically remind you about birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates. Check it out, the basic service is free.

So what can cognitive science tell us about how to design artifacts to better manage the prospective memory load for users? Fortunately, there were several books published in 2007 that review the state of the art of prospective memory research. We will discuss them in this blog with a special eye towards design implications. And there are some very provocative ideas.

BTW - with a simple sensor, alarm and tiny never-die battery we can invent “the remember to water me” flower pot so that you will never forget to water the plants again.

Purposefully putting a user in a state of cognitive dissonance can be a design masterstroke. Doing it accidentally can be a disaster.

We enter a mental state of dissonance when we become aware of two or more conflicting beliefs at the same time. It can also happen we perceive a conflict between a belief and action or a thing. For example, telling someone a lie when you strongly believe in telling the truth. Or reflecting on the belief that you are a really smart and accomplished professional while fumbling around trying to learn to operate the latest consumer electronics gadget designed (supposedly) to improve your productivity.

Trying to hold conflicting beliefs in our head hurts. It is hard to do and so we actively seek relief in a number of ways. In general, we tend to revise (relative importance and/or content) one of the conflicting beliefs until the pressure goes away. Or we laugh — especially if their is a punchline or realization of one — that suddenly releases the tension. Sometimes dissonance leads to creative insight or even a transformational experience for the user as new consonant (supporting beliefs) are added because the tension causes us to reframe our thinking. Finally, dissonance can be like a permanent link on a web page, pushed into the background but remaining ready to activate under the right circumstances. “Every time I look at that gadget I get mad”

Some examples that have positive outcomes (usually):

- Gag gifts

- Being videotaped during practice or performance as part of a training program (the artifact) you are taking

- A bathroom scale

As William Lidwell and others point out in their excellent book on Universal Design Principles, cognitive dissonance is a powerful tool to use when designing marketing and advertising materials. They offer the example of AOL free hours campaign as one of the best examples in history. Users are mailed a free CD which they use to set up the service which takes time and energy. This creates lockin at the time the free subscription expires compelling users to form a positive belief about the service (and paying for the subscription). Why would I invest time and energy (for no compensation) in a crappy service?

So conflicting beliefs properly framed can lead to surprise, humor, flashes and insight, influence decision making or even lead to a change in world view (paradigm shift). Cognitive dissonance grabs attention, generates arousal (emotional energy) and provides an opportunity to orchestrate high impact experience. In terms of level of cognitive fit artifacts that make good use of dissonance often accelerate user cognition (level 4 fit) and those that trigger it accidentally tend to just agitate users (level 1 fit) and fail.

Let’s hope.

Low cost, wearable, reliable and real-time brain machine interfaces will trigger a revolution in cognitive design. We will be able to remake products that directly interact with the brain and fundamentally change how we learn and develop by externalizing and manipulating hidden mental states. And other very exciting stuff.

How close are we? Check out the Emotiv Systems demo at the IBM partner booth at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Emotiv’s Chief Product Officer says they will be released in 2008.

If you want to see something a bit cooler, check out this earlier video on playing video games with your mind.

For many Americans the cognition (or thoughts and emotions) involved in spending money are far more enjoyable than the thoughts and emotions involved in saving for retirement. We have a strong (some say overpowering) cognitive bias towards spending rather than savings. Look at the level of consumer debt and the looming savings crisis and it is safe to say this bias is running us into serious trouble.

For many consumers, telling them not to spend in order to save and avoid trouble down the road is not enough. An alternative strategy is to design savings products that work with the cognitive bias rather than ask them to try and fight it .

A great example of this is the American Express One Card.

As of this writing you get 1% of your purchases deposited in a high-yield (5% APY) savings account with no fees. So you literally automatically save while you spend. Note this is very different than a card that gives you cash back. If you get cash back and you are a spender, you will spend it not save it. This card is linked to an FDIC-insured savings account that you can even make extra deposits to if you want.

There is a powerful cognitive design principle at work here.

When it comes to designing programs or products that require behavior change, make the new behaviors an automatic consequence of something the customer already does (or is very willing to do).

Is this not what lottery tickets do? Consumers hate to pay tax but will gladly do it to buy some hope/excitement of winning big.

According to leaders in behavioral finance (scientific study of how cognitive biases shape our economic decision making) the answer is NOT that we don’t make enough money. Instead, the reason we fail to save is that we are not cognitively wired to do it. I have a number of biases that block savings behaviors including:

1. an aversion to risking or giving up current gains (so I don’t want to commit any of my current income to a regular savings program)
2. a strong belief that I will save more tomorrow (so that I don’t need to save today) and other faulty mental models
3. underestimating the value of a resource in the future (I cannot wrap my brain around the time value of money so I am not swayed by the logic of saving soon and often)
4. a strong visceral factor that drives me to maximize consumption in the present (it is hard to delay gratification)
5. an aversion to thinking about being old and eventually dying.

These are very powerful (often overwhelming) effects that lead to poor decisions and inaction. And it gets worse- the design of the products makes it very hard (intellectually and emotionally) to consume them:

· The products are complex so I have to do a lot of mental work to understand and use them (very high cognitive load) this decrease the relative motivation to participate, triggers a mental state of procrastination and leads to inaction

· small print and legal jargon can invoke feelings of doubt.

In short, retirement products and services don’t fit the way we think and feel so we tend not to consume them appropriately despite the fact that it is in our best interest to do so.

Actually, they score 1 out of 5 (at the very bottom) in terms of cognitive fit and literally agitate cognition rather that support or enhance it. The design of retirement and saving products and services is an area of big opportunity for cognitive designers. And there has been a lot of action: Pension plans that literally let you save more tomorrow by allocating a portion of future earnings (you avoid having to part with anything today and it plays off of the fact that you undervalue future resources), credit cards that allow you to spend and save for retirement at the same time, pension plans that automatically enroll employees and require them to opt out if they don’t want to participate (having the status quo bias work in our favor), 401k plans that come with services that pick specific funds for you to invest in (lower cognitive load) and so on. We will cover all these products and the research that drives them in this blog.

You might complain that you don’t design financial products or services so what can you learn from this? Look at the list of biases again. They (or very close variants of them) are involved in the customer or employee cognition around almost every type of product or service that involves behavior change. So if you are in the behavior change business the lessons learned should be useful to you.

Over the last few years there has been a small flurry of books and papers on the “new science of happiness” - an attempt to use neuropsychology and cognitive science to understand what makes us happy and why. Good stuff for cognitive designers interested in creating artifacts that invoke happiness in users.

Check out the Jan-Feb 2007 issue of Harvard Magazine for recent overview. It covers all the basics and highlights how Harvard’s class on Happiness 101 (actually titled Positive Psychology) was the most popular in 2006 pulling in over 800 students.

A somewhat dated but still excellent source with findings specific enough to guide design can be found in a Time Magazine article The New Science of Happiness.

So what do you do if you what to design artifacts to put users in the mental state of happiness? You can include features and functions that:

1. Involve or trigger a remembrance of friends and family. For example, personalization of your PC desktop with a family or baby photo, discount calling plans for friends and families and adding online social networking features to your software product or content.

2. Allow users to otherwise engage in an acts of kindness or altruistic acts. Interesting recent examples include XO (the give one get one laptop) and Free Rice (play a vocabulary game and for each word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end World hunger).

3. Naturally limit (but not eliminate) the number of choices the user must make to use the product (too much choice is the enemy of happiness). For example, some financial services companies have adopted the “option packages” strategy from the automotive industry to bundle decisions about many choices into one (lifestage asset allocation funds or feature bundles for life and annuity policies).

4. Allow users to express their blessings or joys in an authentic and meaningful way. For example, a comfortable way of expressing thankfullness for a spouse or family member in public.

Adding features and functions that stimulate happiness in users is one way to approach cognitive design.