Cognitive Experience Design: The evolution of design.

Cognitive Experience Design

By Joanna Peña-Bickley

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November 14, 2019

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12 min read

The evolution of design in a new intelligent, quantum computing era.

Artificial Intelligence (Ai) is radically accelerating change in the disciplines human factors, ergonomics, industrial, information, interaction, interior design and architecture. Whether you are a product designer of connected devices (Internet of Things), websites, mobile applications or an architect or interior designer building a home, a commercial or building or an urban planner developing land use programs Ai and quantum computing are enabling the designer to make our experiences more intelligent for our users, customers and constituents. These technologies, when used for good can, reduce the time to make faster decisions and make bolder breakthroughs.

As we forge ahead, with command of the command line, using intelligent tech to power our designs we can we alter what is achievable in a daily minute. As designer, I use data as my paint and see the physical world as a canvas. I practice Cognitive Experience Design to create inventions that democratize understanding, reasoning, and learning to scale expertise and intelligence — not replace it — in the areas of consumer electronics, manufacturing, medicine, automotive, finance, energy and education. With every customer pain point, my goal is to design an experience that removes the time-consuming tasks of finding an elusive needle in the data haystack, giving builders and people the power to be proactive, instead of reactive. With those intelligently designed experiences in place, we can mine millions of unstructured medical documents in record time, freeing the cancer researcher to find a cure, instead of just delivering treatment. In Automotive, we can liberate the mechanic to go beyond fixing a flat, to diagnosing a complex sensor failure and empowering the future of mobility in record time. I believe we can build the tools that banks need to arm every person with intelligent financial advisor accessible with a human voice, emancipating us from the mundane management of our money, to building a more equitable future. I know that we can re-build trust in for journalism and news when we commit to closing the intelligence divide by re-imagining the distribution of truth with blockchain, smart paper and wetware.

I believe it is our role to create wave of 21st century consumer, constituent and enterprise experiences that enlighten industry with magical moments that reframe time.

Q: What is cognitive experience design?
A: Cognitive experience design, #CognitiveXD or CXD is the practice of using artificial intelligence (ai) technologies to reduce the human mental effort and time required to complete a task. Cognitive Experience Design employs knowledge of human perception, mental processing, modeling and memory.

Q: Which Ai Technologies to apply to cognitive experience design?
A: Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), Decision Management, Deep Learning, Biometrics, Robotic Process Automation. For More Info Read Making Magic with Ai.

Q: Why do we need cognitive experience design?
A: A Designer's creed is to create and invent products and services that are service to the humans. Today, 59% of the global population (4.66 billion people) are living in a connected world where we are inundated with incoming data in the form of incoming notifications, reminders, articles, posts, professional and personal content, email and instruction. This inundation of information, being called an infodemic by the World Health Organization, has led to the human condition called cognitive overload. Cognitive overload occurs when the volume of information supply exceeds the information processing capacity of the human brain. To understand the scale of the problem, let me illuminate the facts: In 2020, people are producing 3.5 billion searches a day, sending 294 billion emails, posting 230 million tweets, creating 75+ petabytes of user-generated data on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram everyday. This is far too much information and too many tasks for any human to simultaneously reason, understand and react. This phenomena results in a human's inability to process this information. Cognitive experience design and the study of cognitive ergonomics is the cure for machine (or device) induced human cognitive overload.

Q: Who is cognitive experience design for?
A: Ultimately cognitive experience design is for humans. More specifically, cognitive experience design is a practice for any designer who strives to design human interfaces with machines. Design practitioners can use CognitiveXD to bestow superhuman powers on their users, customers, employees, patients, members etc. for a task in time and space.

Q: When does using cognitive experience design as a practice make sense?
A: Everyday. Cognitive experience design should be used to solve human problems at the intersection of space and time. In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model which fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. I use cognitive experience design to understand the whole human experience, their mental model and journey and seek to improve it in a specific time and space with Ai technologies like Natural Language Generation, Speech Recognition, Virtual Assistants, Machine Learning, AI-optimized Hardware, Decision Management, Deep Learning, Biometrics, Robotic Process Automation, Text Analytics and NLP.

Q: What advise would you give to a designer working with Ai like Watson or Alexa?
A: The user experience of an AI (e.g. Alexa, Watson) begins with the belief that a human will have the final say. The more an AI’s behavior is altered by personal context, the more signals, reference points and calibration opportunities should be offered to the user. Using my analogy of a needle in a digital haystack: The role of an AI shouldn’t be to remove agency from the user. Simply put: The role of an AI should NOT be to find the needle in the haystack. It should be to show the user how much hay it can clear so they can better see the needle themselves. The best example of this is when I was designing diagnosis tools for healthcare professionals. It was critical that our interface 1) telegraph the amount of data it was sorting through, 2) when you surfaced possible diagnosis you demonstrated the confidence level the system had for the options. 3) create mechanisms that enable the user see the inputs that led to the conclusions. Each of the interactions build trust. You can see these interfaces come to life in Ford Service Tech Application, John Deere Agent or GM's OnStar Go Mobility Assistant

Q: How do instill trust in to an AI driven user experience?
A: AI-driven systems are based on probability and uncertainty, this is why explanation is key to helping users understand how the system works. Once a user has a clear mental models of the system’s capabilities and limits, they can understand how and when to trust it to help accomplish their goals. Clarity, simplicity and trust are inherently linked.

Q: Where have you used cognitive experience design to solve a problem?
A: I have used Cognitive XD hundreds of times. I use it everyday in my role as the head of research and design of Alexa Devices. I have practiced cognitive experience design in reimagining our time and behavior on spaceship earth with the invention of Earth Speaks an initiative designed to help heal our planet. Additionally, I used Cognitive XD in my work at IBM.

Q: Why did you coin the phrase cognitive experience design?
A: In 2014, business, design and engineering leaders were struggling to explain how the discipline of design needed to evolve for a new Ai computing era. While designing software for professionals powered by IBM’s Watson, a cloud-based Ai service, I coined the phrase Cognitive Experience Design (CXD) to give life to our emerging design practice and discipline that was creating machines (e.g. smart cars, speakers, gadgets, hearing aides, farming or industrial equipment) that could learn, reason and interact with humans.

I used the term “cognitive” for 2 reasons. First, smart devices enable humans to offload repetitive tasks and mundane thinking in order to combat the cognitive overload that comes from muti-tasking and integration behaviors. Secondarily, artificial technologies like machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing are built to mimic the way the human brain works. The practical application of cognitive experience design Design employs knowledge of human perception, mental processing, modeling and memory.

In 2015, The emcee of C2 Montreal, introduced me as the mother of cognitive experience design - and it stuck. Forever after, designers across the globe have accepted, used and celebrated it. I continue to be humbled by the notoriety of being a first in the design field to begin building a corpus of knowledge and a practice that will take the profession in to the next 100 years.

Q: Who are the practitioners of cognitive experience design?
A: I believe that any designer can be a practitioner. Expressly, Conversation, Sound & Voice User Interface Designers, Brain interface designers, Internet of Things product designers. Anyone who is willing to incorporate artificial technologies e.g. Machine Learning into their crafting of solutions to human problems.

Q: What is the relationship between cognitive experience design and computational design?
A: Computational design is the application of computational strategies to the design process. While traditional designers traditionally rely on intuition and experience to solve design problems, computational design aims to enhance that process by encoding design decisions using a computer language. Most computational design programs take a computer science view of design, applying both the science and art of computing to design problems, in relation to creation, presentation, analysis, evaluation, interaction or aesthetic expression; in real and imagined applications, both perceived and conceived. Cognitive experience design is the practical application of intelligent and quantum computing technologies to augment a humans capabilities. While they are different they can compliment each other to design for billions of people in real-time, at scale and on demand. The intersection each shares is a change in the practice of design expression from geometry to connected neural logic.

Q: How do you place cognitive experience design into practice?
A: First you must seek to understand the whole human and their problems. Once you have defined the problem with crisp terms, then write a narrative that acts as a North Star and gives or augments your customer with superpowers and abilities (e.g.The Force, Photographic Reflexes or Dimensional Travel). Once you have developed the narrative, define the experience in the form of Frequently Asked Questions. One important pointer is to seek to enhance a user experience throughout the day with superpowers that augment the 5 basic senses or give humans a sixth sense. One of my favorite workshop tools are my superpower playing cards. The superpower playing cards help business leaders connect their ideas to the context of human interface design and artificial intelligence capabilities in a way that empower them to write bold business goals and bolder customer goals which are easily translated into user stories for teams to work through.

Q: Does design thinking and cognitive experience design work together?
A: Yes. The cognitive experience design framework moves enterprises and teams from thinking and documenting on post it notes to design doing with computational tools and agile experiments with data to ensure positive human outcomes.

Q: What are the business benefits of cognitive experience design?
A: First, cognitive experience design paves the way for human engagement at the deepest levels and connects humans to efficient data driven decision making. Cognitive XD scales human expertise to a on demand superpower they can opt-in to. Cognitive XD places intelligence into your products and processes. Cognitive XD drives efficiency and lowers costs. Cognitive XD drives exploration and discovery in new and inventive methods. Lastly, Cognitive XD can lead to market making firsts placing your company or brand in a leadership position with new sources of revenue and data.

Q: Why do we need Cognitive Experience Design now?
A: Over the last decade we have discovered different ways to build exponential growth in middle markets and now that they are dry, we are forced to create innovations that capture the imagination and satisfy the customer’s desire for something original. In the connected era, it is essential that we master the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced daily to position our companies and brands to become butlers, not stalkers, to our customers. As designers and industrialists we must become fluent in the language of data and use it as the currency that drives action, and revenue. I firmly believe that when designers have command of the command line - they will command the world.

There are 1440 minutes in a day, lived at a marathon pace. In order to make a market you have to start by making a moment. Your brand must become the antidote to time-consuming distraction -- it must seduce and engage your customers with individualized experiences that transform time.

Data is the fuel that lets us design brand experiences as living, breathing, organic entities that are in service to your customers, adding value to their everyday lives. Cognitive experience designers understand that data is the new oil, a global, renewable natural resource that we create by the second, and when used with an industrialist’s vision and cognitive experience designers empathy, ethics and imagination it becomes a dynamic tool of differentiation.

Cognitive Experience Design Epilogue

You must bring unique meaning to the cognitive experience design with intent. Design, multiplied by data, powered by cognitive intuition transforms a vision into an enchanting customer moment that unseats the competition with an experience that they will want to repeat, over and over again. In this industrial revolution, becoming a post-digital, industrialist and developing new markets in the cognitive era demands that you become an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist; a designer of cognitive brand experiences. Think cognitive banks, cars and kitchens and cognitive stores, schools and toys that are in service to your customers, and you begin to see how data fuels the world, by design.

It is incumbent upon us to understand that our business problems and the world’s problems are inherently linked. The solutions live within us. This industrial revolution gives us an amazing opportunity to discover those solutions and design innovations that matter for the world.

When it comes to this revolution, the winners and losers will be defined by their ability to design with data and scale wisdom with fairness and precision. Once we understand the power we wield, we can use cognitive experience design to design the moments that keep an aging population on the go. We can design 3D printed, life-saving pieces of anatomy. We can design the teachable moments that are accessible to everyone in the world. We can design economic equality for women. We can design the moments that extend human life. We can design the moments that reverse climate change. And in this way, we can design our future because the flip side of any industrial revolution is opportunity: an opportunity to think, an opportunity to design, and an opportunity to change the world.

So my challenge to you is: With more data, let’s envision the future we want to create. Let’s think BIG. Let’s think NEW. Let’s think NOW! Turn that vision into action and design your place as an industrialist in the cognitive era.