Persuasive design is a popular topic in user experience these days. In fact, our posts on how your coffee mug (amongst other things) is controlling your feelings was one of our most talked about posts of the year.  For those that would like to take a deep dive into the psychology behind it, Psyblog have an 18 part blog series that’s worth checking out.

As you might expect, some are more easily relatable to UX than others (though it’s handy to know that you can help your cause in convincing someone by getting them wired on caffeine and talking into their right ear). Some of the more transferable tips include:

• If you’re trying to convince someone to do something, presenting a balanced argument will help. Repetition does too … so long as it’s in the background and reasonably believable.
• Men generally respond better to email messages than face-to-face; women are the opposite (thanks to gender conditioning).
• Or if you want the tl;dr version, there’s a list for you: 20 Simple Steps to a Persuasive Message.

Full series here. For those that want a more direct link to design, take a look at last year’s UX Mag piece on persuasive design, or some of our posts on persuasion profiles,  images, or  returning.

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Arrow image NC-BY-CC from Three Legged Cat

I know that brands want to figure out how to use social media to do their branding work. And being brands, and generally well-0versed  in the dark arts of marketing and sales, skilled brand professionals know that consumers respond out of psychological interest and not out of material need.

There’s nothing intrinsically loathsome about this — the arrangement is equally familiar to the consumer. Who, in his more lucid moments, believes himself to be playing tricks on the marketers, and to have figured out just exactly how the machine works.

Well then, I’m in a state of chronic nonplussedness when it comes to brand involvement in social media. For it strikes me that brands continue to look for themselves in this medium. A medium full of users — nay, of people who consume shit all day and even night long — and talk about it, too. With their friends.

It’s like brands want to change the channel. Dig that remote up out of the bowels of the corporate sofa and find, all lit up like Christmas in Vegas, the chromed shine of their own brand image shimmering on a screen like a hot desert mirage.

Brands have figured out why people want things. They’ve nailed the imagery, the messaging, even the copy. They know how to mediate desire, how to intensify it, raise it up high and with celebrity pedestal amplitude, work the seductive power of distance and altitude. Brands know why people like what other people like, and how to work this dynamic with Shakespearian precision.

So then why have they not figured out how to go social? What’s holding them back? Why the silly games, the useless rewards, the getting behind the stuff people do on social that’s only “as if” if meant something? A revelation of what’s deep in the brand’s heart and calculating mind — that it doesn’t matter, as long as the numbers come out right. Or fooled, perhaps, by the pitching gearheads whose claim to understand what the user wants is possibly doubly corrupt (for it’s bankrupt too). Shiny person, meet shiny object. Likey likey.

I don’t get it. Why brands would want to get behind the smallest shit that people do online, the little itty-bitty clicks of point-less-this and double-plus-ungood save-and-share-and-like… Because all that counts is what they can count? Why diminish brand value and fork brand equity by scrunching it into little votes and likes and points and badges and other diminutive things because people do them just because they’re in the habit of doing them. Why? Because that’s the best they can get? If, then, because that’s the best we’ve been offered?

It works, this social. It works for high brow purposes and just as equally for the trivial silly and the redundant banal. It works because it’s of and by and for the people who use it. Sell into the small acts, the ones you can count, and you get small branding. Yes it’s distributed, yes everyone gets it, yes it’s the hot thing on mobile and web and pad. But pack a brand into bite-sized activities and you’re going to get bite-sized brand messaging. Sound bytes the value out of brand equity.

Small acts and gestures, the lowest common denominators in a medium whose real value is its stretch and span — relationships on a thread, no distance, spanning time. Think small and get small. Acts, you can see. Just look. Activity, takes vision. Where is it then? Where, the new narratives? Stories we can put ourselves in. Forms of expression shared with friends and rich with meaning that grows. History, past, archives, memories. Or future, hopes, plans, promises. Where, brand people, are we the people? What we care about and find interesting. Not profit motive — real motive.

I’d like to know. Companies have responsibilities on this planet. The people are not opposed. Such a shame, this business underwhelming.

The Surgeon General of the United States says that “youth violence is an ongoing, startlingly pervasive problem.” Despite the fact that “the majority of aggravated assaults, robberies and rapes are never reported to the police,” one out of every 3,000 youths aged 10-17 are arrested for serious violent crimes – homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault – each year. While the predictive risk factors include family aspects we might all expect – low socioeconomic status, poor parent-child relations, broken home – many of the individual risk factors apply only to males and the most predictive risk factor of all in this troubling laundry list is simply “being male”.

By now you are surely wondering, “Um, isn’t this supposed to be an interaction design publication?” Yes, of course, it is. But the domain relevant to digital products that is most important, least understood, and represents the greatest opportunity for remarkable growth and advance is the degree to which we understand our users.

To be sure, a focus on users is nothing new. In computing devices it dates back at least to the long-standing Scandinavian tradition of cooperative design, later applied to IT artifacts around 1970. There is an entire subculture in the digital design community built around the idea of user-centered design. Memes about narrative, storytelling and ethnography punctuated the 2000s, and we generally believe we have refined, evolved framing and methods for considering users as part of the product development equation.

Hardly.

Divining Human Understanding

Going back to my opening about the epidemic of violent crime in young males, how well do we understand that problem? It is certainly recognized as a problem, by the highest governmental authorities. A litany of risk factors and predictive models exist, so people more likely to participate in violent crime can be identified by parents and teachers and kept track of as they wind their way through adolescence and young adulthood. Yet, as a society, we dismiss such perpetrators as criminals, animals, evil and inherently bad. We do this despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that their gender – a coin toss at birth – and socio-familial situation are the drivers behind their destructive behaviour.

Let’s break those two things down: why gender? To better understand that we need to learn a little about endocrinology, the field of medicine focused on our hormones. Androgen is the term for hormones that stimulate and control the development and maintenance male characteristics, including those in the Surgeon General’s laundry list of risk factors. There is a long history of castration in human cultures all around the world, as even before the science behind it was understood, people learned that men without testes were far less aggressive. Enlightenment era heroThomas Jefferson even created legislation in the state of Virginia after the Declaration of Independence was signed making castration the punishment of choice for a handful of crimes. The amount of testosterone production varies widely from one man to another, and indeed those who are – from the standpoint of modern civilization – cursed with very high levels of testosterone are far more likely to prove unable to stay within the behavioural bounds dictated by our society.

Another critical discipline for understanding behavioural differences by gender is neuroscience. Like most of the United States sick care system, the preponderance of investment in and attention to neuroscience has to do with the work of neurologists, curing brain tumors and other diseases. But it is also the field that best understands from a mechanical perspective how and why we function. Male aggression is actually one of the more complex dynamics within the brain, involving all of the amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, septal nuclei and periaqueductal grey of the midbrain. While the complexity of each of these disparate brain factors’ impact on male aggressiveness is beyond the bounds of this article, needless to say there is a startling amount of science and real understanding into mapping observable brain structure, condition and operation to many critical human behaviours, male aggressiveness that leads to violent crime being only one.

Now, let’s consider the other main group of predictive risk factors for violent behaviour, socio-familial background. As just one example, MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan have done wonderful work on the psychology of why people can’t escape poverty. In a nutshell, they illustrated that since buying small, everyday comforts is far more costly to the poor than to the wealthy – representing a substantially larger proportion of their net worth – that poverty limits free will and in the process has a resultant drain on one’s overall willpower. Needing to make tough decisions and sacrifices much more frequently than their more affluent neighbours makes it far more likely that the poor will have willpower issues in other contexts. Such as, say, testosterone-fueled moments that spiral out of control. These are economists, studying issues of psychology and sociology, deconstructing behaviour in remarkably insightful ways.

While socio-economic status is only one vector of the socio-familial milieu, the example highlights the ample research and science which illuminates the conditions that finally culminate in serious violent crime. And it underscores an important point: while some criminals might be “bad” in some objective way, many of these criminals are simply very unfortunate people who are victims similar to those they’ve victimized: they happened to be born male, they happened to have high testosterone levels, they happened to be born into poor or broken families. Armed with this knowledge, surely we as a society can do better?

Truly Understanding Users

I’ve chosen the issue of serious violent crime in young males as my example because it nicely applies to all of the five sciences that should be essential learning to anyone serious about understanding users: endocrinology, neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology. In each of these, crucial pieces of the human behavioural puzzle are provided:

• Endocrinology: the study of the endocrine system which secretes hormones into the bloodstream and regulates the body;
• Neuroscience: the study of the central nervous system which uses neurons to coordinate our actions;
• Economics: the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services – crucial to the understanding of individuals in a fiercely capitalistic, free market society;
• Psychology: the study of people and groups in order to best understand them;
• Sociology, the study of a society in order to best understand that society and its inhabitants.

Needless to say that the role of some of the more social sciences on this list – particularly psychology – are already seen as having a role in successful user studies and understanding. However, the preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way. The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.

As it is a fairly straightforward matter to untangle the objective dynamics behind serious violent crimes in young males using these approaches, imagine the impact you can have on your product, service, company, market or even society if you have the vision, rigor and discipline to start truly unpeeling that most complex and layered of onions, ourselves.

Interaction 12

Dirk Knemeyer will be one of the presenters at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX.

Others Who Have Followed A Similar Path

It is difficult to think of the connection between psychology and UX without thinking of Donald Norman, as he is the person who set the stage for incorporating aspects of Cognitive Psychology within Interaction Design, one area of User Experience.

Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include mental models, mapping, interface metaphors, and affordances. Many of these are laid out in Donald Norman’s influential book The Design of Everyday Things.

from Wikipedia

Susan Weischenk, “The Brain Lady” also comes from a background in psychology. She has written books, including Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, online articles such as “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” and has her own blog “What Makes Them Click” where she applies psychology to understanding people for better design.

What I Did

So, how exactly does Psychology relate to User Experience in the practical sense and why did I make the transition from helping people in one context to designing for them in the other? After earning my Masters Degree from Columbia University, Teachers College, I left New York City and moved back to Philadelphia where I worked briefly with juvenile delinquent girls, between the ages of 9 and 13 years old, living in a group home.  With a great mentor and supervisor, I learned how to provide the specific kind of counseling that these girls needed. Lurking beneath the “tough” girls who often threatened others with violence were artists, poets, and overall creative souls. The tough girl behavior was a defense mechanism and how they survived in their world. The girls learned to trust me and share their more tender side. Skills that I learned and started becoming comfortable with during my training in graduate school such as active listening, observation, empathy, and collaboration, I focused on and improved in this setting as well as in my next job. (For more on what dealing with delinquents can teach you about UX, see Brett Lutchman’s post on that very experience). My other job, and one I held for many years, was as an outpatient case manager and clinician in the Drucker Brain Injury Center’s Community Re-Entry Program at MossRehab Hospital. I managed care, therapies and provided counseling. These clients had transitioned from an inpatient stay and were ready to return to career, school, or activity pattern based on their prognosis and level of injury. Frequent collaborative meetings were held to discuss treatment plans and make changes as necessary. On a daily basis, I observed people in various settings, including their own natural home and work environments, to better understand what they were experiencing and their specific difficulties to develop a plan that would help improve their lives. These are the same approaches I bring to my work as a UX designer.

How I Moved Into UX

After the birth of my first child, I needed to find a career that offered more flexibility; one that did not take as much emotional energy and allowed me to work part-time. Working with a brain injured population was one of the most rewarding, yet difficult experiences I have ever had in my life, so the decision to leave did not come easily. I worked with incredibly smart, talented people from different disciplines, within a collaborative environment, much like the team I currently work with as a UX Designer. As I searched options, I decided that web design could be a fun and flexible career. I began taking classes at Penn State Abington for website design.I learned C++, Javascript, Flash, HTML, User Interface design, and usability (among other classes). Once I finished that program, I began to design and develop websites for small businesses. I learned more about user experience, an area related to what I was doing with web design, but involving what I had learned and practiced in the field of psychology. I realized that the skills I had used in my “other life” in Psychology were so aligned with what is practiced in UX that it was a very natural fit.

What I Brought With Me to UX

Ability to understand people’s motivations

Psychology is the study of people’s behavior. Behind that behavior are motivations why someone is doing what they are doing. UX is very similar. We need to understand the “why’s” to design for the behaviors we are trying to elicit, all while making the user feel good about their experience so that they repeat these behaviors.

Research

To understand behaviors that help make our product useful to our clients and their users, we need to conduct research. My background conducting research almost daily in graduate school helped me ease into this part of user experience.

Problem Solving

There is never just one way to solve a problem. Every problem has multiple solutions. Being able to think quickly and offer useful solutions to accommodate multiple variations and desires of the client while satisfying their users is a skill overlapping psychology and  UX. I had a brain injured client who revealed that following her brain injury, her partner began to abuse her. Helping her to develop a variety of options, quickly was important. While the solutions I am expected to come up with in UX are not life-threatening, they can help improve the interactions with a client’s product.

Listening

This skill is one of the most important to learn in life, and oh, so hard for many of us. To make a proper psychological assessment, use of active listening skills helps gain insight into someone’s motivations. Graduate programs in psychology provide a great deal of training and practice in the use of active listening, indicating the level of importance it brings to assessments and therapy. So too, in UX, listening and assessing what our users are saying (or not saying) is one of the most important skills used to assess their behaviors and motivations for performing certain actions.

Observation

As with listening, being able to observe behavior provides such important clues into what a person’s motivations are. Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to. The only way to do this is to observe and allow the natural process to occur without our influence confounding the results. Evaluations of incoming brain injured clients allowed me to practice this, as it was solely based on observation. The plan of action that needed to be taken became clear, just by watching someone engage in daily activities, such as trying (and often failing) to cook from a written recipe.

Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to.

Written and oral communication skills

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is another skill where there is overlap between Psychology and User Experience. This enables an atmosphere of trust and respect to be created which helps get approval from clients concerning design recommendations that are made. The main difference between the two is in the mode of communication. Where I mostly wrote daily notes and reports in Psychology, I now design wireframes with annotations, prototypes, sketches, personas, and storyboarding to explain my process and thinking.

Empathy

Whether in a therapy session or designing for our users, identifying with them through empathy only makes us better at what we do by stepping outside our mindset and into that of another. Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help. By demonstrating empathy, I gained a wealth of information that improved the therapeutic process. This naturally translates to UX as showing we care about how the user interacts with our products helps to improve how they interact with our products.

Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help.

Collaboration

Probably one of the most enjoyable aspects has been the collaborative process, both on a transdisciplinary team of therapists and working as the user experience designer on a team with designers, developers, product managers and marketers. There is nothing like many individuals expressing themselves (much like a really large, loud family) in the design process to make it fun while coming up with the best solutions for the users.

Iteration

Any time there is a plan of action, there needs to be the ability to change course when things are not working as planned. This is true both in a therapeutic setting as well as when designing. Life is ever changing, as should our work.

Looking to Make the Move?

With an open mind and a great deal of willingness to learn new skills and improve existing ones, transitioning from Psychology to UX can be smooth. My best advice is to network, find a mentor, participate in local groups, attend conferences and read. No matter what discipline you may be coming from, think about the tasks you performed in a generalized way and how they may transition to the field of UX. —- Brain image CC-by-NC from labguest

Paper prototyping, usability testing, and a cute kid. What’s not to like here? (/via @leanuxmachine)

Duration: just under 8 minutes

Gamification is on the rise of late, but Sebastian Deterding suggests that many of the current implementations are rather superficial, and that we have a way to before we really get it right.

Duration: 50 minutes

Here’s a wonderful talk about how our unconscious mind controls our online behavior, from Susan Weinschenk of HFI. (From UX Lisbon 2010.)

Duration: 36 minutes

Trust is an important aspect in day-to-day life. Most of our personal relationships are build on it and our best relationships highly depend on it. In fact: trust makes us put extra effort into our relationships. So why don’t we apply it more in the design of our services?
You don’t see it that often anymore: fruit or vegetables placed alongside a country road, unguarded. All you have to do is take the amount you want and leave money behind in a box. This system has been around for centuries and is an easy way for farmers to earn some extra money. It is completely build on trust. And the fact that the owner puts trust in me puts a smile on my face and makes me (and others) honor that trust.

I came across an even more special story about a shop owner in a small town (I can’t remember where I found the story). Whenever he left the shop during the day he didn’t close down. Instead he put a sign on the counter asking people to leave the money they owe. Nobody ever damaged the trust the owner gave them. Why? Because trust is a special thing.

What is trust?

There are many different interpretations of trust, but this is one I can agree on. Trust is:

• the willingness of one party (trustor) to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (trustee);
• reasonable expectation (confidence) of the trustor that the trustee will behave in a way beneficial to the trustor;
• risk of harm to the trustor if the trustee will not behave accordingly; and
• the absence of trustor’s enforcement or control over actions performed by the trustee.

Source: Wikipedia

But what does it give us back? According to the above description trust is a one-way thing: the trustor gives it to somebody else and becomes vulnerable… This feels very unbalanced. If we would open up all the stores in a city and let people put money on the counter we’d be pretty certain that within days the stores will be empty and the owners a lot poorer. A healthy relationship is well balanced and goes two ways: both parties are trustor and trustee. Putting trust in somebody isn’t an anonymous process, but only works when there is a clear relationship between two parties. As the trustor you must make it very clear that you are willing to put trust in somebody and that you are making yourself vulnerable in the process, but that when people honor that trust you are giving them something in return that’s worth their effort.

Design for a balanced trust

One of the best examples in this is Zappos.com, the online shoes and clothing store that offers free shipping both ways and has a 365 days no questions asked return policy. What they have to offer you is a huge collection of products that you can try out at home for free. All that they ask in return is that you don’t abuse their trust and that when you send something back you will return it undamaged. As you can see there is a clear balance between the trustor and trustee, it’s a win-win situation.

Another good example is the release of Radiohead’s 2007 album ‘In Rainbows’. When they released it they didn’t set a price, but instead asked their audience to pay whatever they wanted to pay for the album. They put trust in the honesty of the audience that if they liked the music they would pay a normal price for it. A lot of people and companies thought that Radiohead was crazy and would only lose money, but it paid off: ‘In Rainbows’ is Radiohead’s best selling album.

Turn it around

Recently the NY Times announced their paywall as a means of earning money from their users. This caused a lot of heated discussions. The main counter argument is the fact that everything has been free for ages and must suddenly cost money when you read too many articles. People acknowledge that the quality of the articles is worth money, but at the same time they feel mistreated and are finding new ways of getting free access. In my mind something is wrong with the trust balance: people do claim that they value the articles, but they hate the concept of the paywall. I would say that this is because people have the feeling that the NY Times uses force over trust. If they would turn things around and would ask for a reward (micro-payments) each time you liked an article they would have happier users and earn more in the process. The mistake is that they now force the masses that haven’t got a relationship with the NY Times (but only want cheap news) instead of building on the trust relationship they can have with the core of their users.

So, what now?

When you look at the current examples you immediately notice that these are both big players. You’ll probably think “They can afford to trust people and lose something if it fails, but most companies don’t have this luxury.” I don’t agree with this statement and believe that companies of all sizes can apply trust to build up a better relationship. All around me I see that trust is a wonderful thing when balanced. People don’t give it that easily, but when they do it’s important to cherish it with everything you’ve got.

Trust me on this.

What are your experiences on this topic? Do you know of any companies that use trust in their relationship? How would you design it into a service? I am really curious what your thoughts are on this subject.

Here’s another video from a 1994 CD-ROM of several of Don Norman’s books, together with supporting video clips featuring the author (and now recovered and posted on interaction-design.org by Mads Soegaard).

Duration: just over two minutes

Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance. It may seem incredible to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions. How could these static, boring objects change the way you feel and act towards others? Well, fortunately there is a wealth of new research to back up these bizarre claims. While uncovering this research, I couldn’t help but think about how the design of everything from consumer products to education, could be transformed by the notion of embodied cognition. And so I dove into the ever-overlapping worlds of design and cognitive science once more, this time to unearth more about what it could mean to design with embodied cognition in mind, at the very least subconsciously.

The Research

Yale University’s John Bargh is among a small but international group leading the charge to understand embodied cognition and its behavioral priming capabilities. Bargh recently co-authored a paperfor the journal Science documenting the dramatic power of the sense of touch, when paired with the brain’s abilities to affect how the world is viewed. Bargh’s team found over a series of two studies that subjects:

• who read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to characterize it as adversarial if they had first handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces, compared to smooth ones.
• sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were less willing to compromise in price negotiations than people who sat in soft, comfortable chairs.
• judge other people to be more generous and caring after they had briefly held a warm cup of coffee, rather than a cold drink.
• holding a heavy clipboard while interviewing job applicants took their work more seriously than their interviewing counterparts holding light clipboards.

Considering that none of the subjects in any of the experiments were told they would be tested on how they react to their physical environment, it’s all the more amazing that while their conscious focus was on a very specific task, their subconscious was deciding how they should feel towards literally everything around them, based on literally everything they were interacting with at a given moment, including the jigsaw puzzle pieces, the chairs, the cup of coffee, and the clipboards. An independent Dutch study titled “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” dives even deeper into the notion of physical characteristics affecting abstract psychological concepts. Focusing on one concept, weight, the study found that people deal with the abstract concept of weight in an analogue way to how they deal with the physical characteristic of weight; they invest more effort. The study showed that weight, the abstract conceptleads to:

• greater elaboration of thought
• greater polarization between judgments of strong versus weak arguments
• greater confidence in one’s opinion

while weight, the physical characteristic, as in physical objects:

• require higher energetic costs to move or pick up
• have a greater impact on people’s bodies
• require more effort, in terms of physical strength and cognitive planning
• cause people carrying weight to judge distances to be greater and hills to be steeper (than those who do not carry the weight or who carry less weight)

A Linguistic Perspective

As groundbreaking (and awesome!) as this research is, it’s worth providing a bit of background in similar thinking, albeit purely linguistic as opposed to physical. In 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a seminal work that suggests that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding of the world around us:

“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.”

Lakoff and Johnson proposed a new recognition of how profoundly metaphors not only shape our view of life in the present but set up the expectations that determine what life well be for us in the future. While they may have limited their research to the notions of using physical embodiments as metaphorical communication tools, Lackoff and Johnson’s link to current day embodied cognition research is undeniable. In fact, the Dutch study notes that weight is a metaphor for importance in many languages, including English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese, and that people:

• ‘weigh’ the value of different options before making a decision
• ‘add weight’ to place emphasis on important ideas
• judge opinions as ‘carrying weight’ if the source is considered knowledgeable or influential

Lakoff and Johnson discovered that we use embodied metaphors, such as weight, to tie abstract concepts and emotions to physical objects and environments, they just didn’t realize that these very same physical objects and environments are actually driving human perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Lawrence Williams, who helped design the warm coffee cup experiment with John Bargh says “it’s no coincidence that we use the same word — warmth — to describe both a physical and an emotional experience. Somewhere in the brain, those two sensations are linked,” he says. Williams and the Dutch study both allude to the idea that embodied cognition could be developed early on in life – either starting in the womb (where the child would find love, comfort, and physical warmth), or at least in early childhood development.

A McLuhan Perspective

The notion of a designed thing performing a kind of hypnosis on its user would be nothing new to Marshall McLuhan, writer of the ever poignant if too often quoted “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Author of the 1964 ground-breaking manifesto, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan was a purveyor of radical media theory such as the subliminal effects of what he refers to as “the medium”. Advocating that by by too narrowly focusing on the content, we are blinded to the actual character of “the medium” including its psychic and social effects. Bringing this into the realm of designing with embodied cognition in mind, take the electric light bulb as a classically referenced example. Upon initial consideration, the light bulb might be thought of as a product as opposed to a medium, however McLuhan would propose that the light bulb provides light, which greatly affects the perceptions and emotions of the people for whom the light bulb provides the light. Therefore, McLuhan gives us a new lens through which to look at designed products and interactions, not as cold, static things that we act onto, but as active participants in our perceptual and emotional world.

An Anatomical Perspective

There is no denying the volatility of McLuhan’s theories, but some neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers, emblazoned with the new research on embodied cognition, are giving him a run for his bold money. These thought leaders claim that “human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body.” If we didn’t walk with two legs, grasp with opposable thumbs, or communicate with modern language, they argue, we would understand these concepts in completely different ways. Put simply, the experience of being human, of having a body, specifically our own body, is intimately paired with our intelligence. And since the experience of having a body is inherently tied to the objects and environmental factors the body uses to interact with the world, I would assert that the current suite of things and interactions available to people is really what frames the current state of human thinking.

Montessori Spindle Box — combining abstract concepts with embodied ones

Embodying Cognition

I think what makes embodied cognition so fascinating is how it deals with social responses to environmental factors. The fact that those people holding warm coffee cups perceived other people to be more generous and caring, and those people sitting in soft chairs were more willing to compromise makes me think three very interesting thoughts: that we never think in a vacuum, that we never, ever, stop thinking, and that designers, some of whom may have considered metaphor as a tool to deliver an experience that users can relate to another positive experience, now have so much more to consider when designing. As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you. Industrial and interaction designers are perhaps more aware than most, of how many unpleasant objects exist in the world, waiting to be held or touched, poised to take over our emotions and make us judge people. Granted, in order to keep costs down and ensure that the masses can afford to buy new things, high design and quality materials are often overlooked or kicked by the wayside. But high design is not what we’re talking about here. A warm coffee mug is not better designed than a cold one; same goes for the heavier clipboard – the opposite may be true in that case, in fact. So how can the design process be informed by the notion of embodied cognition? Is it possible to design better things through a deep understanding of the human mind’s disposition for connecting abstract emotional concepts with concrete physical things? For starters, we know that the sense of touch is an essential aspect of being human – physical concepts such as roughness, hardness, warmth, and weight being amongst the first that infants develop. And if we cross reference that with the design process, which often deals with materials selection, we can start to imagine how designers could use embodied cognition as a tool, even helping young children and adults develop abstract concepts about people and relationships. At the very least, I think it’s worth experimenting to see if designing products and interactions for specific embodied cognition applications can work. Wouldn’t it be cool if, while designing a new thing, we could test for embodied cognition affects in potential users? Want to know if your new laptop inspires greater confidence (with the opposite sex, let’s say) in potential owners? Slip it into one of John Bargh’s studies, give half the test group your new computer and the other half the competition’s machine, have them chat online with a blind date and collect data. Imagine what you could learn about users’ reactions to the physical characteristics of the laptop – the feeling of the keyboard, the weight of the metal body, the glossiness of the screen, the auditory feedback when you click. Testing for these things using embodied cognition experiments could become a new product development research standard. But what if using embodied cognition as a tool in the design process could extend beyond testing for emotional and behavioral responses to new products and services? What if designers could create interactions and products that enhance the ability to learn and memorize? Well, it turns out this may be possible. New embodied cognition research, aimed at identifying the value of physicality in education revealed that:

• children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking.
• stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving.
• subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

Imagine using embodied cognition principles to transform education, shifting the focus from static reading, writing, and reciting to movement and simulation. Imagine if rehabilitative medicine specialists could use their understanding of their patients’ embodied cognitive abilities to help them recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. This research proves that designers can use a knowledge of embodied cognition to re-investigate and invent new, more successful physical tools and interactions for a variety of applications. Designers could perhaps think beyond traditional ergonomics in the sense that we design things that fit the human form, that feel good to hold, to consider “cognitive ergonomics”, designing things that fit the human mind, that feel good to think about, or that make us think “nice” thoughts. Armed with a greater understanding for human inclination to embody emotion with physical metaphor and the ability of physical things to affect human perception and emotion, designers could take on the challenge of cognitive ergonomics. To figure out how to design for the mind, not just the body. After all, as Bargh points out, “The old concepts of mind-body dualism are turning out not to be true at all”. Altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors. Our brains are intrinsically linked to our bodies and the relationship is an organic one. We think with our bodies and our brains. So let’s design things that embrace that link, that feel good to think about, that take the cognitive rough edges off, hone them down, and smooth them out. Let’s redesign our physical world with embodied cognition in mind.

Additional References:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy NPR: Study Links Warm Hands and Warm Heart Boston Globe’s Report on Embodied Learning Touch and Gender Stereotypes (Psych Central) —— Coffee image CC by cogdog, Montessori Spindle Box CC  by 54mama,