Brains iasummit2010

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DESIGN how understanding our gray matter helps us do better workandrew hinton / @inkblurt / inkblurt.com iasummit 2010 / phoenix az

Recently, I decided I’d get some sugar-free gummi bears to have around the house for when I wanted a snack to take to a movie or something.I looked on Amazon and saw a ﬁve pound bag, and thought -- hey those look delicious! I wanted the Haribo brand which as we all know aresuperior gummis.

The thing is, I was already convinced I wanted them before I went to the site -- and before I read any of the reviews ... which said things like ...“after a few handsful, a couple hours later I started to feel really sick...”>> Not your normal gummy “it will make you run to the bathroom in 20 minutes”>> “Gastrointestinal Armageddon!!!”Did these reviews stop me from eating them? No ... of course not. Because I assumed I could eat them just ﬁne, that these people must’ve eatenhuge lots of them, or had some kind of weird intestinal problems.So, what do you think happened when I got the gummi bears and ate a couple of handfuls?

!!!!!!! What was I thinking?!?Let’s just say I didn’t get much sleep the night after they arrived.Once I could think straight again, I asked myself ...>>what was I thinking? Why did I just assume all those comments had nothing to do with me?And it make me wonder how often, in my work as a designer, I do the same thing -- choosing to move ahead with a decision in spite of the facts Isee around me.

Sometimes I feel a lot like Brian from Family Guy.I love Brian as a character because he’s so human -- especially because he’s a dog.What I mean is that Brian is the most intelligent, sophisticated character in the family, but he’s a complete slave to his nature as a dog. He can’thelp but be dog-like in spite of himself ... even when he tries to rationalize his way out of it.

Video Clip of Brian barking out the window of the car

Video Clip of Brian getting caught eating gum from the trash.

A designer. I seek to understand A user. you... © Bernd Vogel/Corbis Todd Zaki Warfel’s persona description with his Persona DNA chart from http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2008/01/24/personas-are-not-a-document/As designers we’re supposed to seek to understand our users, which is a good thing.But we often forget that we’re part of the equation -- that the user isn’t the only one with behaviors & impulses we need to understand.

A. Designer “I wonder what’s going on in my head when I’m wearing this turtleneck and looking so pensive?” What about understanding ourselves?So, what about understanding ourselves?What happens if we put the microscope on our own behavior & cognition?Where do we start?

metacognition Thinking about how you think. http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/brain-1.jpgI think as designers we need to cultivate a discipline for metacognition --understanding how we think, and building good habits to keep our self-awareness high.

Some basics: learning, thinking, deciding.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chimp_Brain_in_a_jar.jpg http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Vitruvian_man.jpgA common misunderstanding is that the brain and what it does for the human organism is somehow independent of the rest of the body. If youever took Intro to Philosophy in college you likely ran across this question of “what would your experience be if you were a brain in a jar?”>>But the truth is -- you wouldn’t be much of anything. Because the brain grows along with the whole organism, and learns as it grows throughsensory experience. Without sensory experience, the brain couldn’t become much of anything we’d recognize as a brain of a sentient individual.

Our brains need to think with objects.This explains why it’s so important for us to be able to visualize, touch and, and manipulateideas as visible or physical objects.Visual thinking isn’t really an option -- it’s necessary. Some of us have more talent at it thanothers, like athletes are more talented at running and jumping, but most of us can get betterat running and jumping even if we’re not athletes.

PATTERNS PERCEPTIONhttp://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/perception_vase.giffrom Neuro Web Design, S. Weinschenk, 2009; p 3dezignus.com/ free-vector-patterns/As our brains grow through childhood, they experience the sensory world and they build a library of patterns. And those patterns become thestored templates our brain uses for making sense of future experience.Your brain only comprehends what was useful in the past. When I first heard that, it blew my mind.That it’s a library patterns that form not just bits and pieces, but the majority of what we actually cognitively experience as our immediate reality.That is -- Perception is largely made up of these remembered patterns -- our brain doesn’t ‘clear cache’ with every new perception.Our brains abhor uncertainty -- they fill the gaps with prior experience in order to let us feel we have the full picture.-------------http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=perception-and-memory&print=trueHappily for all of us, our visual systems have more to go on than just bare perceptual input. They use heuristics and short cuts, based on the physics and statistics of thenatural world, to make the “best guesses” about the nature of reality. Just as we interpret a two-dimensional drawing as representing a three-dimensional object, we interpretthe two-dimensional visual input of a real scene as indicating a three-dimensional world. Our perceptual system makes this inference automatically, using educated guesses tofill in the gaps and make perception possible.“boundary extension” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-interprets-info-from-shifty-eyes&print=trueBrain only comprehends what was useful in the pastRather, neuroscience research tells us that we only ever see what proved useful to see in the past. Illusions are a simple but powerful example ofthis pointhttp://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/26/lotto.optical.illusions/index.html?eref=rss_tech

“New Brain” “Mid-Brain” “Old Brain” from Neuro Web Design, S. Weinschenk, 2009; p 3The brain is made of layers that evolved over time -- and in some ways, the very structure of the brain shows this evolution structurally from theinside out.>>The oldest part of our brain controls our bodily functions and the most basic instinctive behaviors -- like breathing, heartbeat, and digestion, orpushing us to eat when we’re hungry, or struggle when we can’t breathe. It constantly scans the environment to see if there’s any danger.>> This is sometimes referred to as the “lizard brain”>>The mid-brain is where emotions get processed -- it’s what causes you to impulse buy, or to feel emotions.>> a lot of our deep-seated moral & ethical stuff comes from this part of our brain>>The “new brain” is the cortex area -->>comparatively thin layers that evolved last and are responsible for reﬂection, analysis, reason ...But we have to be careful not to take the model too literally. Science is discovering that these areas of the brain actually depend on each other agreat deal for making sense of the world.In fact, the older parts of the brain have had millions of years longer to evolve -- they’re actually much smarter than we give them credit for.

emotion Reason from Neuro Web Design, S. Weinschenk, 2009; p 3 ACTIONhttp://www.rowva.k12.il.us/Elementary/http://www.sallybernstein.com/food/columns/zonis/Best_Cookie-20.jpgGut feeling vs rational choice -- mostly a false dichotomy.>> The older brain areas use Emotion to communicate with the newer parts -- inﬂuencing the rational analysis to make it tip the scale and actuallymake a decision. Without the emotional signal, the rational brain would almost never be able to decide anything.>> That’s actually what drives most of our action.>> In fact, choices that we think we made rationally turn out to be made emotionally --http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/04/confabulations.phpMuch of what we do, we do out of an impulse from the older brain -- then we rationalize it later.Well, this is a lot of work!>> And yet, through a given day we make lots of decisions -- each time, based on a perceived reality that’s mostly being constructed from priorexperience, and each time our whole brain is buzzing with this activity.>> Each time we make a decision, we use up some of our capacity for decision-making for that given day. Even when we decide stuff that’s noteven that important.>>In one study, giving people a math problem to solve earlier in the day affected their ability to make a solid decision on an unrelated matter lateron.But even if you don’t have to do math, you should be worried, because in another study,>> just deciding whether or not to eat a cookie weakened the decision-making ability later in the day as well.-------http://www.scientiﬁcamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-makinghttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9599441

Amygdala !!!! !!!! !!!! http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/2009/03/erasing_memory_one_neuron_at_a.phpAmygdala -- forms & stores memories of high emotional experience.This of course affects the patterns in your brain -- and therefore your perception.The interplay of these parts of our brain worked pretty well to get us to the point we’re at evolutionarily, helping us survive for millions of years...but for a lot of modern problems turn out to be somewhat incompatible with our brain’s wiring.

Bugs in the wetware, so to speak. Here’s a list of cognitive biases you can see on Wikipedia -- it’s a looooong list. Reading through it can make youfeel a little hopeless about your ability to ever decide anything again.So let’s just look at a couple of them.-------------

Loss Aversion "Once we have committed a lot of time or energy to a cause, it is nearly impossible to convince us that it is unworthy."How many times have you found yourself soldiering on with something that is clearly turning out to be the wrongthing to do?Especially in design situations, we run into this -- we’ve done a lot of work that we don’t want to throw away,even if we know that continuing on will likely mean more expense, more trouble, more work later on.http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/02/loss_aversion.phphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Confirmation Bias “A tendency for people to prefer information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true.”Another particularly pernicious bias is Confirmation Bias.This is rooted in the way our brains perceive ... we see what we’ve seen and understoodbefore, based on prior experience, rather than what’s in front of our faces.Don’t think for a second that you’re immune to this.

http://graphjam.com/2008/04/29/song-chart-memes-reasons-for-rocking-you/One example - We often look to data to make things clear for us -- but it’s very easy to see what we want to see in data as well.>> Biases powerfully shape how we interpret data -- much like whether or not you see a rabbit or a duck in this classic optical puzzle.

So, that’s what’s going on when we’re making decisions... What happens when we’re just trying to be creative?

IMPROVISATIONhttp://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2008/02_26_08.htmlA recent study scanned jazz musicians’ brains while they were playing pre-written music vs improvising completely new music.They found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefontal cortex sort of “stands down” when musicians improvise ... it’s the part ofthe brain that’s linked to planned actions and self-censoring (like carefully deciding what words you might say in a job interview).Basically, a lot of that decision-making apparatus we talked about before has to get out of the way just enough to let your brain free to be creative.----The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activityduring improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area couldlead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2008/02_26_08.htmlhttp://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001679(source for improv brains image)

DAYDREAMING© H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/CorbisDaydreaming is vitally important to creativity.- People who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity.- It’s a relaxed state that allows your brain to make improvisational connections.- but it’s not enough just to daydream -- you have to be just conscious enough to catch the connections consciously without interfering.“While much of the evidence linking daydreaming and creativity remains anecdotal, rooted in the testimony of people like Fry and Einstein,scientists are beginning to find experimental proof of the relationship. In a forthcoming paper, Schoolers lab has shown that people who engagein more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, which require people to make a set of unusual connections."Daydreams involve a more relaxed style of thinking, with people more willing to contemplate ideas that seem silly or far-fetched," says Belton.While such imaginative thoughts arent always practical, they are often the wellspring of creative insights, as Schoolers research shows.”http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/31/daydream_achiever?mode=PF>>The brain’s ‘dark energy’ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-brains-dark-energy-----------The point is that its not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enoughawareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight."In other words, the reason Fry is such a good inventor - he has more than twenty patents to his name, in addition to Post-it notes - isnt simplybecause hes a prolific daydreamer. Its because hes able to pay attention to his daydreams, and to detect those moments when his daydreams leadto a useful idea.http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/31/daydream_achiever/?page=full

Conscious thought “Dark Energy” http://express.howstuffworks.com/wq-iceberg.htm http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-brains-dark-energyWhen our brains are at rest, we’ve known for a very long time that there’s a sort of low-level noise going on, but until recently it wasn’t seen asthat important. But recent research has shown that a great deal is actually happening there.It’s been nicknamed “Dark Energy” ... and it goes on in something called the Default Mode Network.Much of the conscious stuff we do is actually a small percentage of our brain’s activity. The default mode network provides important context toconscious thought, and is never truly just “idling”.

Play is ... Ancient Necessary Socialhttp://www.contrast.ie/blog/thinking-in-patterns/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-serious-need-for-play The science points to the particular importance FREE PLAY - rather than fully structured/rule-oriented games (which are also good but for different things) Ancient - Rats that have had their neocortex removed—a large brain region that is involved in higher-order thinking such as conscious thought and decision making—still engage in normal play, which suggests that play motivation comes from the brain stem, a structure that precedes the evolution of mammals. “This means that the core, genetically-provided circuitry for play is situated in very ancient regions of the brain,” explains Panksepp, who led the experiment in 1994. Necessary - for cognitive function and emotional health - play makes kids smarter and makes adults healthier & better adjusted, less stressed, and more able to solve problems. IMPORTANT: Play deficit can be as detrimental as sleep deficit (to health in general, and creativity in particular) Play p 43 Social - from earliest development, we start socializing through play -- and we explore & learn the world together that way, as children. Studies have shown that interactions between children during play are highly sophisticated -- moreso than what we see when children interact with adults. In fact it’s this social aspect of play that we especially tend to lose, especially in the workplace. Partly because the workplace has so many “new- brain” expectations and rigors, and social conventions.

WE DON’T WORK IN A BUBBLEBut we don’t work in a bubble - we have to deal with other people, and create with them.We should just be aware of how powerful social inﬂuence can be.

Social Context & Conformity Solomon Asch conformity experiment.http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/i-cant-believe-my-eyes-conforming-to.phphttp://www.philipgraves.net/images/group%20discussion.JPGSocial conformity is incredibly powerful as an inﬂuencer. It’s because we evolved to look around us and learn quickly from what others were doing,as a necessary instinct for our survival.Back in the 1950s, the Asch conformity experiment showed that others in a group can convince individuals that the line on the left isn’t the samelength as line C on the right, but actually either A or B.Neuroscience is just helping us understand what’s happening in the brain when we’re in social inﬂuenced situations and what mechanisms in thebrain cause this. Among the culprits are things called Mirror Neurons and Spindle Cells ... but we don’t have time to look at those right now.We have, however, been learning more recently how group dynamics can affect design.

“Change is pain.” “Attention density shapes identity.” “Carrot & stick don’t generally work.” http://www.strategy-business.com/article/06207Change physically hurts.Predisposition based on background to move to particular work roles -- then those roles & social context reinforce the predispositions over time.Ever notice how a department in a company can have its own culture, its own language?(Creatives vs Account people -- MadMen?)(Engineers, MBAs ... even the various disciplines/cultures in UX)

http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/06/why-group-norms-kill-creativity.phpAs designers we keep ﬁnding ourselves in groups that are horrible at the creative process.That’s because our brains evolved to fall in line with social norms as a matter of survival. So it’s a tough thing to overcome.But that doesn’t mean groups are always bad -- all of us have had some collaborative design experiences that worked very well.4. Group norms - following social cues - kills creativityhttp://www.spring.org.uk/2009/06/why-group-norms-kill-creativity.phphttp://www.spring.org.uk/2010/02/conformity-ten-timeless-inﬂuencers.php

“Fear is the mind- killer ...” from the Litany Against Fear - Dune http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/ uploads/2008/12/alien1.jpgFear is an especially powerful emotion ... because it has to do with our very survival.But our brain tends to react to all sorts of things with this blunt instrument -- as if a meeting or a colleague with a differing point of view is athread to our existence.It can shut everything down, especially play, but also self-awareness and the ability to consider other options.It’s rampant in organizations, and drives more of our decisions than we would like to admit.

So what do we do?What to do?Let’s look at the context of the question -- the activity of design itself.

ROOM TO PLAYWe need room to play. And by that I mean both space and time.You need time during which you have permission to make things for exploration rather than production. Fear of doing something wrong is a play-killer. And it takes sleep cycles for the brain to best work through problem solving.And physical space for collaborating, daydreaming, trying stuff out.---------Part of the freedom to alter the natural order of things is the knowledge that order will be restored again afterward. (Play p 97)

Bill Buxton on the shape of designBill Buxton talks about how we tend to think design iterates into a tighter and tighter perimeter, until we’ve winnowed and honed to an ultimate,ideal answer.>>But he says that’s not how design really works -- design is about exploring alternatives and requires constant consideration of alternativepossibilities, lateral ideation.You come up with variety, then winnow down, then expand again, until you explore your way to a solution.But that’s not a very efficient activity, in the eyes of what is still mainstream management thinking by which I mean the thinking style of mostpeople with management roles. So we have to create a permission space within the linear activity of a project.

Project Process Design SpaceThere has to be room for that sort of playful, exploratory thinking to happen.Now, that certainly makes a lot of managers nervous. But I would argue that giving this room for design is non-negotiable.If giving designers this room doesn’t result in great work -- don’t take away the room. Get new designers.It’s our responsibility to be sure that, given the room to do the work, we make the most of it.That means the responsibility is on us to be ever-vigilant of our own biases & cognitive ﬂaws.

A. Designer “I wonder what’s going on in my head when I’m wearing this turtleneck and looking so pensive?” Continual vigilance.Much of what it means to be a successful designer means the ability to think outside of our own assumptions.So before you think I’m letting us as designers off the hook, let me stress that we need to be continually vigilant -- learn to be meta-cognitive, sowe area always keeping an eye on ourselves, making sure we’re not falling prey to our biases.The good news is, we already have some great tools for this...

m Facilitated Ideation m m User Research Rapid Protoyping Scenarios m m m Personas Contextual Inquiry Trust our best methods. m User Research m Peer Review m Metrics & KPIs m m Collaborative Interpretation Heuristic ReviewThey’re called design methods.In many ways, what we’re learning about how our brains behave is giving us validation for existing user-experience design methods.>>Things like user research, personas, scenarios, collaborative analysis -- if we do them effectively, and we don’t skimp or cheat ourselves of theirfull value, they do a decent job of helping us avoid the pitfalls of bias, to help us collaborate effectively while preserving creativity & insight, andkeep us aligned with the reality of our users.

m m m m m m Even in the space & time set aside for design we need methods to help us avoid traps & pitfalls.Even in the space & time we set aside for design, we have to use methods to make sure we’re letting ourselves generate ideas and understandusers, and make the best design decisions.Methods can help us be present to the facts of the design problem in front of us, rather than enmeshed with stuff that can muddy our attention.Let me describe one trap in particular that we tend to fall into ...

THE DESIGNING-FOR- DELIVERABLES TRAP corbis.comIt’s the designing-for-deliverables trap.Let me explain...

Design Space “Project Process” Sketching for exploration, Communication for free-play, improvisation & production, persuasion & shared empathy. self-protection.Important difference between design artifacts and project deliverables ...There’s the artifacts of our design work, which are just sketches for exploring, playing, making mistakes and trying again.A lot of what we should be doing during this time is making sure we’re using good habits and good methods.>> Then there’s the stuff we create as an interface to the world outside of the “design space”.Too often we get caught up focusing on designing our deliverables for our client and our client’s process, and think we’ve done the necessary workof design -- when really we skipped it.We have to just deal with the fact that every design project is three projects in one.

Every project is 3 design challenges in one. 1. Design the conditions for doing the work. 2. Design the product itself. 3. Design for the collaboration with stakeholders.So we’re really doing three design challenges with each project.

If I had to sum it up in one statement...

Don’t be an asshat ... http://riverdaughter.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/head-up-ass.jpg Be metacognitive!Be metacognitive to avoid asshattery.

The End Andrew Hinton @inkblurt www.inkblurt.comtext

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Brains iasummit2010

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Brains iasummit2010 — Document Transcript