KnowledgeWeave

[Notes from Andrew's IA Summit presentation on Friday, April 9, 2010]

Genesis of the presentation: I kept hearing all this cool stuff about brain science and thinking about the implications of it for design.

Anecdote: I got some sugar-free gummy bears recently.  Ordered them from Amazon, then realized the customer comments said they would “make you feel really sick.”  “Gastrointestinal Armageddon,” one comment was titled (!).

He ate them. “Let’s just say, I didn’t get much sleep that night…. What the hell was I thinking??”

I do stuff all the time that get me thinking, “why the hell did I do that?”  And I realized, I’m not as rational as I think I am.

I’m like Brian of the Family Man: he’s a complete slave to his nature as a dog. [Shows hilarious videos.]

That’s what I love about Brian: he’s so human.

As designers, we often forget that we are part of the equation.  What about understanding ourselves? This presentation is really about metacognition: Thinking about how you think. It’s about self-awareness.

Some basics: learning, thinking, deciding.

- This is a brain in a jar, as though it’s somehow independent from the rest of the body.

- The brain only can do what it does b/c it grew in an organism that has sensory experience.

- As the brain grows along with the whole organism, it grows through sensory experience.

- Our brains really do need to think with objects.

As our brains grow through childhood, they grow a library of patterns.  I.e., your brain only comprehends what was easily comprehensible in the past. What you’re experiencing right now is really just based on a sliver of information that your brain can process.

So perception is largely made up of remembered patterns; your brain doesn’t “clear cache.”

The brain is made of layers that evolved over time; the structure of the brain reflects that evolution. At the core is the “old brain” or “lizard brain.” The mid-brain is where emotions get processed. (I stole these from a book called Neuro Web Design.)  [William Shatner interlude!] The new brain is basically the really rational side; it weighs all the options.

Don’t take this model too literally, though; science says the different parts are actually inter-dependent on each other.  The older parts of the brain use emotion to communicate with the newer part of the brain. This is actually what drives most of our actions. Without this, our rational brain would just dither; we’d have analysis paralysis all the time.

We make tons of decisions every day because our emotional brain tells us, “Just fuck it – do that!” If you think you’re immune to this, you’re wrong.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging can tell in real-time what’s really going on in the brain.

We’re always making decisions; we do it all day long.  It’s sort of like a battery that runs down during the day; our decisions get worse the later in the day we get.

Another part of the brain: the amygdala. It forms & stores memories as a high (?) intellectual experience. “The world smelt, felt and sounded like this when the tiger tried to kill me.”

Wikipedia list of “cognitive biases”: check it out if you want to feel like “I’ll never be able to make a sound decision ever in my life.”  For example:

- Loss aversion (“you just can’t let go”)

- Confirmation bias (“this is particularly pernicious in design”) – where our judgments are based on prior experience rather than on what’s right in front of us.

Biases powerfully affect how we interpret data [as designers].

So what happens when you’re being created?  A recent study scanned musicians’ brain when they are planning from musical notation vs. improvising.  During the latter, the decision-making apparatus of the brain sort of steps out of the way.

People who indulge in daydreaming are better at creative tasks and improvising.

You have to “pay just enough attention without screwing it all up.”

The “Default Mode Network” is the activity that goes on beyond conscious thought; it manifests as “dark energy.”   Free (unstructured) is really important for unleashing that. Play is ancient; it’s pre-mammalian.  Play is necessary for cognitive health.  A play deficient can be as detrimental as a sleep deficit.

Play is also social; our social interactions are something we’re always playing with. It’s this social aspect of play that we especially tend to lose in the workplace.  We feel like we always have to be “on path” at work.  But it finds a non-official way to get in there, in the hallway or around the water cooler, etc.

We don’t work in a bubble.  Social conformity is really powerful as an influencer. When you’re under stress, you immediately fall under conformity’s sway.

But in our job, when that happens, you make CRAP.

Change is painful; change physically hurts; we’re uncomfortable when we’re forced to move out of our groove. Trying to change that is hard.

Attention density shapes identity: certain types of personalities gravitate toward the same professions; being in the profession reinforces that sense of identity. “We cluster and we dig in.”

What works for changing that is being patient, taking time.

Group norms kill creativity.  Fear is the mind-killer [image of the monster from Alien].  Now, we encounter stuff that isn’t going to kill us, but our brains respond as if it might.  Your heart palpitates, you’re going sweaty… and now you’re unable to think of other options, to be creative.  You can only retreat into what the older parts of your brain know.

That’s why we act a little stupid sometimes: because we’re afraid.

So what do we do?

You either get into another line of work, or you figure out how to make ROOM TO PLAY. You need both space and time to play in; fear of doing something wrong is a play-killer.

If you want to be creative, your brain really needs time to sleep.  You also need some time to let that “dark energy” do its work.

Bill Buxton on the shape of design: it’s not a spiral of iteration; it’s more like a constant exploration of alternatives.

Mainstream management culture thinks this is wasteful and inefficient.  But design needs room to be inefficient and try out new things. That makes a lot of managers nervous.

But I would argue that getting that space for design is non-negotiable.  But also, that responsibility is up to us, and if they give us the room, we HAVE to do good work.

To be a good designer, we need to think outside our own assumptions.  We need to learn to be meta-cognitive.  Luckily, we already have great tools for this. Our design methods are what we need for this.

Example: how to avoid “the designing-for-deliverables trap.”  These things that we work with (artifacts) are important, but those artifacts are temporary, and only good for allowing us to improvise and evolve our designs: “that’s what those things are for.”

When we collide with the “project process,” that stuff is for production. The problem is, we get so caught up in creating that stuff (the deliverables) that we don’t do the more important stuff (exploration, free-play, improvisation).

The reality is that every design project is 3 design challenges in one:

1. Design the conditions for doing the work (designing for yourself and your team: you’re picking the right methods, tools and space for it).

2. Design the product itself.

3. Design the interface for collaborating with stakeholders.

I really think this distinction can help us.

To sum up: “Be metacognitive… so you’re not an asshat.”

Our a brains are a tool, and we have to learn how to use it right.

Q & A:

Joe: Does this mean that devotion to best practices is creativity-killing?

A: We need methods. You need ways to make your brain be creative.  But you can’t sleep-walk through those best practices. You can’t just use them to “fart out” the solution. A persona is just me understanding the person who is using something; that’s all it is – it’s just a manifestation of an understanding.

Q: What’s the role of empathy in this? How does it tie in with the emotional brain.

A: The key insights of the user-centered design movement was this focus on, “Hey, we’re missing out on having empathy for the people that we’re making this stuff for.  If we do that, they’re going to buy our stuff.”  But we’re trained to do all of the documentation about empathy, rather than to be empathetic.  That’s completely missing the frigging point.  But you also need empathy toward the people you’re working for; we can’t just say to business people or IT people, “you’re just a philistine.” And we might learn stuff – I’ve learned things from business people!

Q: Dave Fiorito: I’ve just recently discovered “mirrored neurons”; they only work when you’re in contact with another person.  The whole thing about empathy is that contact.

A: It’s like, somebody might try to describe the Grand Canyon to you, but you don’t know what it’s like until you’re standing there. And then you go, “Ohhh!”