There is a critical issue at the core of the discussions about innovation that isn’t being discussed. I hesitate to say that it’s the elephant in the room, but when in India…
This issue is encapsulated in an exchange I had with Gregg Davis during the questions period following his presentation at the “Leadership through Design Summit” in Bangalore just before the end of the year. In reality it was only a question and response, but it’s worth sharing.
Davis presented a talk during the IDEAS section on “Innovation for Business Transformation.” The presentation was titled something like “Brand, Design and The Brain: A New Methodology for Building Design and Brand Attributes Based on Recent Scientific Studies of the Brain.” I grabbed this title from a recent talk he gave at the CONNECTING’07 Congress of Industrial Designers, but it was basically the same thing.
What is interesting about this topic is how cognition studies are being used to inform business and communication practices aimed at better attracting customers. The talk itself was fascinating and full of insight and ideas from cognitive science. Davis presented Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) imaging as a tool to more closely predict how consumers make choices. MRIs “take a picture” of the brain basically by showing where blood flow is most intense. MRIs can even be performed over a time-interval to show how changes in blood flow happen over time. The basic idea is that blood flow increases to parts of the brain that are being used most intensely. So if you are having an emotional response to something, then the amygdala may light up. If you are recognizing metaphors, then the angular gyrus may be involved. If you are involved in reasoning or planning, then the frontal lobe may show a signal (and so on). When Davis and collaborators presented people with “familiar products” they observed that regions associated with comfort lit up. When they showed “unfamiliar products” the regions associated with anxiety lit up.
Here is where it gets really interesting. Davis suggested that one of the purposes of this approach was to do many of the things that artists do. He put it another way by saying that there is an assumption that artists typically “unlock” those regions of the brain associated with emotion that also, incidentally, affect non-rational consumer choice. Given that marketers and business folks are interested in understanding (and in fact controlling) choice, it’s not surprising that they would be interested in those factors and patterns in the brain that affect consumer decision-making.
Okay, let’s assume that artists do indeed capitalize on those “emotional” and “non-rational” regions of the brain (I think it’s reasonable). Why then do we need to expend the vast resources and put people under the enormous imposition of MRI technologies in order to do things that are already possible if you involve artists in the business and design processes? The response I received was great. Davis started by commenting that this was a hugely dangerous question and that it got to some of the issues of the relationship of business and artists. He didn’t go much further than that, and it was fine by me. I could understand why he wouldn’t.
This is the key question. Why do we do things that are technically feasible but ultimately more harmful and manipulative to individuals? Why are big problems approached from a technological perspective rather than the more complicated social one? I understand why this problem exists; artists talk back and make suggestions that businesses do not want to hear. MRI machines just do what they were made to do. While there is some interesting data and observations that can be made, where will the real design innovation come from? Will it come from the more precise matching of people’s preferences to product offerings, or will it come from people who have the ability to predict and enliven design ecologies to respond to the cognitive changes that cause people’s preferences to shift and flux in an ever-changing environment?
