Design, self-assessing, and AI

Based on the headline to this post, The Future of Design? Using AI to Enhance Human Cognition and Creativity, I did not expect EEGs and virtual reality headsets. You should go read it before I spoil anything more than I have already.

What drew me in initially (before the turn in the second act) was the clear articulation of the role of metacognition for designers—thinking about our own thought process:

Metacognitive monitoring specifically involves assessing one's own knowledge, thoughts, and progress on a task.

That’s a much more science-y sounding way of describing what I find myself coaching designers about fairly often. This covers a theme that I often boil down to catchphrase-like idioms—“fall in love with a problem, not a solution,” or “don’t get lost in the pixels,” etc.

The general theme here is to deliberately step back and evaluate how well a solution is working to solve the given problem. And as stated above, assess our own knowledge, thoughts, and progress on a task—that last bit may be the hardest to be honest with ourselves about.

At our worst, designers do some initial divergent thinking, pick a direction, and then start designing the solution—while in parallel building the case for why this direction is correct and great. This is necessary, but also a trap. Solidifying the case for the solution will help communicate it to others (being your own internal product marketer). But beware: it can also cut off the individual’s ability to be properly critical about the solution—which is necessary to make it better.

Oftentimes, the designer spends a good bit of time or effort nailing down a solution, while also building the case to defend it. This can lead to those meetings that we’ve all experienced where feedback is not received productively because we defend our approach, our work, our baby. We dig in our heels.

This leads to the emotional aspect of the article and the study that it centers on. What stood out to me, as a parent of two young boys, was the focus on emotional regulation. I’m far from a paragon of emotional regulation, but it’s often top of mind in my parenting approach—for both myself and my kids. (It’s a process, right?)

An important part of the metacognitive monitoring process is monitoring your emotional reactions to design ideas and options. Emotions give us clues that can indicate levels of confidence, inspiration, and subjective uncertainty (Taura & Nagai, 2017). Monitoring emotions accurately during design, however, can be challenging.

I’ve been doing this metacognitive monitoring more proactively for a lot longer as a professional and a designer than as a parent. I believe this is a strong trait for myself and probably for most seasoned designers—self-assessing, self-editing, self-evaluating. This article is helpful for me to articulate these concepts more clearly as I work to make my junior colleagues more self-aware of their process.

And then—this is where I sat bolt upright, as I did not expect things to go in this direction—the article delves into a study monitoring brain activity in real-time to proactively notify a designer when their emotions change, and how that may be a helpful poke that can inform their own metacognition/self-assessment during the design process. I won’t do that part justice, so go check it out.