Cognitive Design

Entries for Scientific American’s World Changing Ideas Video Contest are due September 15th. They are looking for 2-5 minute videos that describe innovative ways to build a cleaner, healthier and safer world.  Winners get written up in Scientific American (great exposure).   Entries are judged on impact, scientific merit, originality, entertainment value and production quality. You can read about last year’s 20 winning entries to get an idea of what made the grade in 2009.

This contest is an excellent opportunity to exercise your talent in design thinking. For example, imagine how much cleaner, healthier and safer the world would be if we had low cost, high reliability, easy to use and noninvasive brain-machine interfaces?

If you are looking to gain experience in the new open source community-based approach to design check out Open Planet Ideas.  The goal is to use existing Sony technology to create breakthrough solutions to environmental challenges. To stimulate thinking they offer a technology showcase as  a collection of building blocks to construct design ideas.

This is not a design contest with an open innovation prize but instead an opportunity to work with a community of designers and innovators (including Sony engineers) through inspiration, concepting, evaluation and realization.   They are not looking for new product ideas, or ideas on how to make consumer electronics greener.  Instead the challenge is to determine how to use existing technologies to achieve sustainability.

A video explains how the process works. They have collected 22 inspirations so far that include views of the most pressing environmental issues as well examples of clever uses of technology. Concepting will start in 29 days.

I strongly encourage readers of this blog to participate.   From a cognitive design perspective I am very interested to see how removing the element of competition with a cash prize impacts the outcome.

This 3-day  event  promises to overflow with cognitive design ideas, examples and methods.   The workshop on Black Box Design that looks at the relationship between magic and design as well as the workshop on Finding Love in Everyday Objects looks especially interesting.

If you get a chance to attend please share your impressions with other readers.

IDEO has recently started a site, OpenIDEO, to apply crowdsourcing to social innovation. This is your chance to participate in all phases of the innovation process (inspiration, concepting, evaluation and development) for a big question that is posed by a sponsor. There are two big questions currently in the hopper:

1. How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools & services for students in the developing world?

2. How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices?

Both are excellent challenges for cognitive designers.

The annual meeting of the cognitive science society starts on the 11th in Portland, Oregon. There are some workshops and tutorials that look to be of special interest to designers including an introduction to agent-based computer modeling for cognitive research and several others that deal with Bayesian inference. There are also many relevant (but highly theoretical) papers with designable insights into education, decision making and social cognition.  A fairly complete version of the proceedings are already available online. (select the HTML version and scroll down to see links to abstracts and papers).

One thing that is notably missing from the entire program (as in years past) is focused attention on cognitive design. As this is a scientific conference on cognition, sometimes spilling over into cognitive engineering, the lack of focus on design is likely a programmatic decision.

No matter, I am planning to submit a proposal for tutorial or workshop to next year’s meeting focused on design thinking for cognitive scientists.

The goal is two fold. First to demonstrate that cognitive scientists can make a much bigger impact by directly contributing to innovation efforts involving the design of socio-technical systems to improve organizationation performance, products and services that impact mental processes and programs for improving brain health and enhancing cognitive performance.  Second, cognitive design is ripe with many worthy research problems that are scientifically hard and hold great commercial potential. This session will be an undisguised attempt to accelerate the development of cognitive design by enlisting more direct participation of the cognitive science community.

If you are interested in developing and possibly co-presenting this type of workshop please contact me at mark.k.clare@gmail. com.

Quickly building low-cost prototypes is a great way to test design concepts especially early in the innovation process.  I’ve seen robust insights developed from on-the-spot mock ups created from simple materials. One of my favorite materials for doing this is Play-Doh. That’s why the 1 hour design challenge: Play-Doh kicks on Core77 caught my eye.

“Your task is to recreate or reinterpret your favorite pair of shoes in play-doh, in one hour or less. Cut loose and give your imagination a stretch. Maybe you’ll create a miniature tribute to your favorite sneaker designer of all time. Or, honor your humble, beat up kicks by sculpting their likeness, busted soles and all.” 

Grand prize includes a $100 gift certificate.   If nothing else you get to practice your prototyping skills to see if you can demonstrate the soul of a shoe in clay in a hour or less.

I received 10+ emails and even some phone calls on an earlier post, Cognitive Design for the Smart Grid? Lots of interesting views on how we can apply cognitive design to the mega makeover our power generation and distribution system is getting.  Perhaps the most interesting feedback came from a colleague at GE that shared her firm is sponsoring a $200M ecomagination challenge to come up with ideas to improve how we create, connect and use power on the Smart Grid.

 ”GE’s Ecomagination Challenge is a $200 million call to action for businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world’s toughest challenges – building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century.”

 Of the three areas (create, connect, use),  use seems to be most relevant to cognitive designers:

What new technologies, processes or business models can help consumers use energy more wisely and improve our energy balance?

They are offering $50K to the idea that gets the most public votes, $100K to five ideas that illustrate innovation and entrepreneurship and the $200M to those ideas they may want to invest in to commercialize.  Entries are being accepted now and must be in by September 30th.  

My guess is that most of the ideas will be technology/gadget oriented. A team that is able to propose high-value service designs and consumer experiences that make the most of the emerging Smart Grid to improve the environment will really stand out. Just the stuff for ambitious cognitive designers.

Making decisions well when you have just been diagnosed with a serious condition is very difficult, especially in today’s healthcare system.  Even making decisions to insure wellness or prevent illness can be tough. What is needed is improved patient-clinician teaching, social and emotional support systems and technology and local resources for managing information and understanding conditions. If you have solutions for meeting these cognitive design challenges you might want to enter the new Changemakers contest (sponsored by Amgen) on Patients | Choices| Empowerment. The site is open for entries now, the deadline is September 29th and the top prize is $10K and a  chance to go after a much larger grant.

Even you don’t want to enter still check out the site and review the creative ideas, leave comments and vote! Interested to hear from readers that make a submission.

Imagine you sit down to enjoy some TV and discover the remote control is across the room. Can you design a way/device to fetch the remote without getting up? If so you may want to submit your idea to the Grab the Remote Contest and try to win a 3-D TV. Be sure to check out the ideas that have already been submitted on YouTube.

Met yesterday with an ASTD professional development network (PDN) on cognitive learning.  A great group of people very much focused on cognitive design issues:

“The Cognitive Learning PDN focuses on the rapidly expanding field of Cognitive Neuroscience: How do people think, learn, master skills, and gain competencies?” 

I gave a brief talk,  Redesign Your Knowledge Blobs to Accelerate Behavior Change!  If you are in the Chicago area check them out.