Cognitive Design

How much neuroscience does a cognitive designer need to know? Is it important to know about neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, the pathways of brain drugs and what the latest brain scanning study tells us about the link between neuroanatomy and cognitive function?  A general understanding of the neuroscience is important but mastering the details won’t help you do better design. Designers need a neuroscience boot camp.

Last year a colleague attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp and suggested it provides just the level of understanding needed in a stimulating format.

The camp is run from the Center for Neuroscience & Society and is being held again this year from July 31 – Aug 10. A brief description:

“Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. “

It is geared for graduate students and professionals in education, law, ethics and other fields.  Sounds just right for the cognitive designer interested in a refresher on the basics of neuroscience. Cost is $4500 including room. If interested, you have to submit an application no later that February 1st.

I did a post earlier introducing MIX the Management Information Exchange, an exciting attempt to use open innovation to reinvent management for the 21st century.  They are running a series of prizes, called M-prizes, to help focus the creativity of the crowd.  

I submitted an entry, To Engage and Impassion Employees we Must Learn to Manage Mental Energy, to the M-Prize for Human Capital Management.  Here is the summary:

“A key to unleashing human capability in the workplace is to develop a management discipline geared toward creating intangible as well as economic value by meeting the psychological needs of key stakeholders.  Such a management discipline must be based on a modern scientific understanding of how minds work and will need to provide frameworks for estimating, measuring, creating and optimizing mental energy.”  

Check it out and leave comments.  There are currently 65 other entries that are worth a peak. I will summarize the results from a cognitive design perspective and do additional posts.

The US federal government has embraced open innovation. The goal is to accelerate innovation, resolution of tough problems and an agency’s core mission by offering cash prizes to all comers.

Challenge.gov has 56 challenges from 27 organization so it appears to be getting traction. Most of the prizes are a few thousand dollars but I did see one for $50K.

Some of the challenges definitely involve cognitive design. For example check out, the Healthy People 2020 contest. They are looking applications that help professionals participate in our national agenda for disease prevention and health promotion. Contests in the education and health category tend to have a cognitive design element.

Interested to hear from readers that are participating in Challenge.gov.

The world of work has change radically but the world of management has not. Work is now service not product, network not hierarchy, intangible value not cash flow, open not proprietary, crowdsourced not outsourced and untethered not done in the corporate office.  What customer, employee, value, organization and strategy mean has fundamentally changed over the last 25 years.

Nearly everyone admits that our management theory, much of what we teach MBA students and certainly what managers practice on a daily basis is out of step.  Some argue that this accounts for the steady decline in return of assets across most industries for the last 40 years!  Management needs to be reinvented.

One attempt to do that is the Management Innovation Exchange or MIX.   As described in the McKinsey Quarterly:

“The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is a Web-based open-innovation project dedicated to catalyzing the creativity of thinkers and practitioners interested in reinventing management. That’s not an undertaking for any one individual or organization—it’s everybody’s problem, which is why the MIX is designed as a collaborative platform both to surface bold ideas and make progress on a set of make-or-break challenges.”

Check out this 3 min video by Gary Hamel, MIX’s founder. They held the first ever M-prize early in the year. It produced some interesting result but did not (as far as I could tell) lay the seeds for a management revolution.

Two more prizes are currently active including the Human Capital Management Prize (What’s your bold idea or radical fix for transforming human capital systems and leadership practices? ) with a deadline of January 20, 2011 and the MBA Prize, open only to graduate business students offering $50K in funding to test bold ideas “ aimed at redistributing power,unleashing human capability, and fostering renewal in our organizations.” with a deadline of February 28, 2011.

I strongly encourage readers to check this site out and ”join the MIX” as relevant.  Cognitive design has a big role to play in reinventing management for the 21st century.

I am preparing a submission for the Human Capital Management Prize.

Five graduate students at IIT’s Institute of Design working with Wheelwell want to design and take to market a new wheelchair. They are raising money for the effort on the Pepsi Refresh Challenge Site. Check them out and cast some votes. The goal is to design an affordable power-assisted (combines electric and manual modes) chair for people with spinal cord injuries. They are looking for $250K to research, engineer, design and test 3 prototype hybrid chairs. Pepsi will provide the money if they get enough votes.

The challenge is to create a tweet, story, essay, poster, public art, Guerrilla marketing effort, video or some other communication artifact to show the world:

“… that the lack of basic sanitation is one of the most critical issues facing the developing world today.”

Entries to the Sanitation is Sexy contest are due November 21st.

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.