Mindgate Media is running a Show and Teach Contest for educators, graduate students and librarians. They want the videos you use in college-level classes along with a teaching note and offer up to $2000 in prize money.
Although the judging criteria is vague, I suspect the video and teaching note with the greatest cognitive impact will win the prize.
The MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago has issued a final call for the 2010 Whiteboard Challenge. You have to submit an idea online (max 400 words) by April 23rd 5pm CT. The finalists give a 5-minute whiteboard presentation. Prizes are $3K, $1.5K and $0.5K but the intangible value is far higher.
2009 winning ideas included:
1ST: System that gives cerebral palsy patients an incentive to stand up straight. 2ND: Necklace and online social networking website for Tweens. 3RD: Portion-controlled dinnerware for diabetics and the health conscious.
Go here for a blog post detailing the 2009 event.
Last year I gave a 2-hour workshop at the annual Design Research Conference (DRC) hosted by the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It was a great event. A combination of 20-minute TED-like talks, 5-minute speed talks, longer keynotes and workshops delivered by folks with great experience working on the cutting-edge. My workshop explained how to model user interactions as the conversion of mental energy.
DRC 2010 is scheduled for May 10-12 and will be held in Chicago. Strongly recommended it for cognitive designers. Of special note is Don Norman’s opening remarks. He has generated a lot of buzz recently by taking the position (which I strongly agree with):
“design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs”
The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is offering a six-week Summer intensive for experienced designers interested in creating social change. The SVA is well known for being on the cutting edge yet having a practical focus. This is a unique opportunity to develop as a design activist.
SharpBrains is running a virtual summit covering many aspects of cognitive health and performance:
“The SharpBrains Summit features a dream team of over 30 speakers who are leaders in industry and research to discuss emerging research, tools and best practices for cognitive health and performance. This innovative event will expose health and insurance providers, developers, innovators at Fortune 500 companies, investors and researchers, to the opportunities, partnerships, trends, and standards of the rapidly evolving cognitive fitness field.”
Hopefully some readers will participate and share their insights by posting here. I will collect responses and other notes and blog on the event next week.
The 2010 D&E conference is scheduled for October 5-7 in Chicago. It is a key event for those interested in cognitive design. This year’s theme is “emerging societal issues in our lives and living environments.” Topics include:
*Design for Wellbeing : Healthcare; Elderly Living; Food, Health and Culture; Universal/ Inclusive Design
*Design for Environments: Sustainable Lifestyle; Product and System Life Cycle
*Interaction and Context-sensitivity: Human-Robot Interaction; Product Adaptation; User Learning
*Service Design: Modeling Experiences; Retail Design
*Strategic Design and Business: Decision-Making; Business Models; Branding
*Foundation for Design and Emotion: Temporality, Uncertainty and Polarity of Emotion; Affordance, Semiotics, Value and Emotion; Research Methodologies; Design Methodologies
*Theoretical Foundations: Philosophical Foundations and Implications to Design
Submissions for cases, workshops and papers are due February 15th. I am interested in collaborating with others on a submission.
I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop at the Design Research Conference 2009. I focused on designing for how minds really work. My pitch:
A dash of cognitive science + design thinking = innovation breakthrough!
The workshop started with a personal example on how to make it rain. A large insurance company had a few sales people that could really out produce (sell) the others. These were the rainmakers. The management of the insurance company wanted to create a “program” that could transfer the secret sauce of rainmaking to other sales professionals to increase their production.
A classic problem and many solutions were attempted – training, best practice databases, coaching, new incentive systems and so on. Not much happened.
Finally, we tried a dash of cognitive science in the form of talk-aloud protocol studies. These were awkward at first but did uncover the secret sauce.
Looking to pitch a hard design challenge to an interested audience, work on a hard design challenge for $$ or pledge prize money to stimulate work on a cool design challenge? If so check out ChallengePost. The site offers an interesting implementation of the crowdsourcing approach to problem solving and innovation.
The site is new so still developing (only about 37 challenges) but some have a strong cognitive design element. For example, Newt Gingrich has posted one that challenges us to “Create a method to teach math and science that kids like, and that enables us to leapfrog India and China”. Rock and roll.
Details about the X-prize for healthcare were released about 10 days ago. The prize is designed to inspire radical innovations that will dramatically improve health value (community health index / total cost of care) for a population of 10,000 people. If you can design, simulate and implement with assistance an “optimal health paradigm” that improves health value by 50% or more in a pilot community you run a good chance of wining the $10M prize.
The details on the design of the prize can be found here. Comments from the public are welcome until the end of May.
This is an excellent way to structure the challenge. Anything less than a 50% improvement in quality/cost in a real world setting (population of 10,000 and all health issues) will not solve our healthcare crisis.
Cognitive design plays an important role at two levels in this effort.
Check out the 1 Hour Design Challenge: Business Card Hacks. The idea is to design a new use for a business card that is 3D and can be constructed in an hour. A most interesting entry is the seed card that lets your business card transform into a plant.
(image source: Core77)
The contest is open until April 26 so you have time to make an entry. I wonder how we can remake a business card into something that enhances cognition (how we think and feel)?
