Cognitive Design

Making smart machines promises to free us from unnecessary mental labor and trigger a productivity boom in knowledge work. But programming knowledge into machines can be costly and tedious. It seems to improve productivity only in small well defined domains. Developing large or broad scale intelligent machines (e.g. the semantic web) requires new methods.  

 One such method is croudsourcing or tapping the engine of mass collaboration and peer production to do large-scale volunteer knowledge acquisition. We can effectively “teach a machine” (program knowledge for computer use) incidentally as we do other things like play a game.

To try it out go to the site Games with a Purpose.

You can have some fun in your spare time, tag content and improve the intelligence of a search engine. 

Now that is how you design something for how minds (people and machines) really work.