The world is experiencing a merging of media, minds and machines for which we haven't yet created a vocabulary. With 25 years in digital research and practice Professor Karen Pollitt Cham has already had a hand in most of this, and it’s already in your pocket.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we all now know that algorithms have the power to deliver what seems "suitable" to us based on our internet history, and ‘nudge’ our behaviour to the extent of changing electoral outcomes. But have we publicly acknowledged that this works because these interactions change the way our brains work in symbiosis with our mediated machines? Have we recognised that the machines are also learning from us and we are co-evolving, already cybernetic, but now also as a ‘Singularity’ ?
What if we could understand these changing neurological and social dynamics as the starting point for our designs to purposely deliver beneficial human outcomes? From using design to intervene in smoking addiction, provide mental health monitoring and nudge critical thinking, to interaction paradigms for neurogaming, Karen has spent the last ten years working with EEG and other biometrics to perfect the art of Cognitive UX full for stack, human centred, Digital Transformation Design, that is, the automation and migration of values of all kinds from the real to the virtual and back again.