In celebration of Daniel Kahneman’s most recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow he gave a lecture at the RIGB last November. Unfortunately it’s only now I’ve been able to write this post. The book is now firmly on my to-read list and I’d encourage everyone to have a look. My sketchnote is below and you can see Eva-Lotta’s sketch on Flickr.
In November 2011, I attended a talk at the RIGB titled The Serendipity Engine with Aleks Krotoski and Kat Jungnickel.
They describe the engine as the following (taken from the website): The Serendipity Engine is a physical manifestation of theoretical and technological interventions that can be used to enhance serendipity on the World Wide Web. It is a working machine that uses bike parts, flower pots, cake, pulleys, lightbulbs and other concrete objects to articulate the processes that could be translated into digital “solutions” that will re-engineer the potential dystopian social trajectories of current (social) software trends*. It is being theorised, devised, designed, developed and welded together by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Dr Katrina Jungnickel.
Brad and I weren’t too sure about this talk, mainly, if you are engineering serendipity, is it really serendipitous anymore? As a metaphor, I didn’t find the engine appropriate. Still, it was an interesting talk and neither of us went looking for answers. I’ve included my sketchnote below.
Some time ago now, I attended an excellent talk at the RIGB on the topic of Does Neuromarketing Work? The debate was presented by the New Scientist and featured their deputy editor, Graham Lawton. Dr A. K. Pradeep of Neurofocus argued for neuromarketing and Dr Mike Page (whose job titles are too many to mention) argued against.
Overall, I felt that Dr Mike Page was the most convincing speaker, as well as having the audience in stitches. I agreed with the points he made about neuromarketing needing to be peer reviewed and investigated further. Dr A. K. Pradeep made some valuable points about real world deadlines, when any insight is better than no insight.
My sketchnote of the talk is included in this post.
