Earlier in July I was fortunate to go and visit Virginia Tech in the US at the invitation of Associate Professor Tripp Shealy. This followed on from the Design Computing and Cognition conference in Montreal where we presented a paper and ran a workshop on design neurocognition.
During the visit, and along with Auron Avinash, one of Tripp’s PhD students, we expanded the work started in the DCC conference paper where we were exploring manifestations of hemisphericity in professional designers as they ideate as measured with an FNIRS device. We wanted to see if we could find any correlation between the use of the the right and left brain hemispheres and the quality and quantity of ideas they generate. Above is a candid picture of a work session in Tripp’s lab. In terms of results.. no spoilers here I’m afraid, look out for the forthcoming journal paper!
In addition to working on the neurocognition paper, and taking a leaf out of Annie Murphy Paul’s the The Extended Mind, we were able to spend some time hiking on the Appalachian Trail which runs right by Virginia Tech. On it we discussed future research collaboration opportunities and scoped out new projects that we could submit to current joint EPSRC and NSF calls.
Thanks very much to Tripp for hosting and I look forward to continuing to build ties between Virginia Tech and the DMF lab going forwards.