The following discussion is concerned with certain forms of poor practice in academic publishing that give rise to "academic urban legends." It suggests that rather than simply consider phenomena such as poor citation practices and circular reporting as mistakes, misunderstandings, and evidence of lack of rigor, we might also read them as evidence of a particular kind of creativity-for which misunderstandings, assumptions, and failures of diligence are mechanisms by which potentially influential ideas manifest. Reflecting particularly on a critique of the debate surrounding pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and its use by university staff and students, the following will argue that investigators within the disciplines concerned with the effects or development of these technologies are themselves implicated as potential subjects. Alongside reflections from science fiction studies that offer insights into the experiential dimension of reading and misreading, this paper offers some insights regarding how we might think of mistakes and misunderstandings as a form of bootstrapping and a source of creativity in scientific and technological development.
PrefaceThis special issue of AVANT is all about Cognitive Innovation. It is not about CogNovo, the interdisciplinary and international doctoral training programme that produced three different Off the Lip events. It is not about Off the Lip 2017, the novel symposium format we developed to collaboratively create a publication resulting in this special issue of AVANT. It is not about the seemingly heterogeneous collection of papers that follow this preface. Collaborative Approaches to Cognitive Innovation required something else, something we are starting to capture in the four GIFT principles. While this special issue is not solely about CogNovo, Off the Lip events, or the content of the following submissions, all these aforementioned elements were necessary to shape our current understanding of Cognitive Innovation, the very process which led to numerous publications, exhibitions, and events during the past three years. In a sense, all of our previous endeavours have culminated in this collection of 26 distinct pieces of work, yet we hope and believe that this special issue also marks a beginning. Let us explain.
Design(ing) and the placebo effect a productive idea.
Drayson, HEThis is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version of this work (the version of record) is published by MIT Press in Design Issues available at: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/desi This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher's policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. Please do not cite without author's permission.
Design(ing) and the placebo effect; a productive idea.A placebo effect is the measurable beneficial healing effect that results from the context and meaning of a medical treatment rather than its content. While orthodox biomedicine has sometimes struggled to reconcile the paradox of seemingly inert medicines producing healing effects, in the placebo studies literature, a number of scholars have proposed that alternative paradigms for understanding perception, such as affordance, motor-intentionality, and enaction, can reconcile the apparent paradigm conflict.These models are by no means incompatible with design theory, and are in fact both embedded within and enriched by a number of design sub-disciplines such as user experience (UX) design. This paper will show that understandings of placebo responsiveness, and the effects of meaning and symbol on the body, can be identified explicitly or implicitly in existing design and allied practices; industrial design, graphic and information design, marketing and branding, architecture.While the placebo effect is perhaps not a problem in design, the wider cultural influence of the idea of placebo and what it means impacts on the contexts in which design's products are encountered.Observing the influence of placebo effects confirms the importance of -and one approach toarticulating and exploring an audience's expectations and understanding of artefacts of meaning and culture. By talking about some of the ways in which the placebo effect has been mobilized, in the context of contemporary mid-Atlantic medical and scientific culture, this paper seeks to give a sense of the entangled ontological and epistemological frames that carry influence between disciplines and practices, in
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