Conference on brains, behaviour and business

How much do you know about nudging, behavioural economics, and creative communication? These all relate to cognition, the study of the mind and the way it processes information, combining the fields of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience.

On Friday 24 April the Faculty of Humanities will host students, academics, and business professionals from around Copenhagen for the KUA Communication Conference. The theme is cognitive science, where insights into human behaviour will be combined with business, communication, and design.

”With a curriculum mainly focused on academics, me as well as many other students might at times forget our career prospects after graduation,” says one of the conference organizers, Willem Beks to the University Post. ”Through this event, we want to create a setting in which our participants get presented with current and upcoming professionals in the field of Cognitive Science, either working for large corporations, or start-ups, and even more importantly, engage in conversation with them,” Willem Beks says.

From behaviour to product design

Thor Ridderhaugen, one of the speakers at the conference and the co-founder of the company Decision Design, will speak about how cognitive science is making products and design easier to understand, implement and use in everyday life.

”Take for instance the elderly sector in our society. How can we understand their world, their thinking and everyday behaviour to make better designs and aids for the elderly community? For instance, people who lose their short term memory or lose their strength gradually,” explains Thor.

Other speakers include consumer behaviour researcher Jesper Clement, creative communication specialist Anders Ojgaard, former Cognition and Communication student and Mærsk employee Thomas Refstrup Dünweber, and associate professor in Behavioural and Experimental Economics Marco Piovesan.

Willem Beks, conference organiser is looking forward to it: ”The most interesting part will be to see in what different ways our studies are being used in real life”.

universitypost@adm.ku.dk

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