Design thinking has a long tradition of attending to the whole body, both in research and practice, to promote good design and radical innovation. The approach builds on concepts such as visual thinking, which elucidates the role of the senses in creative design, and ambidextrous thinking, which emphasizes the importance of bilateral body engagement for creativity and innovation. 

In more recent terminology, neurodesign invokes an “embodied cognition” perspective on creativity and collaboration. With this outlook, it helps to underpin design thinking in two major respects. First, neurodesign provides a theoretical framework for prevailing design thinking interventions like bodystorming. Thus, it enables innovation practitioners to make use of such techniques in more goal-directed, mindful ways. Second, neurodesign guides the development of novel interventions based on concepts of embodied cognition. Altogether, we encourage physiological research beyond the brain. Also in creative design practice, we track and facilitate full-body engagement.

We want to create novel job opportunities for neuroscientists and support a greater variety of life models in the field. This concern is based on observations about career choices that many highly skilled neuroscientists need to make during or after their PhD. To progress on the academic career path, neuroscientists are often expected to be equally active in fields such as study planning, data acquisition, data processing etc., leading to a weekly workload considerably beyond 40 h with little flexibility to adapt life models on demand. Also, work beyond academic research - even when concerned with the same phenomenon otherwise studied in the lab - is rarely appreciated; it rather tends to impact people’s career prospects negatively. While for example in clinical neuroscience the exchange between lab research (e.g., on depression) and application (e.g., clinical depression treatment) is lively and well-integrated into many research programs, this is rarely the case in social neuroscience. Here, neuroscientists that research phenomena such as collaboration, creativity or social (team) interaction are expected to dedicate all their time to lab research and their career development is based on scientific publications only. In neurodesign we decidedly promote both: exchange between researchers and practitioners, as well as giving individuals the career option to distribute their time between neuroscientific research and applied work in the area of their expertise.