Dr Shama Rahman

Innovation Project  

Shama is a designer, entrepreneur, scientist, and AI researcher/practitioner with a strong interdisciplinary ethos. She focuses on neuro-enhancement and wellbeing, utilising adaptive AI/human collaboration and co-creative digital technologies to enable optimised mental states.  

Shama’s PhD, for which she was awarded an EPSRC-funded scholarship, investigated the complex systems and neuroscience of creativity and innovation. Taking a radically interdisciplinary approach, Shama brought together three institutions in service of her PhD: Imperial’s Complexity Mathematics Institute, Goldsmith’s Centre for Cognition, Computation & Culture, and the Royal College of Music.  

Through her startup NeuroCreate, Shama has translated her fundamental research into an AI-powered and neuro-designed platform that enables Flow mental states for creative productivity and enhanced performance. Her applied research, which has been part-funded by AHRC , has included working with an NHS trust to investigate the impact of a biofeedback-based XR intervention utilising AI/Human interaction design to encourage creative collaboration for improved stress resilience, mental health and social connectedness of health workers. She has also conducted extensive R&D, part-funded by Innovate UK, for the AI co-pilot, Flowcreate™, which is an ideation and innovation workflow tool which integrates neurodesign for improved creative and design-thinking for research, problem-solving and strategy.  

As an Innovation Fellow, Shama will ask how we can create and integrate technology more intuitively via people- and planet-centred design, while simultaneously boosting creativity, well-being and productivity. The Fellowship will enable Shama to draw on her vast and varied expertise to develop workflow products and tools that enhance performance and productivity, whilst simultaneously heightening creativity and health, such as by encouraging Flow performance states. Situated within Design Informatics, Informatics and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, her R&D interests and expertise are at the confluence of designing AI tools, interventions and experiences for impact in enhanced innovation, cognitive augmentation, and healthy ageing with the lens of ethical neurodesign and responsible AI.