PRIZE ARCHIVE
The 2026 Cybernetics Prize winner and honorable mentions:
Winner ($5,000)
A New Choice for HIV Testing — Danny Linitz (2nd-year undergrad, B.Des)
A cybernetically-designed product system addressing gaps in the U.S. HIV testing landscape — intervening to give individuals both the means and the agency to get tested.
Profile: A New Choice for HIV Testing (CMU News)
Honorable Mentions
Two Orders of Design: From Rural Infrastructure to the Foundations of Cybernetics — Micah Nkrumah Ardayfio (3rd-year undergrad, Info Systems)
Two levels of design aimed at increasing human agency: a technical approach to multidimensional poverty, paired with a broader argument for cybernetics as second-order design.
Systograph: Conversational Knowledge Graphs for Human Agency in Complex Systems — Barakissa Gakou (1st-year MBA, Tepper) & John Willie Giles III
A local-first desktop app that uses conversation and language-model extraction to keep shared structural artifacts current in changing socio-technical systems — increasing meaningful choices by making dependencies and assumptions visible under human verification.
Full details and 2026 Judging Panel
In the inaugural year of the Prize, two winners tied for first place. 30 submissions were received from across CMU departments and years of study.
Winners
Africa Mineral Pulse: Designing Agency in Africa’s Extractive Economies — Fas Lebbie
An interactive data-driven proposal for transitioning Africa’s extractive mineral economies toward local community stewardship, using six data indices to expand meaningful choices for sustainable mineral futures.
IntraNote: Prototyping an AI-Driven Design Rationale System Supporting Participatory Conversations — Franklin Xu, Yixi (Chris) Wu, Yuhan (Max) Wu, Minghao Xu
An AI-assisted system that captures dialogue and spatial interaction in design charrettes, helping multi-stakeholder groups document, reflect on, and trace the rationale behind collaborative design decisions.
Runners-Up
The RIF Impact Framework: Language, Legibility, and Design for Government Capacity — Liv Schaefer, Amy Kang, Jaimie An, David Fuentes
A lightweight, ethics-driven framework combining a structured data schema with systems thinking to track and interpret capability loss across the U.S. federal government.
Fisherwomen of Mumbai: Rethinking the Cycles of Work & Wealth — Sagarika Kulkarni
A proposal for formalizing Mumbai fisherwomen’s informal commoning networks through cooperative models, strengthening economic security and care infrastructure.