Author: sheilapontis
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Imagination, Well-Being, & Happiness Course
What is imagination? What role does it have in mental well-being and inner development? How does imagination affect self-worth and combat loneliness and social disconnection? How does imagination and creativity relate? What is individual creativity? What is social imagination? How does AI impact our capacity to imagine? Is imagining a future and a better life…
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Interacting with Complexity
Information designers’ bread and butter is making sense of complexity. This is why the core courses in the first year of the Information Design & Data Visualization (IDDV) graduate program centers in building an information design mindset. Throughout the semester, in ARTG 5100 Info Design Studio 1, students engage in a range of projects from…
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Guiding Research Into, Through & For Design
This has been a busy year. Among other things, in the Fall semester, I took on the challenge to lead the Critical Design & Research Seminar course, which prepares MFA students from the Experience Design and Information Design & Data Visualization graduate programs to start working on their final thesis. For different reasons, the experience…
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Learning about Inner Growth Competences
Last month, I attended the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) summit in Stockholm, Sweden. I came across the IDGs in May and I immediately connected with their aim and purpose: promote individual inner growth to build a healthier society. The IDGs initiative was first introduced in 2020 at the Stockholm School of Economics in response to…
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Imagination, the bridge between inner growth and outer change
Finding purpose in life, accepting who we are, and expressing our true feelings and thoughts – to name a few – are examples of struggles that many people face every day. Many of these struggles have even been exacerbated by Covid, leading to increased loneliness, social disconnection, and other mental health conditions. However, in Western…
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Pillars for teaching Imagination and Creativity
While everyone has the innate ability to be creative, teaching deliberate creativity can be challenging. Nowadays, there is a vast amount of literature about imagination, creativity, and related techniques. However, gaining familiarity with the theory and research studies is only half the equation. Ongoing misconceptions, myths, and lack of clarity about the topics – imagination…
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Deliberate Creativity Workshop Day 4: Materializing Ideas
On the last day of the Deliberate Creativity Workshop, participants gave life to their ideas engaging in four different activities:Visualizing, Visioning, Building, and Storytelling. Visualizing. Each participant created a collage of their own idea using magazines to transform words into visuals. This exercise was followed by an energetic speed-dating feedback session – another of my…
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Deliberate Creativity Workshop Day 3: Applying Imagination
The focus of the third day of the Deliberate Creativity Workshop was to start applying the concepts discussed during the first two days: imagination, creative thinking, and divergent and convergent thinking. As in Days 1 and 2, we began with a warm up exercise. This time we used a modified version of the exercise “This…
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Deliberate Creativity Workshop Day 2: (Re)Learning to Imagine
As in Day 1, the second day of the Deliberate Creativity Workshop began with a warm-up. This time the focus was on being imaginative and creative through the body: working on teams of four, participants had to explain a given concept only acting it out and without speaking. To team up participants, I borrowed the…
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Deliberate Creativity Workshop Day 1: Examining
The first week of July, I led Deliberate Creativity, a four-day workshop for La Nave Nodriza in Madrid. Here is a summary of the first day flow and activities. We kicked off the workshop with an introductory warm up: grab an object from a box and introduce yourself using the object to describe something personal…
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Deliberate Creativity Workshop: Embarking into the Imagination journey
Last week, I travelled to Madrid to teach with Mariana Salgado Deliberate Creativity, an intense 4-day workshop about imagination and individual creativity (little c). Participants were a group of 16 professionals from diverse backgrounds and industries including creative directors, entrepreneurs, art and digital product directors, urban planning consultants, engineers, and computer consultants. The workshop was…
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Information design Profile Conversations
Gaining familiarity with the origins and tracing the roots of a practice helps understand its evolution, current state, ongoing issues, and possible future paths. What we know today as information design is the result of a long process and the interaction of multiple forces. Understanding how and why information design came to be starts with…
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