Category: Creativity
-
Why Designing Futures matters
We live in a world where everything is more interconnected, and everything we do has an impact on the planet. In addition, we experience constant rapid social, economic, technological, political, cultural changes that create more uncertainty and ambiguity in different areas of our lives. For instance, technological advances are great to help us perform some…
-
Joining forces to better equip the next generation of designers
The world is changing. Problems are changing. Design is changing. Design education has been changing too. One of the main changes has focused on helping designers move into management positions to lead problems that are unframed and whose solutions are unknown. Some of these changes are reflected in the creation of new types of courses…
-
Sh*t Stories Matter
Design has changed. And designers’ role has changed too. The Future of Design Education Group describes designers as “starting to address some of the major societal issues facing the planet.” Challenges of this complexity need creativity, original ideas and fresh points of view. Taking risks and exploring unknown paths are now necessities, not choices. However,…
-
How to do field research from home
The last four months have been busy for Sense Information Design. We have been working on two big user research projects. The first project involved an evaluative research study, and the second one an exploratory research study. In both cases, our first choice would have been to conduct field research studies to examine the intended…
-
Teaching Information Design and Research Virtually: Challenges & Learnings
The last week of class before spring break was challenging. I went to sleep prepared to go teach my class the next day, and when I woke up, everything was changed: campus was close and classes had been moved online for the rest of the semester. I had one week to plan and prepare how…
-
Design Thinking isn’t for everyone
Design thinking (DT) has been hot topic for a while, and many people advocate for it arguing that this approach can help solve any problems. While there is a lot written and said about the approach and the methods, and wicked problems, not much has been said about the challenges of working with design thinking. An…
-
Final Step: Designing Your Ideal Experience
What does the ideal college experience look like for freshman students just twelve weeks into their first semester? How could colleges support that experience? After eight weeks of self-reflection, metacognitive activities and creativity exercises, students in my Creativity seminar answered these questions with the final project. The goal of this project was to help students…
-
Step 3: Using Analogies
In previous posts, I wrote about two important steps involved in the creativity journey that students explored in my creativity freshman seminar in the Fall: Coloring outside and beyond the lines, and moving from unconscious to conscious levels. This post dives into a third step; to me, one of the most important ones: using analogies…
-
Step 2: Moving from unconscious to conscious levels
My previous post discussed the impact of coloring books in students’ creativity and argued for breaking the rules as the first step for reconnecting with creative thinking. This post examines having a deep understanding of your own mental processes as a second step. Cognitively, certain mechanisms (deactivation of pre-frontal cortex, increase of alpha waves) need…
-
Step 1: Coloring outside and beyond the lines
Do coloring books stifle creativity? Or do coloring books encourage creativity? Some people believe coloring books are good because they provide children with an opportunity to practice creative skills (i.e. painting) and help children learn elements from the world. However researchers argue that coloring books can actually hurt the development of creative thinking. I agree with the…
-
Creativity + Happiness + Wellbeing
As a designer, creativity has been an intrinsic part of my life since a very early age. However, I didn’t become fully aware of the impact that this way of thinking and related skills have had, not only, in my professional work but in the way I see life until I started teaching design in…
-
Embrace Creativity: It is more than a buzzword
Teaching creativity has helped me understand myself better and gained an appreciation for how empowering learning (or re-learning) to think creatively–a.k.a. think “outside the box”–can be for many people. Interestingly, 20 years ago, creativity was not taught explicitly in design education. Instead, exercises, such as creating 25 explorations of textures or coming up with 10 different…
You must be logged in to post a comment.