Design & Creativity at Purdue

by | Apr 21, 2008 | Creativity, Design, Engineering, Learning, Research, Teaching, Technology

I will be at Purdue University, at the School of Engineering Education later this week, making a presentation titled: Unpacking Design and creativity: What I think I know, and what I (quite certainly) don’t. I am quite looking forward to this trip, mainly because I haven’t been to West Lafayette in a while. Smita used to work there, many many years ago, teaching at the school of art and design, after she finished her master’s at Iowa State, and I made many trips there from Urbana-Champaign.

The abstract of the talk is is given below. I will post the presentation here once it is done.

Design is both a noun & a verb—a product as well as a process. Design is involved in the construction of any artifact created for a purpose: be it a poem or a computer program, a mousetrap or a business plan, a website or a research project. Design occurs where the known meets the unknown; at the interface of multiple disciplines—science, technology, individual and social psychology, management, and art. It is this multidimensionality that makes design so important and also so complex. In this presentation I will share some of my research (and teaching, since it is often difficult to separate the two) on attempting to develop a better understanding of the design process. More recently I have become more interested in understanding creativity. The ability to be creative and flexible is critical in today’s rapidly changing world. The emergence of the knowledge economy (and the knowledge worker) means that tasks are rarely “given” or structured. We are now expected to operate in a complex and chaotic ecology where our very survival and personal identity is tied up in improvising knowledgeable answers to largely unanticipated problems. Creativity lies at the heart of innovation, in an ability to see things differently, and of making new connections, of exploring new frontiers of knowledge and enterprise. In this presentation I will also share some of my current thinking, and future plans, related to creativity, what it is, how it can be recognized, and some thoughts on how it can be fostered.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Meeting Sanjaya Mishra

Yesterday I met with Sanjaya Mishra, a scholar and researcher in the area of distance education. Sanjaya and I first met at the Vidyakash conference a bunch of years ago and we clicked almost immediately. I always enjoy meeting up with him when I am in Delhi, though...

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Educators as Designers

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Links of interest

During Dr. Jalaluddin's keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). The first is an European study: ICT in Schools: Trends, Innovations and Issues in 2006-2007. You can...

11/26/2008

Mumbai, 11/26/08 Nov. 27: School children hold candles as they pay tribute to the victims of terrorist attacks in Mumbai at a school in Ahmadabad, India, on Thursday. (Photo credit: washingtonpost.com) The last few days have been very strange... dream and nightmare in...

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Since 2009, our family has been creating videos to welcome the new year. The videos are typically typographical in nature, sometimes including a visual illusion or some kind or the other. So as usual, we have a video for welcome 2016. Shot on our dining...

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Today's NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson's method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on "how frequently an...

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems

The reductive seduction of other people's problems, Illustration by Punya Mishra Anurag Behar forwarded an article: The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems, which I really think is a must-read for any of us involved in education or development. The...

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists...

Handbook of TPACK for Educators, 2nd Edition

Handbook of TPACK for Educators, 2nd Edition

The TPACK framework, as we know it today, was first introduced to the world in 2006 in an article in TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). An important part of the story of the success of the framework was the publication of The handbook of technological pedagogical...

1 Comment

  1. GraphicBull

    Design is both a noun & a verb—a product as well as a process.
    That’s very correct.
    I was searching the internet for something, and i found a very interesting picture the other day. On the picture I find this text:
    “Design is a BEHAVIOUR, not a department.”
    What do you think about it?

    Reply

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