Design & Creativity at Purdue

by | Monday, April 21, 2008

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.

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Engineering | Learning | Research | Teaching | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Walking in a straight line

Determining the shape of the earth is something I have written about previously. For instance, see this post on seeing the shape of the earth using eclipses. (A somewhat similar effect could be seen in my photo of the moon during a lunar eclipse). On the web, I found...

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

What is the relationship between technology and creativity, particularly in educational contexts? In this article, we provide a critical thematic literature review of existing scholarship at the intersection of creativity, technology, and teaching/learning in...

New ambigrams for AERA

I was invited to give two talks at the the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. One was a Ignite presentation (5 minutes, 20 slides set to move at 15 seconds per slide), and the other was an ED Talk (sort of like a TED talk...

TPACK is top story on eSchool News

I just discovered that TPACK made the Top Story of the Week for Educators on eSchool News! Written by Laura Devaney, Senior Editor of eSchoolNews the article is titled, TPACK explores effective ed-tech integration. It is a pretty comprehensive piece with quotes from...

Leigh Wolf @IgniteLansing

Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she...

Visual thinking

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...

Mishra & Hershey, 2004

A few years ago I was invited to be a part of a symposium on etiquette and the design of interactive media (organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). I hosted all the papers and presentations from the symposium (links to which I...

Academic publishing, a changing world

A few months ago I had posted a note about Harvard faculty considering and passing a resolution to freely publishing all their scholarship online (see this and this). Now it turns out that faculty at the Stanford University, School of Education have gone the same...

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

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *