What is the Connected Creativity Lab?
The main theme of the Connected Creativity Lab is to explore creative behaviour, processes and skills and their impact on and beyond design. We adopt an engaged scholarship mindset: we combine theoretical and research knowledge with professional expertise coming from practice. By collaborating with public and private organisations, we are able to explore the transdisciplinary value that creativity can bring in any field where innovation is needed, such as mobility, healthcare or societal issues.
Why creativity?
Creativity is an essential 21st century skill, recognized worldwide (e.g. WEF, G20 and P21). Students in science, design, managerial, humanities and beyond are increasingly required to be innovative and forward-looking: to foresee opportunities, to set new problems, to come up with new solutions and adapt readily to new ideas of others. This requires a flexible and creative approach and to address problems that no longer fit in well-defined silos or single disciplines.
Creativity is especially important when we consider that our current problems are “open, complex, dynamic, networked” (Dorst, 2015) and require creative attitudes and a deliberate creative process. Creative thinking is thus an indispensable skill during our education, but also in our job career, because creativity is crucial for problem framing and problem solving, at all levels of society, technology and businesses.
Why connected?
Connected creativity strives to connect different disciplines in an interdisciplinary manner, both in terms of your backgrounds but also in terms of how we will combine knowledge from different domains. “Connected” in this case can be understood from multiple dimensions:
- Connecting a diverse set of people: across disciplines, backgrounds, cultures, experience, etc.
- Connecting theory and practice.
- Connecting the context, organisations, individuals and society.
- Connecting individual creativity and group creativity.
- Connecting technology, innovation and creativity.
- Finally, Connected Creativity expands on the notion that creativity cannot exist in a vacuum; it is always connected to something in order to result in something novel, useful and meaningful.