SfNC2024: Creativity & Design took place in Toronto last month. Our aim was to deepen the ties between the creativity and design fields and examine key theoretical and methodological challenges in studying creativity in and outside of the lab.
Design is creativity embodied and extended in time and space and is usually more complex than the tasks we use to model creative processes when using neuroscience methods. In Toronto, we heard from leaders in the field about the opportunities and challenges of studying creativity in the context of design and were inspired by the calls to action to do so.
Now, after some much-needed incubation, we wanted to share some key insights and highlight what we learned about the intersection of creativity and design – and the resulting opportunities to advance the work we do together.
Opportunity abounds: designers want to know how our research can help them, and design researchers want to collaborate
The keynote addresses by Kosa Goucher-Lambert (UC Berkeley) and Upali Nanda (HKS, University of Michigan) anchored the conference and offered two very different perspectives on the interaction between creativity and design. Most importantly, both emphasized how much opportunity there is to build bridges between our community of academic researchers and professionals who practice design (e.g. designers, architects, engineers, etc.)
Upali Nanda, PhD on designing for well-being and creativity for professional designers
“…there is a bridge that is missing between the work that is being done in the scientific community and the industry that is investing in creativity and creating products and designs from it. If nothing else happens today, if we never meet again, know that bridge building is the primary thing we can do here together and what I hope we achieve.”
- Upali Nanda, April 12, 2024
Upali Nanda, (Global Sector Director, Innovation and Partner) at HKS and University of Michigan gave an exhilarating talk on how HKS is learning how to design for creativity and well-being both for their clients and for themselves as a design firm.
As one of the world’s largest and most influential architecture and design firms, HKS’s purpose is to design and create innovative built environments that achieve their desired function, while also promoting the health, creativity, and well-being of the people who use those spaces. Delivering on these enormous design projects also requires tremendous creativity on the part of HKS’s professional designers, architects, and engineers. Upali and her stakeholders recognize that promoting brain health and mental well-being are critical to supporting their creative workforce. Even though creativity is more important than ever to achieving the firm’s goals, there’s a gap between the promises of what they could develop through their creative efforts, and what designers are actually able to achieve given that today’s working conditions are often inconducive to creativity.
Upali explained how HKS recently engaged in a partnership with the Center for Brain Health at UT Dallas to educate their workforce with empirically-driven work strategies to operate at a higher level of effectiveness, such as how to limit multi-tasking, how to choose the best physical and social environment to work in depending on the task, and how to plan and prioritize one’s workday effectively. They are now in the process of re-developing their work environments at their physical offices to align with these insights.
Upali also presented the results of a survey about creativity that she administered to some of the firm’s best designers. She found that although the professional designers at HKS mostly don’t have a formal understanding of creativity science, they’re knowledgeable about their own needs and creative practices and are eager to understand more about what research on human creativity can offer them. It turns out that they have many of the same questions we do about creativity, such as:
- Can creativity be learned, trained, or improved?
- Does stress improve creativity or hinder it?
- Can specific environmental or cognitive interventions enhance creativity?
- What is the ideal amount of time to devote to working on a creative task?
Upali’s talk left us all inspired to build these bridges so that our research can have a greater impact on the stakeholders in design professions who may most benefit from it.
Kosa Goucher-Lambert on the frontiers of design neurocognition
“There’s so much possibility for cross-pollination between the design research community and the creativity community and I think we have a lot to learn from one another and share with each other. Our work in design research has been amplified by the interactions that I’ve had with you and I hope that you can see design as an interesting test bed for some of the problems you’re working on.”
- Kosa Goucher-Lambert, April 11, 2024
In his keynote address, Kosa Goucher-Lambert presented a snapshot of what it actually looks like to research design neurocognition. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, Kosa has turned his curiosity to understanding how the engineering design process unfolds and how it can be optimized. The main goals of the Co-Design lab which he directs at UC Berkeley are to understand the mechanisms that allow humans and computers to excel at design tasks and to develop the next generation of methods and tools to improve designer behavior and creative problem solving.
Most of this work is focused on the initial conceptual development phase of the larger design process, rather than the subsequent embodiment or detail design phases. Kosa explained that though creativity is required throughout the design process, this phase is where it is concentrated and where many of the creative sub-processes that we study in the (neuro)science of creativity are brought to bear, such as idea generation, analogical reasoning, and fixation effects. His lab’s approach often involves engaging in one or several tightly controlled lab experiments before implementing and studying those effects in more naturalistic design situations using tasks and tools that engineering designers would normally engage with.
One of the main research goals of his lab going forward is the development and use of computational tools such as extended reality, computational models, and LLMs to enhance creativity in design.
Kosa concluded his keynote address by emphasizing how the Co-Design Lab’s work is only possible because of the collaborations between individuals with expertise in engineering, design, cognitive neuroscience, creativity, and computer science, and much opportunity there is for creativity scientists to make an impact on design research through such collaborations.
Beyond the keynotes, the rest of the conference was filled with important insights and emerging themes. Here are some that stuck out to us the most:
2. Our field may be mature enough to move (thoughtfully) beyond a reductionist approach
A major theme of the conference that was addressed during the Creativity & Design Panel on Day 1 was how to balance the methodological rigor required in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology with the complexity and ambiguity of the design process. Evangelia Chrysikou (Drexel University) suggested that just as how in the early 20th century, behaviorist approaches were considered necessary to establish the objectivity of early psychological science, our present reductionist approaches to examining creativity were a necessary and salient goal for the field 5, 10, or 20 years ago, when the (neuro)science of creativity was still in its infancy and researchers were focused on establishing it as a legitimate field in the natural sciences. Though we shouldn’t abandon precision, our field may now be mature enough to (thoughtfully) move beyond discrete cognitive tasks because our foundations have been well established (thanks to the accumulation of decades of rigorous scholarship!)
The need to extend our scope was also highlighted by John Gero (University of North Carolina), who explained that the behaviors and products of design cannot simply be understood as the sum of a series of tasks and cognitive processes. Rather, it is emergent, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding the cognitive building blocks of design is critical, but so is understanding how they interact when they are combined and extended in naturalistic settings.
3. How a creative idea or design is evaluated matters a lot
Another theme from the Creativity & Design panel was how much opportunity there may be in deepening our understanding of how creative ideas and designs are evaluated by the brain.
Dirk Bernhardt-Walther (University of Toronto), who studies neuroaesthetics, highlighted how similar the processes involved in evaluating creative ideas and products are to how we make aesthetic judgments. This aligns with recent research by Sarah Moreno-Rodriguez (Paris Brain Institute) whose talk supported the notion that, contrary to current theories, the evaluation phase of the creative process doesn’t only recruit executive processes involved in assessment such as the executive control network, but also the brain’s subjective valuation system. Her study also found that individual differences in the degree to which people weigh novelty vs. originality in their liking judgments are related to differences in creative abilities and patterns of neural activation at rest and during creativity tasks. This perspective may shed light on the inherent subjectivity of creative evaluation and pose new questions about the contributions of metacognitive and reward-related processes to creativity.
How ideas and designs are evaluated during design processes is important because design, more so than the open-ended creativity tasks we use in the lab, often has to satisfy many practical and social constraints. These constraints may be known at the outset but can also change over the course of a project (and often do!). The ultimate success of a design concept depends on how many different contributors and stakeholders with varying needs, sensibilities, and preferences evaluate the work.
4. The time dimension is under-explored in creativity research
Gero also argued that time is one of the most important dimensions in design research that’s usually overlooked by cognitive scientists. Design is non-monotonic (or non-linear) and unfolds over longer periods of time than typical creativity tasks - and some of the most important parts of the design process occur at points beyond initial ideation. He also presented a talk (Let’s Talk Design Symposium, Day 2) about time-of-day effects on the creative design process and how these effects may interact with education (e.g., industrial designers vs. engineers) to influence creative outcomes in design.
5. Studying design offers tasks and methods for creativity beyond the AUT, and introduces more factors to consider
While tried-and-true lab tasks such as the AUT still make up a large part of our research output, design research offers a whole range of new tasks and problems to leverage to study creativity. Creativity researchers looking for new, more ecologically valid tasks may look to design research for ways to prompt and measure creativity even outside the context of design. Using design as a model also reveals other factors that influence creativity in the real world, such as what happens when designers are forced to rethink or re-conceptualize a solution after feedback, or when constraints and needs change as a project progresses.
Using standardized creativity tasks like the AUT are useful for us because for the most part, anyone can do them. On the other hand, using more complex or specialized design tasks can introduce the possibility that educational background, experience, and personality traits have a significant influence on how individuals approach them and how creative their solutions are. These factors need to be controlled for, but understanding how these individual differences impact creativity is also extremely useful. For example, industrial designers and engineers are educated very differently and are trained to achieve different outcomes. Whether or not creativity is valuable in a solution can differ tremendously depending on their goals. For example, maybe you don’t want quality control engineers to propose risky creative solutions…but you do expect creativity from product designers.
6. The big priorities for creativity & design research range in methods from experimental psychology, to cognitive neuroscience, to applied human-computer interactions
During the Design & Creativity panel, the experts offered their perspective on what the next big priorities are in this discipline, and we were struck by the diversity of their answers.
Kosa Goucher-Lambert (UC Berkeley) talked about the exciting opportunities to study how human-computer interactions influence design creativity, and said that among the most urgent research priorities towards that goal is the “(mis)alignment problem” between AIs and humans in terms of how they store, access, and make relational inferences about semantic information. As human-AI collaborations become more common, how computational models determine how various objects and ideas are similar, different, or novel in terms of semantics, form, or function will influence the inferences and suggestions they make and by extension, the quality of the human’s creative solutions. His lab is actively working towards understanding the divide between computational models and humans with the goal of closing that alignment gap. This direction complements the ongoing work of scholars in our field, notably Janet Rafner, Roger Beaty, John Patterson, James Lloyd-Cox, and many others. We know that the application of AI and computational tools to creativity will continue to be a hot topic in creativity science (and was the topic of last year’s SfNC conference!).
Li Shu (University of Toronto) said that from her perspective, a significant priority for design research is continuing to understand the nature of fixation effects in design. Fixation effects during creative problem solving have long been a topic of study in experimental cognitive psychology, yet there is still so much we don’t know about the factors that influence fixation during reasoning and approaching ill-structured problems. This research is critical for the development of processes, strategies, and tools for designers, which can either hinder and limit the scope of their solutions or promote expansive, successful ideation and problem-solving.
Throughout the conference, researchers presented work on design and cognition that spanned many different methodologies and disciplines, ranging from neurofeedback with fNIRS, EEG and fMRI studies of neural states during design tasks, behavioral manipulations and interventions, and evaluation of team-based design creativity. It appears that there are as many ways to study design as there are to study creativity!
Cheers to a Successful Conference!
We were so impressed and inspired by the variety of talks, presentations, and research posters presented at SfNC2024. While we can’t highlight each one, we want to encourage all of our members to (re)watch the talk sessions and keynotes on CrowdCast if you missed any.
Special shout-out and congratulations to the winners of the Best Talk Award (Theophile Bieth, Paris ICM) and Best Poster Awards: Clin Lai (Penn State University) and Josie Friedman (University of Minnesota). Thank you to everyone who made SfNC2024 so special! Cheers!
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