Creative Encounter: Process as Research

Is creativity a trait everyone shares? This class answers the question with a resounding YES. Students explore creativity as an active process within individual, group, and organizational contexts. Class projects provide hands-on experience to help understand and develop creative approaches and build new strategies for problem solving and innovation. Active research of "making" is supplemented by readings and conversations where students explore viewpoints from architecture, literature, performance, physics, psychology, sociology, visual arts, and other fields. Topics include analogy, creative catalysts, curiosity, the everyday, failure, hierarchy and harmony, impossible thinking, metaphor, mindfulness, myths of creative genius, ordering sense and concept, play, and spontaneity.