The Creativity
Initiative
At Research Theory, we believe that creativity drives good science. The Creative Initiative aims to foster creativity among scientists in order to help them unlock their creative (and therefore scientific) potential.
The Creative (Scientific) Act
The Creative (Scientific) Act is a five part course on the creative process in science. It combines exercises from applied improv with lessons from scientists, artists, athletes, filmmakers, and other creative professionals at the top of their game. Our goal is to inspire scientists to prioritize creativity, and give scientists the tools to develop their own creative practice.
The Sessions
Getting into the Creative (Scientific) Act
01
BE PLAYFUL
Session 1 acts as foundation for the course. Creativity begins with venturing into the unknown and letting go of outcomes and expectations. By embracing failure and learning to have fun with the process, this session establishes a playful mindset that we believe sets the stage for true creative growth.
03
BE DYNAMIC
Session 3 examines the environments, both internal and external, in which we operate. During Session 3, we help you understand how your environment impacts your creative process and help you regain control over the factors in your environment that foster your creative process.
02
BE OPEN
Session 2 aims to redefine your relationship with how you see the world around you. Influence and inspiration drive creativity, but often, as scientists, we forget to see things in the world around us as being a valuable part of the scientific process, and by doing so, lose out on the opportunity to discover something unexpected.
04
BE BRAVE
Session 4 brings into practice the tools you've been taught through the past three session. This is your opportunity to practice your tools and techniques to solve a complex problem in order to gain better insight into how your own creative process works when applied in a problem solving setting.
05
BE YOU
The culmination of the course, Session 5 is where you take everything you've gained from the course and apply it directly to your own creative practice. You come with a scientific problem that you have, and we use everything we've learned throughout the course to help you navigate that problem.
What should I expect?
These sessions are based on the best creative pedagogy we know: improvisational theater. Each session will have a combination of group, partner, and individual exercises. Some group participation is required, but the focus is on your individual creative process. Sessions will have a safe and open atmosphere, like a sandbox for creativity.
The Enrichments
Enrollment in The Creative (Scientific) Act also gets you access to the enrichments. These are supplements to the in-person experience designed to expand on the ideas taught in person and give context for the creative processes we hope to foster.
Evaluating Creativity
How can you measure creativity? How do we know if this workshop is effective?
We're developing a multimodal program evaluation to understand the creative state of researchers and the impact we're having. Our goal is to link short-term proxies like creativity in a video game environment with long-term scientific output to put these theories to the test.
Survey
Course Feedback
Game-Based Pscyhometrics
Come explore creativity with us!
If you'd like to learn more, or join our experiment, let us know!