OUR STORY

Our motivation:

• Over the years teaching our classes and workshops on Creativity in Research, we have been repeatedly amazed by the transformation students undergo -- from feeling stressed out and stuck on their research or decision to do a PhD, to feeling (1) like they’re part of a shared enterprise where scholars face similar kinds of challenges and (2) like they have the cognitive and behavioral tools to carve a path forward and (3) the emotional shift that many made where research became something less scary and something they could handle, no matter what circumstances threw at them 
  

• Wanting a way to scale our teaching work and reach students or audiences we did not have the time or ability to reach in person 
  

• Teaching creativity techniques that are commonly taught but realizing the literature on how and why these work (cognitively and emotionally) is scattered across many different academic disciplines. Wanting to bring it together coherently in one place

Creativity in Research is the collective effort of a team of researchers and educators – Nicola, Amanda, Anja, Sebastian, and Adam – who came together at Stanford University with a common interest in creativity training for researchers. We met at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute for Design (“the d.school”), an institute focused on teaching creative problem solving through design. When we each converged on the d.school, it was focused on building the creative confidence of Stanford students through solving external problems like alleviating poverty and improving healthcare. While research students participating in these courses might gain important innovation skills that complemented their domain expertise, for many of them, it was hard to translate those skills to their scholarly research. This was a sharp contrast to our own experiences, which suggested that the techniques being taught for innovation in other fields could be useful in research practice. Thus we identified an important opportunity: adapting the d.school’s creativity pedagogy to the academic and scientific challenges faced by Stanford researchers every day. Thus, what was initially called the Research as Design project – RAD for short – was born in 2010.

Beginning with our initial pilot with six students (read: “arm-twisted friends”) in March 2011, we’ve taught RAD classes and workshops at universities and conferences on five continents. The format has varied from two hour taster workshops to more traditional multi-week classes. We published an investigation of how senior scholars use creativity in their own research and a formal evaluation of the curriculum in 2014. We’ve worked with fabulous students from many disciplines and career stages, hearing about their triumphs and fears, and giving them concrete techniques to address their struggles. 

Our understanding of the role of creativity in research has evolved along the way, too. Over the years that we have been teaching and investigating the creative practices of researchers, our approach has evolved in response to student feedback

and our learning from our design-based research observations. Initially, we were focused almost exclusively on creative confidence as a means to greater productivity and innovative outputs. We still see this as a key benefit of creativity training for scholars. But we also found that focusing on the process of research and one’s own creativity had an emotional impact on how our students approached research. We observed the same shift in ourselves as our team practiced these techniques over the years since we began working on this project. Greater facility with designing one’s research process seemed to translate into less stress, greater self efficacy, a greater sense of control, and ultimately being a happier as well as more creatively productive researcher. This link between attention to one’s creative process and emotional empowerment was the most surprising outcome for us. Perhaps research doesn’t have to be as painful or stressful as many PhD students and Principal Investigators seem to consider the norm.

We now live across the world. Each of us is a practicing researcher. But we remain passionate about sharing our deep understanding of creativity in research.