From Spark to Process: A Neuroscience-Informed View of Design Creativity

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From Spark to Process: A Neuroscience-Informed View of Design Creativity

Creativity in design is often described as a mysterious spark, yet research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience increasingly maps the processes that make novel, useful ideas possible. The lecture will synthesize scientific evidence to show how designers, musicians, and people in general flexibly alternate between divergent idea generation and evaluation during creative thinking. It will be outlined how associative memory and analogy support novelty, how attentional control and constraint-management support usefulness, and why mood, time pressure, and task framing can shift creative output. Moving beyond the individual, it will be discussed how collaboration, critique, and design tools shape creative search—sometimes amplifying originality, sometimes narrowing it. Finally the talk will focus on how research-supported hypotheses about when incubation, iterative feedback, and well-chosen constraints may support design creativity, and how creativity is evaluated using measures that combine originality with domain-relevant usefulness.

The lecture will be held in English.

Bio

Dr. Örjan de Manzano is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main and a co-founder of the Center for Culture, Cognition, and Health at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. His research bridges the natural sciences and the humanities to study the psychobiological mechanisms of human skill learning and cognition, often using music as a model domain. He investigates the neural correlates of creative performance and how cognitive abilities, personality, motivation, and life experience interact to shape creative achievement.

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