A public talk by Dr. Michael Mose Biskjaer, Center for Digital Creativity, Aarhus University, Denmark, part of the Creativity and Innovation Lecture Series organized by the Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation (WCCI).

Date: 10 October 2018
Time: 18:15 – 19:00 (followed by a small reception)
Place: LLC Commons Room

This event is free, but we request that you please register here.

Digital tools play an increasingly important role in almost all aspects of everyday life, not least in creative activities. From young children expressing themselves creatively by using an iPad app to make fanciful drawings, to professional record producers, photographers, architects, and designers; all rely on digital technologies to accomplish their creative tasks. The problem, however, is that this increasing digitization of creative practices, and not least its consequences, remains surprisingly underexposed. While research in digital design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has developed new insight into these digital tools for supporting creativity (in fact, researchers often build such tools themselves) more work, and a closer relationship to creativity research, is much needed. The present talk will provide an overview of current research into digital creativity from a highly interdisciplinary perspective; that is, where we are, and where we are going. Based on new studies conducted at Aarhus University’s Center for Digital Creativity––from state-of-the-art prototype-based interaction design experiments to literature surveys––the talk will attempt to map the current, but rapidly changing, landscape of creativity in the digital age.

Michael Mose Biskjaer is Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Creativity (http://digitalcreativity.au.dk) at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is positioned in the intersection of digital design, creativity, and innovation. As one of the key themes of the center, his work focuses on how we might better understand the impact of digitization on creative practices by studying the use of digital tools, including the role of constraints, collaboration, ideation, and inspiration, in creative processes. A main tenet of the Center for Digital Creativity is the need to strengthen the ties between creativity research and research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which since the early 1980s has been a particularly strong discipline at Aarhus University. This calls for a highly interdisciplinary approach to creativity as well as to design and innovation. With a background in philosophy, aesthetics, and digital design, Michael Mose Biskjaer’s research mirrors this call for interdisciplinarity as per reflected in his publications. As an educator, he has developed new undergraduate and graduate courses in this field and has recently been the driving force behind the development of a new creativity teaching package for Danish high school students, largely based on his own teaching style. Additionally, he has given keynote presentations and done specialist consultancy work on digital creativity for several major media corporations, especially DR (the national Danish Broadcasting Corporation).