Creativity & Critical thinking

 As a postgraduate researcher, you will use creative & critical thinking to generate new and imaginative ways to understand and evaluate ideas about your research topic and discipline.

Narration‌

• Workshops and webinars

  

  You can find out more about the Design Thinking process in the webinar:

  • An Introduction to ‘Development through Design Thinking’

  To try the Design Thinking process in a  personal project for your own  personal development goals, consider the boot camp:

  • Development through Design Thinking Boot Camp

  Further workshops under this theme use creative mind-sets and methodologies of Design Thinking and Lego® SeriousPlay®.  The following workshops are highly recommended for PGRs at any stage of their PhD.

  • Getting Unstuck as a Researcher
  • Gaining Confidence as a Researcher
  • Improving your Social Wellbeing during the PhD
  • Making Meaningful Impact during your PhD
  • Communicating your Research through Storytelling

  You will also find further workshops that make use of Design Thinking or Lego® SeriousPlay® in the Research Productivity, Resilience and the Taking Ownership themes.

• Online provision

  
  • Vitae, Creativity in Research-quick tips.   (Requires registration and log-in.)
  • Vitae Guide, The Creative Researcher (requires registration with Vitae’s website)
  • Vitae Podcast, The Creative Researcher

  • Vitae, Using critical thinking and evaluation in research (Requires registration and log-in.)
  • Originality in doctoral level research

• Design Thinking

  

  Design Thinking is a process of thinking and working that can be used to design innovative solutions and better research.  This human-centred approach is a creative and experiential learning process that all researchers can use to generate and shape new ideas and reimagine better solutions to problems. Developed at Stanford University’s d.school, design thinking has been used across higher education.  The process involves:

  • Gaining empathy for end-users or key beneficiaries of your research
  • Defining a problem based on the insights gained from your beneficiaries
  • Ideate potential solutions, often done during collaborative brainstorming
  • Build a prototype of your idea to help you think and explain it to others
  • Test your prototype with your beneficiaries and gain feedback on your idea

• Lego® SeriousPlay®

  

  Lego® SeriousPlay® is a creative and participatory method that enables individuals and groups to solve problems, explore ideas, communicate better and achieve objectives.  The process fosters deeper discussions, problem-solving and decision-making.  During workshops a facilitator will propose a series of questions or challenges.  Each participant builds Lego® models according to their personal response.  The models are then shared and discussed in groups who ask questions.  The culmination of the process involves a reflection on the insights and learning that were gained both as individuals and as a group.