AAA Experiments in AI, Art and Architecture, Kunsthalle Zürich, © images: Cedric Mussano, 2024
In the Creative Thinking Seminar in the Departments of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the ETH Zurich we explored the question of what creative thinking is. One reason for this was that, Creative Thinking is one of the ‘Top Ten Skills’ or ‘Most In-Demand Skills’ 2025 that we will need for our future world of work and life, according to more business-orientated sources. There are several instructions and five- to seven-step programs on how to implement something creatively and thus become creative. In the seminar, we tried to better understand what creativity and creative thinking is by looking at this creativity dispositive, as the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz calls it, according to which we all not only want to be creative today, but also need to be creative in order to be a productive part of our global (not only Western) society.
We looked at creative artistic practices to find innovative solutions. We also looked beyond these practices to the creative potential of today's technologies, especially generative AI. We studied how creativity can be gained from employees in companies, how Dada artists as a group co-created new artistic strategies, how artists today use AI creatively and what role an aesthetic approach to more rational techniques of computer science, engineering or electrical engineering can play. Of course, we also tried out and applied many different creative thinking exercises and strategies directly. At the beginning, for example, the students were asked to draw a portrait of their personality by hand and generate an illustration of a problem they were currently working on with AI. They wrote manifestos, did sensory exercises, wrote poems with the help of cards and recited them. And together we created a fanzine pdf that summarizes our findings and experiences and can serve as a reader for the future.
The students had the task of working in groups to find a problem that they wanted to solve with the help of creative thinking strategies. They also had to show which creative thinking strategies they used. In four groups they developed physical presentations for the AAA Experiments exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich about their solutions to larger, self-defined problems and the creative thinking tools they used to solve them.
In the seminar, 90% of the students were studying and researching computer science at Masters and PhD level. They are, of course, brilliant in the most demanded tech skills today related to AI, Big Data, cybersecurity, et al. Not only were they eager to learn more about creativity and creative thinking to solve the problems they deal with in their research, but they also seemed to really enjoy this different, aesthetic and artistic way of thinking. One of the most touching moments was when a participant who said at the beginning of the course that she considered herself not only very shy and reserved but also not creative at all, felt creative and empowered by the end of the course when her group had developed a board game for creative thinking. Other participants also surprised me in great and lovely ways where being creative and having fun, enjoying a bit of freedom from their daily constraints and being heard seemed to empower them and make them more confident.
It was a great pleasure and fun to work with these brilliant and creative students during the autumn term 2024. We may have deconstructed creative thinking into an algorithmic process to become creative thinkers and actors, and perhaps even creative activists.
