Special Seminar: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design

Optional ZOOM LINK
Meeting ID: 946 2393 8715
Passcode: 956717

This talk will discuss connections between creativity, prolific idea generation, humor, and play. Specifically, humor and creativity both involve making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. Kudrowitz's work illustrates how improvisational comedians produce more creative ideas than professional designers in controlled, time-limited idea generation challenges, and how engineers can generate significantly more ideas after improvisational training. Kudrowtiz will also share research on how a playful attitude is helpful in creative problem solving and ideation. It seems obvious to promote play for children, but we tend to discourage it in adults. If we want to be creative designers and engineers, we should encourage play and humor in academia and industry. Throughout the talk, Kudrowitz will highlight some of his own playful design work as well as highlights of other related research projects in the domains of creativity assessment, food design, and concept presentation. 

Hosted by Professor Sol Diamond.

About the Speaker(s)

Barry Kudrowitz
Professor of Product Design, University of Minnesota

Barry Kudrowitz is a professor of product design and head of the Department of Design Innovation in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. There, he founded and directed the product design program from 2011–2021. Kudrowitz received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying humor, creativity, and idea generation. Kudrowitz is interested in how creativity is perceived, evaluated, and learned. He has years of experience working with the toy industry and has taught toy design for over a decade. Kudrowitz co-designed a Nerf toy, an elevator simulator that was in operation at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, and a ketchup-dispensing robot that was featured on the Martha Stewart Show. He is the author of Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation.

Contact

For more information, contact Ashley Parker at ashley.l.parker@dartmouth.edu.