Creating Creative Science: A Participatory Workshop on Creativity in Research

How can creativity help science break boundaries and spark fresh discoveries? How can creative practices be integrated in daily research work, and into research environments? What barriers to creative thinking are embedded in scientific work culture and structures, and how can they be overcome? 

This participatory workshop invites researchers and science enthusiasts of all levels to explore playful and reflective approaches to scientific work. Through interactive stations—from poetry and collage to LEGO construction and walking conversations—you’ll engage with creativity as a core element of credible research. Short talks on mental health, research culture, and the neuroscience of creativity will set the stage. Together, we’ll co-create insights and ideas.

In a World Café format, we will unlock creative scientific practice in parallel interactive workshop stations. Each station engaged with a different mode of expression to represent a variety of personal approaches to creativity: artistic, physical, verbal, and reflective. 

• At the Written Word Station, participants use collage, poetry, or painting to express ideas around failure, discovery, and intuition in science.
• The Physical Construction Station invites metaphor-building with tactile materials —what does a “creative research ecosystem” look like?
• On a Spoken Word Scavenger Walk, groups will find and respond to planted conversation prompts, sparking dialogue on creativity in motion.
• These different experiences will be synthesized together at a Reflection Table afterwards.

We are excited to present this event as part of our ongoing work on scientific work culture and practice, bringing creativity into research. In October 2024, we organized the "(In)Credible Research Conference: Creative and Credible" to explore creativity as a dimension of research culture and practice; here we build on these insights and push the project further. To read about what we learned at the conference, check out our interview in Nature Magazine: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01913-3