Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik

Thinking Design x Örjan de Manzano

From Spark to Process: A Neuroscience-Informed View of Design Creativity

Creativity in design is often described as a mysterious spark, yet research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience increasingly maps the processes that make novel, useful ideas possible. The lecture will synthesize scientific evidence to show how designers, musicians, and people in general flexibly alternate between divergent idea generation and evaluation during creative thinking. It will be outlined how associative memory and analogy support novelty, how attentional control and constraint-management support usefulness, and why mood, time pressure, and task framing can shift creative output. Moving beyond the individual, it will be discussed how collaboration, critique, and design tools shape creative search—sometimes amplifying originality, sometimes narrowing it. Finally the talk will focus on how research-supported hypotheses about when incubation, iterative feedback, and well-chosen constraints may support design creativity, and how creativity is evaluated using measures that combine originality with domain-relevant usefulness.

The lecture will be held in English.

Dr. Örjan de Manzano is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and a co-founder of the Center for Culture, Cognition, and Health at Karolinska Institutet. He studies the psychobiology and neuroscience of skill learning and creative performance, often using music to examine how cognition, personality, motivation, and life experience shape creative achievement.

The venue is accessible.

The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics investigates why and how people create art and how they perform, experience, and evaluate it. The Institute’s focus is on music, but we also engage with other performing arts such as dance and film.