Buy it from: www.paulcarneyarts.com

This book is aimed at all the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, pioneers and thinkers out there who understand the value of creative thinking in their field. It identifies some of the key cognitive processes that drive innovation, invention and discovery. They are compared and then illustrated, the cognitive processes behind them explained, or exercises provided so that you might improve these skills in yourself or your students. 

Nine processes are discussed from both a STEM and an art perspective:

Observation, Collaboration, Knowledge, Serendipity, Methodical, Alternative viewpoints, Trial & Error, Adaptation and Visualisation. 

It is not a ‘How to Draw’ book, nor do you need to possess any drawing or art ability yourself in order to do the exercises. What it will do is show how the visual, semantic process of drawing is essential to our progress and a language in its own right, not a gift for the talented few. 

‘I liked this book so much I wrote the foreword for it. I think it’s an essential read for any science teacher or lecturer – and contains practical exercises too.’ Professor Alice Roberts

Why is this book important?

If you can’t even define creativity or deem it important enough to be specifically taught, how can you say for certain it results from the knowledge you’ve deemed as being appropriate?

Our education system deems it irrelevant to understand how creativity occurs, how knowledge changes and how increasing our chances of affecting that change might be developed in our students even further. We are simply hoping it will happen from stuffing more things in.

Is leaving creativity to chance the best education we can come up with?

What I’m advocating is that we need to identify how knowledge is created and develops within our subjects; to connect some of the processes we already teach to exemplar material from the historical knowledge domain, then try to explain, demonstrate, practice or improve them.

Surely we can begin teaching creativity here?

There’s more about the nature of creativity in my book Drawing for Science, Invention & Discovery; even if you can’t draw.

Buy it from: www.paulcarneyarts.com