"Creativity under the magnifying glass. Reconstructing the Whens, Whys, and Hows of your Creative Process through a Micro-phenomenological Explication Dialogue" – Workshop with Michael Kimmel

The workshop aims to assist students in reflecting on creative and technical decisions in projects by bringing their hidden conditions – such as the “intelligence of our bodies” – into focal awareness. Specifically, we will try to identify central points at which students make creative decisions, and subject these to close scrutiny together, employing methods from the field of empirical phenomenology. Dr. Kimmel will first introduce participants to basic principles of a dialogic method known as the Explication interview. He will then guide them into a form of Socratic “midwifery”, which directs attention to the micro-dynamics of their own cognition while engaging with materials, tasking constraints, and prior creative ideas. The dialogue will assist students in a structured introspection process, so as to help them to reflect on (a) their own implicit skills and constraints, (b) the interconnection of technical and creative facets, and (c) why they chose a particular creative path and what its alternatives may have been, respectively.

The course as a whole aims to familiarize students with basic principles of Explication and give sufficient insight into the process to experiment with it in their future conversations with peers and professors.

The workshop takes place on 14^th and 16^th December under the Angewandte COVID regulations.

Michael Kimmel is a researcher at the University of Vienna and works in the field of embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognitive science. His specific research interests include interaction, improvisation, co-creation, dynamic decision making, skill theory and movement expertise. In the past twelve years he has developed micro-genetic interviewing tools that tap into embodied, tacit and intuitive facets of expert knowledge, within the broader context of empirical phenomenology. Empirical application fields include partner dances, martial arts, somatic therapy, and partner acrobatics. Previously he worked on cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology, the fields in which he took his PhD in 2002. Michael Kimmel's website