Acknowledgements
I look forward to working with you, and I thank Prof Villar, the faculty, and you for the gracious invitation and this opportunity. I must also thank Prof José Bernardi, and Neale Martorell of Arizona State University (ASU) for their translation help and suggestions that will make our experience here more productive. I am grateful too for my interpreter's help while I am here. The lack of Spanish is a gap in my background and deserves attention.
Personal narrative
My profile page shows my official background in a formal way. However, I want you to know the more personal story about how I learned from different influences and moved through several stages during my career. This may help you better understand that growing your creative potential into a professional career may not be a direct path. What follows are key points in my life.
Only recently did I realize that my parents and grandparents were my first creative influences. My grandfather shaped my character, my grandmother formed my individuality, my father taught me the value of drawing as thinking and communication, and my mother introduced me to performing arts.
My childhood included living in several places such as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico City. While I did not have a sense of a homeplace, I did learn to appreciate diversity.
My university experience took me through music, physics, engineering, visual arts, advertising design, graphic design, and finally design education. Although, like my childhood experience, I moved to different subjects, I always did my best and learned as much as I could. It was a slow and meandering path to the destination of design education, but I benefit continually from all the pauses and turns in the process.
After graduation, and after working ten years as a designer and teacher I felt a need to rejuvenate myself and my career. I did this by traveling to Switzerland where from 1980 through 1983, I studied at the Basel School of Design. I was always curious and studious in school although my grades did not show it, but I approached this experience differently. The difference was that I worked as much as possible from internal-to-external compared to the external-to-internal-to-external approach that most of us learn in school. Surely, we all learn from both approaches but I found that taking time for reflective work was highly rewarding.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tse says in his classic work The I Ching (The Book of Changes) that ten years is a full cycle, and I find myself in that rhythm. So, in 1995, after about another decade of teaching and working, I began another path as a personal growth project that I titled Awareness Across Disciplines. Whereas in Basel I took a micro approach and set aside outside influences to follow an internal path by doing. With this project I used a macro approach to seek out other people's ideas and reflections on creative work. I still do this widely across disciplines such as the physical sciences, the social sciences, history, literature, and performing arts. As with my path to design education, I will only know the destination when I get there. However, my purpose is clear. It is to find and better understand creative thinking and creative thought where ever it happens.
My presentation today covers some results from my study about creativity that I titled Understanding the Human Component as a Means to Better Design.
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