Creativity is a muscle. This microcredential will teach you how to use it.
It’s a familiar story: go to uni, get a job, embrace the grind … and then wake up one morning realising you’ve become completely disconnected from your creative side.
If that sounds like you, don’t despair: thanks to a new UTS microcredential called the Creative Intelligence Catalyser, professionals from all walks of life are learning how to inject creativity and play into their professional practice.
It’s about connecting to creativity in its many shapes and forms. It’s an opportunity to play, to give yourself time to stretch and to make mistakes and to investigate in a way that you just don’t get anywhere else.
— Course convener, Dr Barbara Doran
The art – and science – of creativity
The Creative Intelligence Catalyser is a six-week course built on the idea that creativity is a kind of fitness – that the more you use it, the more adept you become. Participants are encouraged to engage with concepts of curiosity, experimentation and invention; to explore and reflect on new ways of thinking and doing; and to embrace the idea of play as fundamental to their creative practice in life and at work.
Explore our applied short courses, designed for busy professionals with an innovation mindset.
The curriculum, which introduces students to 24 creative tools and methodologies, is truly transdisciplinary: it draws on the ground-breaking UTS Master of Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation and is underpinned by research evidence from fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience and the creative arts
The diversity of the course content makes for a rich learning environment, and it also makes the course accessible to people from all walks of life – students come from traditional, creative and innovation-led roles and sectors at varying levels of seniority.
The course is for anyone who is either wanting to stretch themselves from where they are to somewhere new and they’re looking for some kind of creative stimulus, all the way to people who know they’re working in complex places and spaces and know that they need to innovate.
It helps you to own your creative experiences and to understand that they’re meaningful and useful.
— Dr Doran
From concept to reality
For student Christina Luzi, Director of Teaching and Learning at Catholic Learning, the course has challenged her to think about problem situations – and the world around her – in new and exciting ways. Using experimental techniques she learnt at UTS, Christina recently conducted a project to better understand how the design of her school’s library affected students’ ability to study.
These included reframing techniques to probe deeper thinking, time-lapse tracking to identify and explore durational patterns, conversation and the use of materials and design to shape connections, and the role of story to bring coherence to make sense of the problem situation.
“There was such power in capturing these narratives and identifying the values and assumptions that lay in the language I was using to capture these perspectives,” Christina says.
“Rather than a complete re-design, we were able to identify the real problem area and then workshop solutions.”
A microcredential that really packs a punch
As a microcredential, the Creative Intelligence Catalyser can be completed as a standalone qualification complete with a formal assessment process and a certificate of attainment. Microcredentials are increasingly recognised by industry as an indicator of a specialist skillset.
For those seeking further learning, the UTS Master of Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation beckons. Students who completed the Creative Intelligence Catalyser and go on to enrol in the masters can receive recognition of prior learning for their work.