The Media Technology program recognizes creativity as an important factor in scientific innovation. It stimulates students to deal with science and its results in creative and innovative ways. It wishes to deliver modern scientists that are capable of finding new, interesting and unexpected area's of research.

Using examples from research, business and art, the concept of "creative research" is introduced. With that we mean actual research that was brought about in non-conventional or creative ways, in order to come to results that could otherwise not be envisioned or achieved. Topics of the workshop are basics of creative research, asking creative questions, and creative research methods. Although we cannot make you think creatively, we can show you its importance, give you starting-points for your own research, and show you examples.

The course takes the form of a workshop of four full days and a one-hour session. Attendance is compulsory. During and after the workshop, students must do a project and write a paper about it. This work is graded. If the results of your class work or class participation are extreme (either positive or negative) this may influence your final grade.

• Read [British Library].
• Is it important? And why? [Fisher]
• "Academic research that is creative" versus "Research about creative arts"?
• Is it scientific?
• Creativity in general.
• Examples of non-creative research.
• Concrete, manageable, start-to-end projects.
• Understandable for everyone.
• The importance of fun. [Ig Nobel Prize] [Feynman]

"The research process starts well before the articulation of a question or a problem. Or rather, it is important to acknowledge the value of what can be learned in the time it takes to find a problem. Also, that the longer you take to find the problem, the more useful the research might be." [British Library]

• The question must be possible to answer in a rational manner.
• It can be a "large" question.
• You need not know how to answer it. Finding out how to answer it may be part of the research phase.
• You should not know the answer beforehand, and the answer should not be already know to science (it should not be a trivial question either).
• During the research phase, you may change the question or switch to a different question.

How to come up with a creative research question:

• Use your own personal interests and feelings: what intrigues you? [Swim in Syrup] Or even, what annoys you? Like Professor John W. Trinkaus - he has published well over 80 journal papers about everyday things that annoy him. [Trinkaus]
• Look at questions that no-one dares to answer.
• Study your surroundings.
• Look in archives of good questions. [101 Problems] [edge.org]
• Ask others for good questions.

Dealing with why-questions:
Beware of 'why'-questions. To answer a why-question, you must explain why something is the way it is. This means that you must both come up with a suitable theory and test that theory. This is usually more difficult than answering an 'is it so that...'-question, which are more concrete. For example, 'Why do dog owners eventually look like their dogs?' is more difficult to answer than 'Do dog owners eventually look like their dogs?'. However, why-questions can be transformed into easier questions to answer. Just come up with factors that you think determine the phenomenon in which you are interested (a theory), and study those.
Take for example the why-question 'Why do we emphasize more with victims of some natural disasters than with others?'. Factors that may possibly explain this phenomenon are if it is a popular holiday destination, or how much we know about it, and many other factors. Using these assumptions, you can transform the why-question into 'Is there a relation between what we give for natural disaster relief and how often we go on holidays to the victims country?' or 'Is there a relation between what we give for natural disaster relief and how much we know about the victims country?'.

"... the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and - if the right questions are asked - is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking." [Freakonomics]

• Use things in a way in which they were not supposed to be used, such as
  - data [Freakonomics] [Black Names] [Seafood Menus] [Bill Bryson]
  - technology [Personal Ads]
  - methods [Call of the Mall] [Rosenhan Experiment]
  - results
  - humans [Captchas and Porn] [Mechanical Turk]
  - whatever!
• Gather data in creative ways. [Whale Falls] [Trinkaus] [Drug Finances] [Scrotal Asymmetry] [Small World]
• Research by creating or doing. [Pek van Andel] [Kevin Warwick] [Tapeworms]
• Any other method can be good! [LUMC Experiment] [Gorillas]

Keeping it simple with relations:
Often, students propose research projects that search for causal relations between phenomena ("does A lead to B?"). In many cases, this leads to interesting research proposals. However, it may be wise to first search for proof of a relation between the phenomena under interest, without saying which is the cause and which is the effect. This is much easier to study and also yields interesting results. If a correlation is indeed found in the data, then a next step can be to study what causes what.

Contact one or more scientists and ask him/her/them two questions. Return to class and tell us the results and your opinions about them. The two questions are:

1. What's the most creative thing that you did as part of a research?
2. In your study field, what is an example of creative research by someone else?

Read Freakonomics. In groups of three students, discuss what style of creative research particularly appeals to you. Describe this research style in maximally one page, and why it appeals to you. Also, find at least 5 references to scientific papers that describe examples of this research style. Then write another page that summarizes these research projects and discusses why these are examples of the research style you chose. The due-date for this assignment is November 27.

In small groups, write a research proposal (max 2 pages) based on the prelimenary proposal that you did in Monday's class. The written proposal must contain more detail than the prelimenary proposal. Make sure that the proposed research can be done and reported by your group within three weeks. Preferably, it is a self-contained project that could be explained in non-technical terms to anyone. The proposal must discuss at least the following aspects of your research:

• project title
• research question
• some context of the research question; what is the relevance, how does it relate other research/results
• data collection
• how will the data be used to answer your research question? E.g. using which statistics, or other methods.

Do the research that you proposed to us (if we accepted it during Thursday's class) and write an academic-style paper about it (2 - 5 pages, title, authors, abstract, introduction, references, etcetera). If your proposal is not accepted, we will assign you one.
The deadline for the paper is Monday January 1st. The final paper must be sent on this day at the latest to Maarten via e-mail.

Some of the online articles in the list of resources are protected against downloading for copyright reasons. They can however be viewed from any computer that is connected to the university's computer network! All resources in this list can be accessed from that network.

[British Library]	Creative Research, British Library website
[Fisher]	Len Fisher (2004), Weighing the Soul: The Evolution of Scientific Beliefs, Orion Books Ltd.
[Ig Nobel Prize]	Wikipedia entry: the Ig Nobel prize for scientific achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."
[Feynman]	Richard P. Feynman (1999), The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Perseus Books (amazon.com)
	+ Wikipedia entry: Richard Feynman, slightly mad genius
[Swim in Syrup]	B. Gettelfinger & E.L. Cussler (2004), Will Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?, American Inst Chemical Engineers Journal, Vol 50(11), pp 2646-2647
[Trinkaus]	Alice S. Kaswell (2003), Trinkaus: An Informal Look, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol 9(3), pp 4-15
[101 Problems]	Martin Cohen (2001), 101 Philosophy Problems, Routledge Publishers (amazon.com)
[edge.org]	Edge Foundation, www.edge.org
[Freakonomics]	Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (2005), Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, HarperCollins Publishers
	+ Wikipedia entry: Steven Levitt, rogue economist
[Black Names]	Roland G. Fryer Jr. & Steven D. Levitt (2004), The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol 119(3), pp 767-805
[Seafood Menus]	Glenn Jones (2005), Restaurant Seafood Prices Since 1850s Help Plot Marine Harvests Through History, Texas A&M University, research in progress
[Bill Bryson]	Chapter 1 of Bill Bryson (2001), Down Under, Black Swan
[Personal Ads]	D.S. Strassberg DS and S. Holty (2003), An experimental study of women's Internet personal ads, Archives of Sexual Bahavior, Vol 32(3), pp 253-260
[Call of the Mall]	Paco Underhill (2004), The Call of the Mall: A Walking Tour Through the Shopping Mall, Gardners Books (amazon.com)
[Rosenhan Experiment]	D. Rosenhan (1973), On being sane in insane places, Science, Vol 179, pp 250-258
	+ A good description of the Rosenhan experiments
	+ Wikipedia entry: the Rosenhan experiments
[Captchas and Porn]	Cory Doctorow (2004), Solving and creating captchas with free porn, BoingBoing online magazine 27/1/2004
	+ Wikipedia entry: CAPTCHAs
[Mechanical Turk]	Amazon Mechanical Turk, an example of "artificial artificial intelligence"
	+ James Surowiecki (2005), The Wisdom of Crowds, Anchor Publishers
[Whale Falls]	Professor Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii sinks dead whales to study fish
	+ Craig Smith, Bigger is Better: The Role of Whales as Detritus in Marine Ecosystems, to appear in "Whales, Whaling and Marine Ecosystems" by James Estes (ed.), University of California Press
[Drug Finances]	Steven D. Levitt & Sudhir A. Venkatesh (2000), An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2000, pp 755-789
[Scrotal Asymmetry]	Chris McManus (1976), Scrotal asymmetry in man and in ancient sculpture, Nature, Vol 259, pp 426
[Small World]	J. Travers & S. Milgram (1969), An experimental study of the small world problem, Sociometry, Vol 32, pp 425-443
	+ Wikipedia entry: Small World Phenomenon in which Milgram's "small world" experiment is described, and criticized.
[Pek van Andel]	W.W. Schultz, P. van Andel, I. Sabelis & E. Mooyaart (1999), Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal, British Medical Journal, Vol 319, pp 1596-1600
	+ Pek van Andel in VARA Nieuwslicht 3/11/2005
[Kevin Warwick]	Website of Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England
[Tapeworms]	Biologist Mike Leahy grows tapeworms, inside himself. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, BBC Television 26/11/2003
[LUMC Experiment]	F.W. Dekker & A.J.M. de Craen, On pens and presents: a teaching experiment to assess the influence of pharmaceutical industry promotional activitities on medical students, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), article in preparation
[Gorillas]	D.J. Simons & C.F. Chabris (1999), Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, Perception, Vol 28, pp 1059-1074
	+ The research video