Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design - Hardcover

Kudrowitz, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 103223220X ISBN 13: 9781032232201

Publisher: Routledge, 2023

Synopsis

Blending popular culture and design theory, framed by a decade of scholarly research, this book highlights how play and humor fuel innovation. Now, more than ever, we are in need of creative solutions to global problems, but creative skills and abilities decline over time without intervention and practice.

Sparking Creativity provides empirically supported methods for embracing the often-trivialized domains of play and humor to increase our creativity. It shows that topical examples, such as Seinfeld's humor, the Apples to Apples board game, and the Adventure Time cartoon series, are more closely related to innovation than you might first think. The book is organized into five main parts, each containing short, engaging subsections and informative, playful, and colorful illustrations to demonstrate concepts.

Written in a humorous and accessible style, this book is aimed toward creative-minded entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, industry leaders, parents, educators, and students. It encourages a playful approach throughout a design process to produce truly innovative solutions.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Kudrowitz, PhD, is a professor of product design and department head in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, USA. There, he founded and directed the product design program from 2011–2021. Kudrowitz received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying humor, creativity, and idea generation. Kudrowitz is interested in how creativity is perceived, evaluated, and learned. He has years of experience working with the toy industry and has taught toy design for over a decade. Kudrowitz co-designed a Nerf toy, an elevator simulator that was in operation at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and a ketchup-dispensing robot that was featured on the Martha Stewart Show. He is also the associate editor of the International Journal of Food Design.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 103223220X
• ISBN 13: 9781032232201
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276