How can creativity enter into the scientific process?
It's not just ideas for studies...
(Updated 30.10.2023 due to input received on social media: Sabine Sonnentag on LinkedIn; Peter Kahlert on Mastodon)
Most people would acknowledge that creativity is an important part of doing science. And the place where creativity matters most would be in coming up with new research questions or in terms of solving a particular, given problem. This is certainly a key place for creativity to enter into the scientific workflow, and one that interests me a lot. But it’s not the only point where creativity matters.
In the research process as a whole, there is a place for novel ideas at several different points, in addition to coming up with research questions (also see this article by Cook (2020) that touches on some of these points).
Research design/ approach
Basically every aspect of the design of a research study, given a particular question that already exists, can be highly creative. Of course there are confines in terms of set standards of the design of experiments that are not subject to creative changes (randomization, independence of treatments, etc.), but beyond that there is plenty of room for ideas. For example, can you transfer one experimental design or approach from one field to another? One example from my work was to transfer an accepted design from biodiversity- ecosystem functioning research (randomly sampling from a pool of species to generate a gradient in species richness) to global change research replacing species with global change factors). The question was already there: what happens when there are many factors of global change at the same time. But the experimental approach was the new idea.
Data analysis and presentation (communication within the research community)
Presenting the results in figures is an excellent place for letting the creative juices flow. How can you make the main message of a figure clearer, so that it is obvious to the reader what’s going on? This applies to both result figures and conceptual figures. This is perhaps the part that most strongly intersects with art and design, and that most people will immediately recognize as ‘creative’.
Interpretation of results
Maybe the results were not what you expected? This happens sometimes, and it can mean failure, but it can also mean opportunity if you can view your results from a different perspective. This happened to me. For example, one time all my fungal inocula of several species of AM fungi failed to infect (likely heat-killed). The experiment per se was a failure; however, when looking at the results, there were still effects on soil properties. The effects were likely due to microbes associated with the AM fungal hyphae. This actually directly led to a new research line (including publication and a major federal grant funded). It would not have happened without this change in perspective. There are probably many other examples of such discoveries arising from failed experiments.
Communication to the public
When presenting research to the public, the challenge is often to make it relevant and interesting, to come up with a narrative that will relate to people. What stories can we tell that will make our research relevant, that makes it easier to understand. What comparisons can we make, for example, to illustrate certain huge or very small numbers. This is not easy, but definitely a huge opportunity for creative ideas.
Application/ entrepreneurial ideas (products/physical goods, services, information products)
Finally, and this is of course also completely optional, it takes a whole other set of creative thinking to ponder scientific findings in a certain light and spin them towards an application.
So, it seems creativity is really woven into the entire workflow of doing research. Of course you don’t need to do all of this, these are just ideas and examples. Perhaps you find you’re better at one than the other. This is great! I believe we need excellent ideas at all these points.
What do you think? Have I missed anything? What have your experiences been with creativity at these different points of the process?
You can also watch this as a YouTube video:
Creativity is problem solving.