Creativity in Our Lives
Virtual /Instructor Zoom | Registration opens 5/4/2026 12:00 AM MST (Arizona)
Everyone is creative, but some forms of creativity sometimes have more perceptual salience than others. For example, as in the definition below, people most often associate the concept with graphic art, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, and they make judgments about the level of creativity on a continuum (a range), rather than a dichotomy (creative/not creative). However, people engage in creative thinking in every field. Some people think that engineers are at the top of the list of creative thinkers because they often need to solve problems that require impressive forms of innovation (creativity). Even though the aforementioned fields require creativity, other fields do to. Life is full of problems to be solved, some small some enormous, and those problems often require creative thinking. Of course, sometimes we solve problems by applying some knowledge that we have learned, but sometimes the problems are new to us, so we need to use our “imagination or original ideas” to solve them. In this workshop, we will consider ways in which we have witnessed and experience creativity in our lives.
Duane Roen
Roen, Duane - has been tracing his roots since his teenage years, building a database with more than 32,000 ancestors. He and his wife, Maureen Roen, have also been recording their family history since 1978 by writing more than 19,000 daily journal entries on their children and other family members. Combining his professional and personal interests, Duane worked with colleagues to establish courses on writing and recording family history at Arizona State University. He also is founding coordinator of the Project for Writing and Recording Family History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at ASU.