The conference was initiated by one of the world’s leading creativity researchers, professor Mark E. Runco, and hosted 330 participants from 28 countries as well as two keynote speakers and ten invited speakers. The conference consisted of workshops, boom talks, sessions, panels, and more than 250 presentations. As a representative of the Center for Digital Creativity, Michael gave a 15-minute talk entitled “Creativity “in the Key of Easy? Why Digital Tools for Professional Creativity Call for Interdisciplinary Research,” which served to help position the center’s aim, scope, and preliminary contributions.

What Michael found interesting about this particular conference was how interdisciplinary it was, which is quite unusual in the field of creativity research. Even though the conference was the first of its kind, Michael notes that the conference was a huge success. This was partly due to the format of the conference. In contrast to traditional academic conferences, there were no prolonged peer-review processes; instead the participants were encouraged to write an extended abstract emphasizing both new research findings as interdisciplinary contributions and the motivation for attending the event. This dynamic, Michael says, created a very informal and fruitful environment  of knowledge exchange in which attendees were able to orientate themselves widely within the variegated field of creativity research. . Furthermore, the format allowed people from both industry and academia to meet up and discuss creativity from their particular point of view. This allowed for a rare networking opportunity with so many experts whom it would normally be difficult to meet and interact with on one specific occasion.. Given the success of this inaugural conference, a second one is likely follow next year.