Curiosity. Connection. Craft.

Rather than treating creativity as an abstract ideal or a purely individual trait, the Creativity Lab treats it as a craft and a public resource, that is something that must be studied, practiced, and defended if it is to remain a source of innovation and democratic resilience.

Why We Exist 

Creativity plays a critical role in innovation, democratic participation, and societal adaptation. Yet the underlying processes – behavioral, social, technological, and ethical – remain insufficiently understood, especially as AI tools become increasingly embedded in everyday creative practices.

The Creativity Lab exists to address this gap. Our goals are threefold:

1. To advance scholarly understanding of creativity, with particular attention to how digital and AI-based tools reshape creative processes, expertise, and collaboration.
2. To convene diverse perspectives across academia, policy, and practice, creating structured spaces for exchange that challenge assumptions and surface new insights.
3. To translate research into accessible, policy-relevant, and imaginative formats, supporting evidence-informed decision-making and broader public engagement.

What We Do 

The Creativity Lab is structured around three core pillars:

• Studying Creativity: ​​We conduct empirical and theory-informed research to understand how creativity emerges in individual, collective, and institutional settings, from artistic production and problem-solving to policy design. A central focus lies on how AI and digital tools reshape creative processes, redistribute power, and introduce new forms of dependency, bias, and exclusion.
• Connecting People and Ideas: We design research-driven convenings such as workshops, design-informed sprints, and storytelling formats – that bring together researchers, youth, artists, and decision-makers around clearly defined questions. These processes are not designed to produce quick “solutions,” but to surface tensions, test assumptions, and generate insight under realistic constraints.
• Translating Research For Different Audiences: We treat translation as a core scholarly responsibility. Research findings are transformed into accessible, policy-relevant, and imaginative formats, including illustrated reports, short films, exhibitions, educational resources, and digital toolkits that enable engagement beyond academic audiences and inform decision-making in practice.

Focal Areas

Initial focal areas include:

1. Resilient Narratives for Democracy: Working with students and civil-society partners, we examine how creative storytelling can strengthen democratic discourse in digital spaces. Rather than focusing solely on moderation or removal, we explore how positive narratives can be designed, tested, and scaled to counter anti-democratic speech and restore agency in the public sphere.
2. Speculative Futures in Public Space: In collaboration with cultural institutions such as museums, the Lab creates public-facing experiments that invite participants to explore alternative futures for places they care about. Using a combination of generative AI tools, artistic methods, and guided reflection, these projects turn speculation into a collective practice, helping people imagine, question, and negotiate possible futures together.
3. Human-Centric Governance and Creative Agency: We translate research into formats that support evidence-informed governance. This includes working with regulators and public institutions to develop guidelines that protect young people in digital environments while preserving their capacity to act as creators, not just consumers, in an AI-driven world.