PUBLIC LECTURE: Reimagining and Inhabiting Extended Minds: Creative Intelligence for Complexity - Dr Barbara Doran
The DCU Centre for Possibility Studies, DCU Business School is pleased to invite you to a special lecture by Dr Barbara Doran, Program Director of the Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation program at the
Transdisciplinary School, UTS Sydney.
PUBLIC LECTURE: Reimagining and Inhabiting Extended Minds: Creative Intelligence for Complexity
What if the mind is not confined to the brain, but extends through body, environment, relationships, materials, and culture? What if creativity is not an optional extra, but a core human capacity for navigating complexity?
Our times demand new capacities for thinking, imagining, and working together. This talk explores how we might reimagine and inhabit extended minds — forms of intelligence distributed across people, places, tools, stories, systems, interoception, and material engagement. Drawing on theories of the extended mind, embodied cognition, Warm Data, and transdisciplinary creative practice, creativity is reframed as a metabolic capacity intrinsic to navigating complexity: the ability to expand perception, transcend limiting assumptions, hold paradox, generate new possibilities, and transform within uncertain terrain. Today’s complex challenges require capacities beyond separation, hierarchy, fixed expertise, and linear solutions. We need to work as living webs of intelligence — adaptive, relational, and responsive. Creativity, in this sense, becomes a capacity for reframing problems, perceiving hidden relationships, and imagining alternatives.
The talk explores practical skills, many drawn from arts-based practice, for working across disciplines, ecosystems of knowledge, and diverse ways of knowing — moving from me to we, from individual expertise to collective capability. It considers the micro-moments that build new habits of attunement: deep listening, noticing patterns, holding ambiguity, making meaning together, and creating shared language across difference. Using examples from numerous creative projects and ideas developed in her new book, Creative Practice and Embodied Narratives: Transdisciplinary Inquiry through the Body, Story, and System, the session offers a fresh lens on how intelligence may be expanded through biopsychosocial integration, embodied cognition, and relational practice.
Dr Barbara Doran is an award-winning artist, transdisciplinary scholar, and educator whose work explores creativity as a catalyst for health and social change. She is Program Director of the Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation program at theTransdisciplinary School, UTS Sydney; Creative Lead for SPHERE, a major multi- partner health collaboration; and Chair of the Arts Health Network (NSW/ACT).
With more than 30 years of experience spanning public health, urban planning, health psychology, the arts, and higher education, Barbara uses creative practice to generate new insights, foster collaboration across diverse knowledge ecologies, and help communities and institutions respond to complexity. She is the author of three books, and her current work focuses on transdisciplinary practice, embodied minds, relational care, and creative futures.