SENSORY IMAGINATION LAB: An Applied Workshop in Extended Minds and Creative Complexity
The DCU Centre for Possibility Studies, DCU Business School is pleased to invite you to a special workshop led by Dr Barbara Doran, Program Director of the Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation program at the Transdisciplinary School, UTS Sydney.
Sensory Imagination Lab: An Applied Workshop in Extended Minds and Creative Complexity
Immerse in a Sensory Imagination Lab where you will explore how sensory awareness can unlock fresh perspectives, and generate new possibilities for research, teaching, and real-world practice. Some of our richest sources of insight arise before conscious reasoning through sensation, embodied awareness, subtle perception. When we play with our senses, we hone interoceptive attunement and fitness.
Through a sequence of sensory experiences moving through sound, touch, texture, spatial awareness, olfaction, visual reframing, and internal sensing, you will disrupt habitual modes of thinking and access new ways of noticing, connecting, and imagining. The senses are approached as integrated creative portals that can reveal overlooked variables, surface hidden assumptions, and catalyse unexpected combinations. The workshop culminates in a story-building conversation that opens out new possibilities, exploring how and where these emerging perspectives might be applied.
The Sensory Imagination Lab is a transdisciplinary space drawing on a cross-section of embodied cognition, creative practice, psychogeography, design thinking, arts-based practices, and biopsychosocial approaches. It offers a rigorous yet playful environment for expanding perception, enriching creative repertoires, and generating practical new directions. Rather than teaching creativity as a technique, it invites participants to experience intelligence as embodied, relational, sensory, and materially distributed.
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.