The Creative Scholars Project at Brown: Exploring creativity with and without AI

For the past year, I've met weekly with Professors Ian Gonsher and Carlos Aizenman as part of the Creative Scholars Project, which Ian leads at Brown University. Together we've been asking what it means to be creative with technology, especially now that generative and agentic AI tools can produce text, images, and code in seconds.

Our conversations have focused on creative synthesis: how new ideas come from holding opposing perspectives in tension and working through them. We're developing a model of this process that we call critical flow, which combines the absorption of a creative flow state with the reflective, critical stance needed to judge what we make. We see this tension between immersion and critique as essential to creative work, and as something AI tools can either support or short-circuit, depending on how they're designed and used.

We first shared this work in Brown's Faculty Bulletin and now added it to the Brown Digital Repository as "Creative Scholars Project: No AI Was Used to Create This Document" (DOI: 10.26300/4bba-jf35). 

We're now developing this model in two directions: a journal manuscript, "The Creative Dialectics of Critical Flow," on how structured dialectics enhance creative synthesis in design education, and a workshop for educators and students. 

I'm grateful to Ian and Carlos for a weekly practice that has become a "generative" part of my intellectual life.