Sanctuaries for Wandering Minds: A Practice Research Workshop (Penny Hay, Mike Lewis, Luke MacNab) (part of doing together 25)

Sanctuaries for Wandering Minds: A Practice Research Workshop7th April 2025Modern society demands creativity to thrive, yet too often our education systems and workplace environments prioritise convergent thinking, logic and problem-solving, at the expense of divergent thought, daydreaming which fuels imagination and innovation. With the relentless pace of daily life, opportunities for unstructured reflection, essential for breakthroughs, are increasingly rare.This workshop invited participants to explore how spaces can encourage creative, cognitive wandering. Through a collaborative, interactive exercise, the workshop explored how ideas can evolve as they are passed between participants, each building upon the last through mediums including sketching, storytelling, movement, or sound. This iterative process mirrors the layered, unpredictable nature of creativity, offering a playful way to explore how environments shape thought.The session culminated in a discussion reflecting on emerging themes, shared interpretations, and the balance between structured and unstructured creativity, encouraging participants to rethink how space and interaction influence imagination.doing together 25doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Art Research Centre (Bath School of Art, Film and Media) in collaboration with Bath School of Design and the Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries.doing together is a platform to connect staff, students, and the community through making, collaboration and experimentation.Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.