Mike Sharples

Mike Sharples
Mike Sharples is Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Birmingham, UK. He leads the University's Educational Technology Research Group, comprising some 30 staff and postgraduate researchers. The focus of the Group's research is human-centred design of technology for collaborative, informal and lifelong learning. Current work includes two major projects funded by the EC 5th Framework Information Society Technologies programme: MOBILearn, to develop mobile technologies for informal and contextual learning, and The Lab of Tomorrow to design wearable and embedded technology for science learning. Mike Sharples is also Director of the University's Centre for Educational Technology and Distance Learning.

I would suggest another approach to Nature Inspired Creative Design would be to take a more human-centred perspective, based on Naturalism in Human-centred Creative Design. Naturalism in design stems from the 19th century poets and painters, particularly Wordsworth and Constable, who drew on nature for inspiration. This was a deliberate and self-aware process, which involved, in Wordsworth's words, "emotion recollected in tranquility". The general approach was to develop an immersion in and emotional response to Nature, which could later be summoned up and explored through a process of movement between low focus (dreamlike) and high focus (problem solving) thought. In my book on "How We Write: Writing as Creative Design" I've discussed this in relation to creative writing, but there is also an opportunity to explore nature-inspired creative design in, for example, HCI and software engineering.

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