30 April - 2 May 2019, Chicheley Hall, Milton Keynes

In 2019, 28 PhD students from three CDTS based at Imperial, Cambridge and Nottingham participated in a two-day creativity sandpit, spread across three days. There were three companies involved in the sandpit that each presented a challenge for the students to work on:

• McLaren Applied Technologies - Use of sporting data to attract new audiences and deliver new levels of engagement
• Blue Bear Systems Research - Use of swarms of UAVs in rapid disaster relief
• The Trade Desk - Using bidding data to help advertisers plan and optimise campaigns, and help users to have better advert seeing experiences

Together with academics from Imperial, the challengers participated as mentors throughout the sandpit, giving valuable guidance and feedback. The underlying theme of the workshop was reflecting on various activities, all of which can enhance creativity in different ways.

During the first day, the students learned about the challenges, started asking questions and having initial ideas, got to know each other, and built Rube Goldberg contraptions for popping party crackers. There was also an activity to demonstrate different aids to being creative. On the second day they constructed mind maps and thought of potential solutions ideas for the problems before forming small groups to work on one of the problems for the remainder of the workshop. After initial presentations and feedback from everyone, the mentors ran a “test lab” to help the students challenge themselves further about their ideas. On the final half-day, the students presented their ideas for final feedback and then gave an elevator pitch to conclude.