Abstract
The golden rule of design is 'understand your materials'. For human activities and human science those materials include the physical and mental abilities of people and their individual personalities and cognitive styles. Within our own academic or design endeavours those people may be the subject of our studies, but also include ourselves. If we wish to design for people we need to understand them, and if we wish to do this effectively, we need to understand ourselves. In this talk I will analyse examples of processes and tools based on such understanding including some that foster technical creativity, even amongst those who would not consider themselves creative, and some that help in the difficult process of academic writing. Crucially, I will discuss personality prosthesis: taking seriously our differences in personality and seeing how each individual can surround themselves with structures and scaffolding that enables them to achieve their goals given who they are. For this I will also draw on lessons from my own thousand-mile walk around Wales in 2013.
Keywords: creativity, personality prosthesis, individual differences, cognitive style, design
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