Conference

IDR Theme 2025 -

Creative Intelligence: Intuition, Insight, and Innovation in Design Theory and Practice

This year’s Integrated Design Research (IDR) Conference, themed “Creative Intelligence”, delves into the evolving relationship between imaginative thinking and informed decision-making in the field of design. The conference invites exploration into how creative intelligence emerges at the intersection of intuition and analysis, tradition and innovation, emotion and logic. It aims to examine how this synergy shapes contemporary design practices, tools, and pedagogies, while addressing pressing social, technological, and ecological challenges.

“Creative Intelligence” emphasizes design as a multidimensional mode of inquiry—where creativity is purposeful, and intelligence is expansive. It encourages a rethinking of how designers generate insight, synthesize knowledge, and craft meaningful change across diverse cultural and disciplinary contexts.

The conference will explore the following sub-themes through the lens of creative intelligence:

Society and Culture: Investigating how design, infused with creative intelligence, responds to shifting cultural narratives, social complexities, and collective aspirations.
Vernacular Knowledge and Practice: Highlighting the role of indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems as vital sources of creative insight and adaptive intelligence in design.
Economy and Industries: Examining how creative intelligence drives innovation, value creation, and transformation within economic systems and industrial practices.
Design Pedagogy and Thinking: Exploring how design education cultivates creative intelligence—through emerging methodologies, interdisciplinary thinking, and reflective practice.
Design Across Technologies: Analyzing the relationship between creative intelligence and technological advancement, particularly in the age of AI, digital fabrication, and interactive systems.
Circularity and Sustainability: Addressing how creative intelligence informs regenerative design practices that prioritize environmental responsibility, circular economies, and systemic change.

Join us for IDR 2025 as we engage in a dynamic convergence of perspectives, methods, and provocations that celebrate creative intelligence as the driving force behind meaningful design. Through insightful discussions, innovative presentations, and collaborative exchanges, the conference will explore how intuition, insight, and innovation come together to shape the future of design theory and practice.

Date and Venue

13th - 15th, November 2025

University of Moratuwa,
Bandaranayake Mawatha, Moratuwa 10400 Sri Lanka.
www.uom.lk

Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speech by

Rikke Hansen

Graphic designer / Teaching Associate Professor

Rikke Hansen is a Graphic Designer and Educator and she works on and researches design development projects and has her own design studio doing print and digital design, doing product development, branding and consulting for companies and organisations. Has been Juror in several international Poster Biennals and Design competiotions worldwide. COFOD excelence Award winner. Graphis Silver, Gold and Platinum Award winner, China Poster Biennal Silver winner. Mut zur Wut winner. She has been exhibiting, giving lectures and workshops internationally in Europe, Middle East, Asia and America.

More info www.wheelsandwaves.dk

Vision Speech by

Sarita Sundar

Designer and Design Historian, India ‎ ‎

Sarita Sundar is a designer and design historian based in India. At Hanno, her heritage interpretation and design consultancy (www.hanno.in), she combines 35 years of working with brand design and strategy with her academic training in museum studies. Through the years, her work has looked critically at how culture engages with the visual, ranging from research into Indian vernacular typography to studies of intangible culture in performance practices.She has a particular interest in unearthing alternate views of modernity in design practices and research. Her recent publication: ‘From the Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India’, culturally and temporally, maps the journey of a ubiquitous and everyday object, while also challenging existing norms of design historiography. During a recent Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellowship she investigated the resistances to modernism in Indian and American design histories. She has conducted lectures at academic and cultural institutions across India and abroad.

Sarita has a Post-Graduation in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (1990), and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK (2016). She ran an award winning multi-disciplinary design company, Trapeze for a decade before moving her focus to a research oriented consultancy at Hanno. She received The Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize for 2016 from the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and an Arts Research Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) to study Poothan Thira, a ritual performance from Kerala (2015-2017). Sarita continues her fascination for seats through a project that studies the Planter’s Chair in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Lee of TUV Delft.