Altringer Eagle Lab

We study how people learn to make things and to tell when they’re good. Creativity has a making half and a judging half. Making is ideas, building, and getting work done with other people. Judging is noticing what is in front of you and deciding whether it is good, or worth doing at all. Most research on creative problem solving is about the making half.

The judging half is harder to see. Experts in creative fields can tell, from an internal point of view developed over time, what is working and what is not, and they can say why. One of the oldest words for this is taste. The lab treats creativity and creative judgment as learnable skills, and studies amateur and expert methods to inform new courses and programs that train the next generation of innovators.

The lab runs a research and fellowship program: the Problem Genome, the evidence-based design education studies, Visualizing Design Taste, and Designer Decisions; the Balter Fellowship, which invites mid-career experts to campus for a year to work on a new idea with the team (seven fellows in 2026–27); and Spark Grants, tiny grants for anyone at Dartmouth to make something creative for someone else.