The emphasis on producing future-ready graduates with attributes of critical-creative thinking for their employability is a global goal. Despite this, few studies have developed effective pedagogies that promote this ability across chemistry domains and real-world contexts. Therefore, this study explores the promotion of productive creative thinking skills in first-year undergraduate chemistry students, using real-world contexts and collaborative dialogic approaches. A design-based research framework is utilised to inform the iterative design of instructional interventions with a collection of student work and interviews. Collaborative discourse was embedded in active learning workshops as the learning environment. The first cycle involved the design of an intervention, informed by theoretical perspectives and empirical research, accounting for students’ prior learning and cohort size. Adjustments were required to foster creative thinking and engagement. In the second cycle, adjustments were made, and audio recordings of peer discourse were collected. Reflexive thematic data analysis is informed by inquiry behaviours, bisociation, Simonton’s chance configuration theory and Torrance’s creativity test measures. First cycle outcomes revealed flaws in task design that limited opportunities for exploration of creative thinking due to simple yet non-creative or complex yet creative, relatable, real-world applications. The second and third cycles revealed more creative, out-of-the-box, insightful, and instinctive responses due to improved scaffolding, encouraging students to think at the sub-microscopic level. Students’ reasoning followed initiation-response-peer evaluation/feedback pattern, whereby initiations and responses largely took the form of inquiring (exploring conceptual meaning of core concepts, and describing target ideas), intelligent guesses, and confident propositions (divergent/convergent ideas informed by prior disciplinary knowledge and personal real-world experiences). Transitions in their scientific reasoning largely followed the inductive-deductive pathway. In this presentation, the relationship between instructional design and dimensions of creative thinking is explored. Hence, this HDR study seeks to provide valuable recommendations for chemistry education practice.