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That's what I found the most fascinating is when people are acting before they know what they're doing, and then the creativity emerges from engaging in the process. The creativity doesn't come at the beginning. You don't start by having a brilliant insight, you just dive into the process. And then as you're engaging in the process, the ideas emerge.
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The key to creativity isn't about having brilliant ideas in isolation, but but about cultivating our ability to observe the world around us and make the intuitive leaps that connect disparate ideas. Keith Sawyer, a creativity researcher who spent over a decade interviewing hundreds of art and design professors and students to understand how creative professionals learn to see and think differently, writes about this in his new book, Learning to See.
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Keith brings a unique perspective to creativity research. A jazz pianist turned MIT computer science graduate, he designed video games in the early 1980s before pivoting to study the science of creativity under the legendary Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago. His latest book challenges common myths about the creative process and reveals why the most successful artists and designers don't start with a vision they discover it through an iterative dialogue with their work. In her conversation, Keith shares insights from his research on On Improvisational Creativity, explains why ambiguity is essential to the creative process, and discusses how AI is reshaping but not replacing human creativity.
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Whether you're struggling with a blank canvas or wondering how to sustain creativity throughout your career, Keith offers practical wisdom drawn from decades of studying how creative professionals actually work. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
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And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our Premium subscriber feed. DesignBetter Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. You get four episodes per month rather than just two. All are ad free and you get invited to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. That's designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just seven bucks a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also supports your design community. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription right now, just shoot us an email at subscriptions and we'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. DesignBetter is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show. Keith Sawyer, welcome to Design Better.
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It's great to be here. Thank you.
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C
Keith, you've got a new book out called Learning to See, which is super interesting. You spent over a decade talking to hundreds of college professors and students at art and design schools trying to understand how people teach other people to see things. What was it that brought you to this topic and led to this book?
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I started talking to art and design professors in 2010 and I thought I'd be done in six months. But I was so fascinated by these compelling and articulate stories that I kept seeking out new artists and designers. And I wanted to see, you know, how universal is this way of thinking and seeing. So in 2010 I was at the Savannah College of Art and Design scad. I was there on a sabbatical leave and I had never been to an art and design school. I'm not an artist myself. I don't have a BFA or an mfa, so I came in as a creativity researcher. My own research focused on performance, creativity, improvisational comedy, and jazz. I got into creativity research because I'm a jazz pianist. So I'd written a lot about improvisational creativity. I didn't know anything about art and design, so I thought, let me go to an art in a design school and I'll ask them how they teach people how to be creative. And so that'll be my contribution to creativity research. So it all started in 2010. And then, yeah, I just kept going. I loved having these conversations. I kept learning new stuff and then 10 years later I thought it's time to write this book.
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B
So you spent your recent time on the book and looks like in academia. But I wanted to rewind a bit to your very early career because it's super interesting. Looks like your first job. And I'm basing this off sleuthing we did on LinkedIn, so there might be inaccuracies, but you worked as a video game designer and then somewhere called Keenan Systems and did some early work on artificial intelligence. Video game design is interesting for us. We just had on a few months ago Jordan Mechner, who's the creator of Karateka and Prince of Persia. So some early video games and the computer games in the 1980s and early 1990s. And I was kind of a computer game nerd as a kid. So talk to us a Little bit about that. What got you started in that career? How did that kind of lead as a stepping stone to the other work you've done?
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A
My undergraduate degree was in computer science. I went to MIT and I didn't know anything about creativity research, but I've been a jazz pianist ever since, you know, high school. And I played in the jazz band at MIT. That was 1982. So computer science graduates, you know, there wasn't entrepreneurship and there wasn't the PC or the Internet. So a lot of the computer science graduates would get hired in the military industrial complex. And I interviewed with AT&T and with Hewlett Packard. I was on an airplane flying to an interview in San Francisco and I saw another guy with an MIT ring on. They're pretty distinctive college rings. And I just went up and started talking to him and turned out he said, I've started a video game design company and we're flying out to California to meet with Atari. And then he said, oh, you're a jazz pianist, you probably know something about creativity. You know, we're trying to hire people who are creative who also can code. In 1982, you know, not a lot of people knew how to code and most of them were not at least stereotypically creative. So they said, yeah, when you're back in Cambridge, come over and interview with us. I was like, you know, no one had heard of entrepreneurship. No one I knew was going to a four person company. So it was kind of a leap at that time to say, you know, I'm turning away from Hewlett Packard and I'm taking a real leap on this tiny company. But video game design sounds super cool.
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C
That's cool. And also early on, when you're working on your PhD in Chicago, you did your PhD with a legend, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is a very difficult name to.
- [07:37]
A
Write and say, that's right, you got it right.
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C
Yeah, Most people will know his work on flow and flow state creativity and kind of getting lost in a flow state. And he's been very influential in Silicon Valley. I'm curious, what was it like working with him?
- [07:53]
A
Oh yeah, that was just a phenomenal opportunity because you mentioned I designed video games for two years and then I actually did artificial intelligence management consulting in the 1980s and basically I burned out in the late 1980s. I said, you know, I want to go back to graduate school, I want to dive deeper. I really want to find out what goes on when people are being creative. So I went to the university of Chicago. And that's where Mike Csikszentmihalyi was a longtime professor. And I started in 1990 and that was the same year he came out with this blockbuster book called Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience. You know, millions of copies. He was traveling around the world. He went to Davos, Aspen. Yeah, so it was a heady time. And I just happened to be there working with him on his next project, which was a study of exceptional creators later in life. Over 50, at least. Over 50. So I did a bunch of these interviews with some of these exceptional creators and that was his second book that came out in 1996, and it's simply called Creativity. So yeah, I had this opportunity to work very closely with him. A very inspirational individual, very soft spoken. Honestly, I don't think he was a great TEDx speaker. There weren't TEDx back then, so he wasn't the dynamic speaker on stage, but he was this very calm, centered, spiritual individual.
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C
So I mean, you've been studying creativity and the way the mind works for some time now and presumably learned a ton from working with Csikszentmihalyi. Are there some, like, common themes that have emerged over these decades of your research about the creative process?
- [09:37]
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Absolutely. And I think it all goes back to improvisation. And I don't know if I'm just seeing improvisation everywhere because I'm a jazz musician, but. But at the beginning of my career I'm studying. That's what I found the most fascinating is when people are acting before they know what they're doing and then the creativity emerges from engaging in the process. The creativity doesn't come at the beginning. You don't start by having a brilliant insight. You just dive into the process. And then as you're engaging in the process, the ideas emerge. And that was particularly compelling to me. So my whole career the keywords are improvisation and emergence. Then when I went to study artists and designers, I thought maybe kind of like this lone genius insight sort of myth that you have a brilliant idea for your painting and then you just go in the studio and you throw it out on the canvas. But that's not what professional painters and designers were telling me. What they were telling me just like an improvisational theater performance. They said we start doing the work before we know what we're doing and we go through this iterative wandering process of working and then the ideas emerge from the work. So I mentioned painters, but designers told me the same thing. Graphic designers, advertising architects. This was shared across the visual arts. The nature of the creative Process being wandering and iterative and essentially improvisational. So, yeah, I would say that's the core of the creative process. It's this iterative nature where you have dead ends, you have restarts, you have a kind of wandering, exploratory path. Yeah, you could think of it on a group level, individuals improvising together, or you could think of it as a designer in the studio going through an essentially improvisational process when you were doing.
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The work on creators who kind of hit their creative stride later in life. And it's an interesting coincidence, but we just interviewed a musician named Fitz from Fitz and the Tantrums, who kind of broke out as a pop star in his mid-40s, which is pretty unusual. But were there any common traits that you found there? Was it either just that it was kind of a timing thing or something that allowed them kind of later in life, in their maybe 40s or 50s, to access that creative thinking?
- [11:54]
A
The reason why Mike Csikszentmihalyi chose to go down this path is because even then, back in the 1980s, a lot of people would associate creativity with. With youth and, you know, the stereotypical painter, Pablo Picasso, or software company founders. A lot of these people are young when they come up with their ideas. So Csikszentmihalyi was interested in how do you sustain creativity over a lifetime? A lot of people can have one brilliant hit or one brilliant insight, but what is it going to take to sustain that creativity year after year and decade after decades? And I found that to be very compelling. Again, it's what I found. The interviews I had were with artists and designers who had at least 20 years of experience. So most of them were in their 40s or their 50s. And they would say a lot of the same things to me about what we're trying to teach our students in BFA and MFA programs. We're trying to teach them a deliberate process. We're trying to teach them mindsets and ways of living that are going to sustain them through a career as a creative. We don't want you to just have one brilliant insight. We don't want you to have one vision and then spend the next 40 years doing that. So that's what we saw when we interviewed people in their 50s. These were people who had sustained their creativity. And a lot of the stories they told were about having multiple ideas, multiple projects. Some of them worked in multiple disciplines, some. So they kept doing new things. They kept changing. They kept applying their mindsets and their practices to new projects and new questions. They didn't just keep doing the same thing over and over again for 50 years. So I'd say that's a message for any creative. Try to get out there and change it up. Don't just do the same thing over and over again. A lot of these designers told me, that just won't sustain you. It's going to be a boring life.
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C
Yeah, we see that with jazz musicians working with different collaborators. People like Herbie Hancock, who's like 82, still touring, still working with new people. He's connected with different instruments and different styles. Miles Davis famously just sort of hit the reset button over and over again to try new things. And there are lots of other artists out there. Pablo Picasso, you mentioned him. But in your book, you talk about seeing as a means of thinking. Tell us a little bit about what you've learned about that.
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It's a little bit mysterious, isn't it, to say you're learning how to see? Like, what is that? What does it mean to see? I mean, we all look at the world, we all see stuff. Even if you're 18 years old and you're starting art school, you can sit in front of a human model and you can sketch the model, and you can do a pretty good job. So what is it that they're teaching? I discovered this language of we're teaching them how to see. When I interviewed these artists and designers, I would say, how are you teaching students how to create? And everyone was quite uncomfortable with that question. A lot of them would say, we're not teaching students how to create. Or they'll say something like, the students are already creative. We're teaching them how to realize the potential they have as creatives. But many of them, when I said, how do you teach them how to be creative? They would say, well, we're not doing that, but we are teaching them how to see. And I said, wow, okay. So that's why I ended up calling my book Learning to See. As a matter of fact, a bunch of these people said, don't put creativity in the title. Don't put the word creativity in the title. So I was like, okay, what else am I going to call it? Yeah. And Learning to see was what so many said. And it's hard to describe. I mean, if I could describe it, you wouldn't need to go to art school, you know, for four years. They told me that it takes at least two years. So I would say there's a lot I can say about it. But I'll start by saying, when we talk about learning to see you're talking about learning to see yourself. The hardest thing to teach a student is how to see their own work, to see something that they've just generated. Because these studio classes, students have opportunities to share their work in interim stages along the way. You don't go off and work for two weeks or four weeks and then bring back in the finished product. You bring in your interim and you get a lot of feedback and comments on it. And what the professors tell me is these 18, 19 and 20 year olds, they don't realize what they put on the canvas, or if they're a graphic designer, they don't realize what it is that they've generated. A lot of times they'll think they've done a certain thing. So they have this kind of linear model of the creative process where I'm going to have an idea and I'm going to execute it. So they'll start with their idea and they'll execute it. They'll think that what they put on the canvas is their original idea. But in a lot of cases it's not. They can't see what they've done themselves. So that's kind of powerful. How do you teach someone that what you put on the canvas isn't what you say you're doing? Right. You can't just tell them, hey, you're wrong. Let me tell you what you've done. You have to lead someone through that. You have to walk them through it. One way you do it is you put students in your classroom together and then have them comment on other students work. So they will be on the other side, right? And they'll see another student talking about what they've done and not really describing what's really on the canvas. So I think that's the hardest thing about learning to see is learning to see yourself, learning to see your own work.
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C
I have some theories about this that, you know, you hear of people like Bob Dylan talking about writing songs and people, reporters, interviewers will ask him, how did you write the Times? They were changing our. Whatever major song that he's written. And he's like, I don't know. It just came through me. And I feel like great works, when a creative thinker is at their height, they don't see themselves. They're closer to what you described earlier. You described jazz improvisation, where you're making a thing and it's not, is this a good thing or is a bad thing? It's a thing. And then you're reacting to the thing and it quiets that default mode Network, where we've got this ego and who we are and all of these constraints and expectations live there. And when we quiet those things and we are making things a bit more objectively and participating with it, that we can make better, more creative work. That's a theory. You've got the research. Does that line up at all?
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To me, I think of it as, and I think a lot of creatives would say this is that it's a dialogue. You aren't the person who's creating. Absolutely. And if you think of yourself as the only creative agent in the room, then you're going to try to impose your conscious wish or your vision on the work. But what all these artists and designers tell me is that it's important to get something out in the world, something that's material in many cases, then you have to look and see what it is that you've done, because it's almost always something different than what you thought. So then you engage in a dialogue with the work, and the dialogue is continuing and ongoing. I call it the dialogue of creativity. So then you are, in a sense, moving the creativity out of yourself into the process. And painters and graphic designers, they'll tell me that the work has its own needs, the work has its wishes, the work has inconsistencies or conflicts going on within it, and your job is to see what the work's needs are and then respond to that. So I don't know if that's the same thing as the inspiration, but I think it has the same characteristic of stop thinking about you imposing your will on what's happening.
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I think this idea of seeing yourself is really interesting, especially in our current generative AI era, where it feels to a lot of us there's a potential for AI to take on a lot of the creative tasks that we actually enjoy. But at the same time, its output is often very generic. And by the nature of how it's created, it's the sort of statistical average of everything that humans have done creatively, at least that's accessible via the Internet and a few other channels. But I think, and this has held true for the entire time that creative people existed, since we're putting our handprints on a cave wall. But what we bring to creativity is often ourselves and our perspective and our history. And how do you think about people seeing themselves and accessing that, while at the same time understanding that, as we were touching on earlier, we're often really kind of channeling creativity in a way that's this drawing from centuries of other Creative things that other people have done.
- [20:56]
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It's a great question and I think about it in two different ways. And one way is how you use gen AI. So I use it all the time. I have $20 a month for ChatGPT and it generates some, you know, pretty impressive output. So one issue is, are we going to be putting graphic designers out of work? Because instead of hiring someone to do a logo, you're going to spend 30 minutes with ChatGPT? Yeah, absolutely. So that's one conversation to have. But as a creativity researcher, I'm actually not impressed with Gen AI. And the reason is because Gen AI does not create the same way people create. I'm a cognitive psychologist. My interest is what goes on, what people are creating. Genai doesn't have anything to teach me about what people are creating because I've been talking about this iterative process. I've been talking about a dialogue with materials. I've been talking about being surprised by yourself by something that you've generated, putting the creative vision outside of yourself into the process. I talk to people in 20 different disciplines in art and design, and this is the universal nature of the creative process. But you don't have to know very much about Genai to know that's not at all how it creates. So one conversation then is about the outputs of Genai, but the other conversation is about the process and the process, yeah, it's nothing like what people do. That doesn't mean it doesn't generate great outputs. But if we want to help people be more creative, which is one of my goals, how can we use this understanding of creativity to help people be more creative, to have more fulfilling lives, to be more likely to get into this flow state of peak experience when they're creating? You know, you're not going to emulate ChatGPT to do that. You're going to try to learn how to engage in this process and these mindsets and these practices. Like I said, two different types of conversations. But as a creativity researcher, at least at the moment, Genai doesn't have anything to teach me.
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C
What can people do who are working in creative fields to cultivate that skill of seeing the power of observation?
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A
There's a lot you can do and everyone can get better at it. Everyone I talked to said we can teach anybody how to do this. It's just a matter of engaging in a certain set of practices and guidelines. So one thing I've already hinted at, which is the importance of engaging in a dialogue with your own work to do that you do have to be able to see your own work clearly. You kind of have to get a distance. So maybe that's the first lesson, is to put a distance between yourself and what you've generated. People get very attached to what they've generated. And this is what beginning students, 18 and 19 year olds, you identify with your work. It becomes a part of who you are. But people who are able to engage in this kind of dialogic creative process, they're able to think of the work as something separate from them and then engage in a dialogue with that thing. So maybe that's my first lesson, is don't identify too much with the work. See if you can perceive it as something separate, its own agent, its own being, and only then can you engage in that dialogue.
- [24:16]
C
And the distance, when you describe distance, what are some specific methods that come to mind?
- [24:22]
A
That's one of the powers of art school, I believe, is that you're in a studio class with other people, so other students are telling you what they're seeing. I mean, in a way, that's the first challenge, is to realize that this might be the case, that the work is something different from you, and you might have generated something different from what you think you have. So, yeah, I would recommend doing this with other people. Get other people to comment on your work and in a safe space where someone can be honest with you. And then, of course, you have to try not to get defensive and take what's being said to move you forward.
- [25:01]
C
Yeah. Something you said earlier, I think maybe aligns that you described creative thinkers as creating many things and having multiple avenues simultaneously. What's great about that is it's sort of if you hit a roadblock, you can just hang a left or hang a right into a different pathway and try something else, and then come back with fresh eyes to a thing. But then you've got multiple things that you've created. And so no one is particularly high stakes. You know, I think of my time. I was studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was there taking a painting class one summer, and I sort of had a breakthrough painting in my studio. And a professor came in and talked to me about it. And he's like, man, I don't know what you've done, but you've really cracked open some new ideas here. And I got so stuck on that one painting. After he told me that I couldn't make another painting, I just fixated on it and I became paralyzed and I couldn't make any other paintings. It's almost debilitating to just have all your eggs in one basket.
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A
Oh, I have a great example of this. Multiple pathways underway at the same time.
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C
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Foreign.
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