In this 5th episode of the book series, I turned my attention back home. Like me, Jean Rosier is a Brazilian who found in Portugal a new scenario to cultivate ideas and provoke questions.

With a unique trajectory between education, business, and creativity, he is one of the minds behind Perestroika, a school of creative activities that has transformed the way of teaching in Latin America, and which is now also flourishing in Europe. He is also an international speaker and has collaborated with companies such as Red Bull, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Walmart, and LinkedIn. In October, he released his first book, Hacked Creativity (translated from Portuguese by me), the result of years of research, classroom practice, and reflection on creative thinking.

In our conversation, Jean shared three central ideas that guide his vision. First, creativity is a trainable skill, accessible to everyone, as long as it is fueled with curiosity, intention, and practice. Second, creating requires action. It is necessary to get ideas into the world, test them, make mistakes, and redo, transforming thought into experience. And, finally, true creativity is born from the attentive eye, that is, from the ability to observe our contexts, connect stories, and transform references into new possibilities.

Between reflections on neuroscience, visual metaphors, and classroom experiences, Jean reminds us that good stories are the inspiration to make things happen, and, as his own trajectory will reveal next, it all starts when we decide to roll up our sleeves and explore what we can actively transform.

To begin with, what led you to study creativity? Was there a specific moment that set you on that path?

I never thought I had that ability to be creative. When I chose to take the Marketing & Advertising course in college, it was never because people said I was creative. They said I was good at “solving problems” or that I was good at “selling things”. My father, for example, always said that I had this commercial vein very present and, as a winemaker, suggested that I work with him doing wine marketing. But that wasn’t for me. 

When I entered college, on the first day of the creative marketing class, the professor asked: “Who here doesn’t consider themselves creative?” I was the only person to raise my hand. I thought more people would raise their hands, too. At that moment, I felt like an outsider. “What am I doing here among the creatives?”

But I’ve always been an optimistic, glass-half-full type of guy. I thought that by being there, I could at least learn to be creative. But no, the University never taught me to be creative. It expected me to be creative. It judged me creatively. But it never taught me how to think creatively. As the Advertising side didn’t work out very well, I decided to focus on Marketing and worked for a while in a tool company and in a digital company.

A while later, I did a two-month exchange program in New York and got inspired. I came back with two ideas: the first idea was to make a kind of proto-Netflix in Brazil. Back then, in the US, there was a service where you could choose on a website what movie you wanted to watch, and two days later it was in your mailbox. But I then realized that it wasn’t going to work in Brazil. The other idea was to do something related to bringing people together. At that time, I was the manager of the largest Orkut surfing community, a famous social network in Brazil in the 2000s.

However, as soon as I returned, a friend called me to find out what I was doing. I was out of work at the time. He said, “The Perestroika guys are looking for someone, and I thought of you. I think you will be a great fit.” And I said: “Peres-what? What’s that?” They had created a course, but they wanted to turn it into a school. The course had a creativity class with Felipe, who later became my partner. After watching his class, I thought: “Man, this is something you can learn. And more than that, creativity can be studied.”

It was in this class where Felipe was teaching, in his view, how the creative process works. He’s a naturally creative guy, and he deconstructed his creative process to teach in his class. I was delighted. It was when I decided to study creativity and focus more on the subject.

Your passion for creativity and even teaching it arose within Perestroika itself, where you later took over the class. About the book, when and how did the idea of writing it come about? What was the moment when you realized that you would have to put this experience in a book?

Since I learned to like to read, basically. That was something I started doing late. In my family, I have an older sister, and she has always been an avid reader. I remember going out to play soccer, and she, at thirteen, was in her room reading Agatha Christie. How did she manage to sit and read? I just wanted to play, and my sister read. I couldn’t conceive that. But, in one way or another, reading has always been in my visual reference.

Later, entering the educational universe, I realized that I needed to seek information, but it didn’t start with creativity. I noticed the importance of being able to stop, sit down, and absorb a new way of thinking. At school and college, they direct you to which books to read, which doesn’t necessarily interest us. But one day, passing by a bookstore, I saw a book and thought: “This book is interesting, I liked the beginning, and I’m going to buy it.” And then I started reading frequently, until it became an addiction. Today, I’m a guy who buys a lot of books and reads a lot. It became a great passion.

With this passion, it was in my unconscious mind that it would be amazing to write a book, because I always admired people who did. I remember that the first autograph session I went to was André Carvalhal’s, a famous Brazilian writer, in Rio de Janeiro. We already had a professional relationship that became a friendship. I asked him, “How did you manage to sit down and write three hundred pages?” He said, “Dude, just keep going and writing.”

Then, in 2016, we launched Perestroika’s online course platform. At the time, we were three partners: Tiago, Felipe, and me. We agreed that we needed a minimum of three courses, and each of us had to create one. Felipe was first, I was second, and then Tiago. It was a must.

I started writing the scripts for KGB (Kreativ Gamify Brainstorm), my course on creativity. It was a very cool course and sold a lot. By creating the content for the course, I noticed that I could sit down and write. But it was made of short scripts, where each class had two to three pages. In the end, I had about thirty to forty pages of content. After a few years, we decided to update the course to bring new theories, new authorial movements, experimentation with tools, and so on, because the KGB was already getting outdated.

So, I decided to create a new course, KRIA. That’s where I thought of the creative thinking wheel, which is the backbone of the entire course. I wanted to write more in-depth. I did a lot of research, and that course ended up getting longer. I wrote about eighty to ninety pages of new creativity content.

After a while, I had one of those New Year’s resolutions. I reopened the course script and decided to turn it into a book. But I wanted to write with a slightly different narrative, maintaining a language of dialogue. So far, I’ve received feedback that it seems my book is talking to them. I was very happy, because that was exactly what I wanted. I’ve also always liked the narrative of writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Charles Duhigg, who bring concepts filled with stories. For example, they open the chapter with a story, then bring their idea and, at the end, tie it to that story. This tied me to this narrative a lot, which I didn’t have in my course script.

One day, I went to speak at the first edition of the Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A journalist named Angélica Mari from Forbes wanted to interview me, and I mentioned that I was thinking of turning the course script into a book. She was super interested and asked me to send what I already had. Two days later, she replied that it was the best creativity book she had ever read.

That was kind of a breakthrough for me. I had something interesting there and decided to go for it. So far, two years have passed, between writing, contacting publishers, seeing formats, and so on, until the book was born. But it is a construction. It didn’t come by chance.

You not only delved into the theory of creativity, but you also brought your own experience. How did you turn this into a kind of practical guide to creativity? How was structuring the book for this purpose?

Before it became a book, this project was a kind of Frankenstein of materials from several different classes. In Perestroika, our methodology has this thing of building artifacts that help to visualize what we want to teach. For instance, during the pandemic, we developed the BUG course (named after the millennium bug) to place the individual at the center of learning, immersed in two interconnected contexts.

This need for a visualization artifact is very present in our educational arches. I had a lot of things and ways of thinking, but I didn’t have the artifact. I had some metaphors for the creative process. I had things kind of loose. But my backbone was not yet assembled.

So, I started drawing. First, it was the person, because I believe that creativity alone is not enough. It comes from within. The person needs to have the need, the will, and this is very much endorsed by Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. We need to have motivation first, then expertise, and finally critical thinking. For me, that was it. The motivation is the first step.

I also wanted it to have a sense of movement. The development of creative thinking is a process that has a beginning, a middle, but no end. As long as you are alive, you have the possibility to think about more options, to try different things, and to logically develop your way of thinking creatively.

I categorized them into stages. That was another reasoning I had developed, which was the creative levels. I was very bothered by the idea of being or not being. Everyone is creative, but they have different levels. So, the first step is to know yourself and know what level you are at. For example, it’s like playing the guitar. I know how to play the guitar, but if I compare my guitar-playing skills with Eric Clapton, obviously, he plays better than I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to play, just that my level is lower.

With that came the metaphor of martial arts. You have to “wear the kimono”, which is the moment that everyone accepts that it is. Our belt depends on how much effort you’ve already put into developing. If you haven’t put in any effort, you’re a white belt. And that’s okay. You can improve that.

Then came the neuroscientific questions. I just finished a postgraduate degree in neuroscience, and when I started studying creativity, I really wanted to explore the creative pragmatic side for people who were more skeptical of the creative issue. “Oh no, this is for artists, musicians. That’s not for me.” I’m not just talking about ideas or conceptions. It’s physiological. I discovered neuroplasticity, the myelin sheath, all this by buying books and trying to improve my arguments for classes. I had a lot of this neuroscientific background that I love to bring to the creative field.

Then came the second quadrant. First, you must want it. Then, you have to know yourself, know where you are, and accept yourself in that place. Then, you must practice. You have to focus, test, and experiment, because every time you practice, you can, in fact, modify your brain, the neuroplasticity. Then comes the most practical part that I love about the classes: the challenges of perception or logical reasoning. These are things that make the person interact with you, even if they don’t have a need, or apparently, it’s not something creative.

I reached the third quadrant, which comes a lot in the field of the individual. How is the act of having ideas? How does this act work? There is a system. I created this metaphor of the candy: to remove the packaging is to understand the challenge. Then we experiment, create, create, create. And then we package it again. I feel that people have this difficulty nowadays. How do I create? What will my process be to come up with an idea until it’s ready?

Finally, all of this can be facilitated with techniques, processes, and creative tools, which are the fourth quadrant. I present several tools in the book; some that I learned and made some modifications, others that I simply put in because I found them interesting.

My goal was to reach five quadrants. I couldn’t. But when I got to these four quadrants, I saw that it could have a wheel shape, which is pushed along the “experimentation road”. I felt that it was kind of a puzzle that I was putting together. I wanted to get to this artifact, this creative thinking wheel. I even thought it could be the title of the book, but it turned out to be its backbone.

In your own journey, you started with a creative block, where you thought you weren’t creative, but through your life experiences, you deconstructed this process. Regarding the book, what were your biggest blocks in the writing process, and what did you do to overcome them?

My main block was thinking that I didn’t have the ability to write something interesting enough to be read. As I am used to teaching, it is different. When we express ourselves, there is body language and a voice tone. I’m not a guy who naturally had an easy time speaking. On the contrary, I have always been very shy. Today, I do what I do, but it is nothing more than a great exercise in resilience and a lot of preparation. To this day, I rehearse to teach some classes that I am not used to. I’m thinking all the time about where I can improve.

So, in this place, I know that my physical, sound, and visual performance can, sometimes, make up for a fragility of content. In the book, I don’t have these artifices, so I was afraid that the content alone would not convey the intention and depth that would instigate people to read it. When this feedback came from Angélica, it was a big push. After all, we are talking about a journalist who reads a lot and writes very well.

I swear, I was scared. I said to Angélica, “Look, this is a draft.” And when she gave me positive feedback, I said: “Angelica, please be honest. I want criticism. I know there’s a lot I can improve.” She assured me she was being truthful and said my writing felt authentic. Perhaps because it came from adapting a class script into a book, and I didn’t want to lose how I felt in class, I managed to keep the same tone.

I confess that I wish I could have found more impactful stories that had a connection, the same way I feel when I read Adam Grant or Malcolm Gladwell. I’m passionate about chess, so when I found the Polgár family story, I kind of used it as the backdrop for all the reasoning of the creative thinking wheel. I wanted to launch it soon, but if I had more time, I would have invested more time in looking for more stories like this, where the book would also hold on to the stories and not just the content of the book itself. So, when I was on the verge of launching the book, there was that feeling of “Is it really ready?”

I also eliminated an entire chapter, where I talked about the VUCA world and the BANI world. When I first wrote it, it made a lot of sense. But when I read the version I sent to the publisher, I thought that chapter was boring to read. I expected to receive more constructive criticism from people who had a much greater literary background than mine. And they didn’t. For example, when I commented on it with the editor, he told me that he thought that too. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me that, then?” I eliminated the entire chapter, which was a lot of work, because I referenced it throughout the entire book.

There were times when I also opted for “less is more.” I want people to start reading. My friends bought it, and I asked them to read at least three pages a day. My book is a book that has a lot of interactions with the reader, so I invite people to pick up a pen and write on it. There’s no use just reading the book. You also need to move things around to get results.

I imagine you didn’t have a strict deadline for delivering the book. Also, there’s always that lingering sense that something could be refined: linking chapters more smoothly, rearranging a paragraph, or clarifying a sentence. How did you approach setting and managing your own deadlines?

One day, Flávio Tavares, who is a guy who created several major events in Brazil, sent me a message inviting me to join the list of a publisher to whom they would send books every month. As he knew that I liked to read a lot, he wanted to include me in this partnership. I accepted.

My book project was on hold at the time, and I took the opportunity to ask him for the contact information of some publishers to whom I could present a proposal. He gave me five publisher contacts. I sent a message to two people who I thought might be more interested in the project. First, I sent it to Sextante and Citadel. The people at Sextante read the manuscript and liked it a lot, but as they had just released another book of creativity, the timing was not the best.

At Citadel, I spoke with Marciano, who owns the publishing house. I sent him a WhatsApp saying that I was Jean from Perestroika. He said, “I don’t know Perestroika, but I entered your website and liked it. Let’s schedule a call.”

On the call, we only talked about life, but there was a connection. We had a lot in common and thought alike. At the end of the call, he said that he liked me and that he was going to publish my book. That was something that skipped a lot of steps. I was so lucky. Perhaps that is also why they were more careful about saying what was good and what was not. Closing the deal with a publisher was much faster than I expected.

Already with the publisher, they started to give the deadlines and everything. We closed the contract at the end of last year. I had it in my head that, as I was going to turn forty, I wanted the book launch to be in Brazil, so the date should coincide with my trip there. Our idea was to launch in April, but it wasn’t ready yet. The whole process of editing, proofreading, and designing the cover took longer than I expected.

When it was closer to the end, I squeezed them: “Look, I’m going to Brazil for my cousin’s wedding. I’ll be in Porto Alegre, and we’ll launch the book there. Let’s settle on that date then.” So, I also imposed these deadlines. I turned forty in August, and in October, I officially launched the book.

On a more personal level: how did writing this book impact your own creative process? Did you find yourself “hacking” your own creativity while writing?

Undoubtedly. For me, the coolest thing that the act of writing awakened, and that remains to this day, was my attentive look for cool things. You know that thing about having a folder with references? I already had these folders that I used for my classes. Writing the book, I revisited these folders many times, looking for what I could add. But a lot were left out, too, because there was nowhere to fit in, or I would have to structure something much bigger.

For me, this attentive look and having a place to put them were super interesting. Often, we collect a folder of references, but we never revisit it. The most pleasurable thing was having to dive into these references. Today, this is a complex issue: social media brings us a lot of cool baits, but sometimes a post that seems to have a lot of good or interesting information is shallow or doesn’t have much foundation. You must look deeper.

To include it in the book, it needed a solid foundation. I was particularly careful about grounding it in research and credible references. This process proved essential: first, having an attentive eye, and then deliberately exploring the topic in depth to connect it meaningfully with my writing.

You’ve said that you’re always eager to grow and open to learning new things. If you could start the book project again, knowing what you now understand about yourself and about creativity, would you change anything in the way you wrote or structured it? In what ways might the book have turned out differently?

I would start by collecting good stories and having greater diversity. For example, a story of a family in Africa, of a young woman in Pakistan, of a homosexual in Ireland. You know, something that would show that our creative capacity is born from this diversity, and that it doesn’t necessarily depend on some points that we sometimes think it does.

From the stories, I would try for, let’s say, six stories. I would pull the main learnings, so that they would flow either into the creative thinking wheel or, for each story, have an appropriate quadrant. But I would start with the stories and less directly from my content. In this book, I started with the content. Perhaps that is why it ended up as a more technical book, because it emerged from an educational narrative and not from stories.

I also don’t know if the authors I admire start from this place. But it wasn’t my case. I clearly had my content, my thesis. And from it, I found connections. Perhaps even the construction of my thesis would change based on the interesting stories I could have encountered.

What are the next steps to continue this theme, and how has the writing of this book opened doors to new challenges in your work?

I think the next challenge is to translate the book into English. I could have done the book launch here in Portugal at a friend’s art gallery, but his audience is 99% foreigners. What wouldn’t make sense, because the book is in Portuguese. I was also invited this year to speak at the Web Summit in Lisbon, on the creativity stage. I’m going to connect these two things, but I can’t launch the book there either, because the event’s official language is English.

Without a doubt, the second step is to connect creativity with artificial intelligence. In the book, I write a chapter about AI and the way I imagine it can enhance our creative thinking, especially in the stage of experimentation and the volume of ideas, but we don’t know what is still to come. However, I came up with a way to relate to AI and invite people to relate to it, especially having this creative direction. So, if it’s going to have a Hacked Creativity 2.0, it’s going to be about AI.

I confess that I am a little skeptical of literary productions in the near future, largely because of the ease of writing with AI. I don’t know if I would have that predisposition to put in as much energy as is necessary to write a book, because nowadays it’s easier. I don’t know if I would be strong enough to resist the temptation of having the AI participate in this construction, which may be natural in the future.

I can relate to that feeling. When I finished writing my book back in 2022, it was just before the explosion of AI tools, and writing feels so different now. Having gone through the process of writing a book without AI, how do you view this new way of writing alongside it? What’s your take on this idea of shared authorship or co-creation with AI?

I think AI can lead to a lazier posture in humans. It’s much easier now. For example, it is no longer necessary to structure a text; just throw an idea there, and a ready-made text comes out.

This is nothing more than the furor of some new technology that is useful and productive at this moment, but I think that all this commotion will not be sustained in the medium or long term. We are going to quickly identify what is produced by AI and what is not. And this is something that I have already noticed. For example, posts on LinkedIn: people who didn’t post anything are now writing long texts, and I see that this text has a lot of hyphens and emojis. It was definitely AI. I don’t even read it anymore.

I don’t know if I’m right or not, but it gives me an initial block. I write several texts with the help of AI, but at least I go through the trouble to revise, to edit, to bring my vision, my perspective, my narrative, and my authenticity to the text. There are people who don’t even care about it. This immediacy that we are experiencing will no longer be relevant. We will have to go back to seek, in fact, what the questions we want to ask.

My invitation is to use AI to help us think better, and not just answer what we need. It takes time to mature and create a more refined critical sense as a society, which will be the differential of people who stand out.

In the past, those who stood out were those who knew how to write well. Then came the video format. Then came the reductions in reasoning with Instagram. Nowadays, “everyone” writes because AI writes for them. But there are people who write better than AI. There are people who write better with AI. Our critical sense will notice it and stop rewarding the text for the sake of the text and prefer what actually brings a provocation, what makes you think differently.

I see a long way to go, with a lot of learning, a lot of overlapping information. I am always careful not to fall into the temptation of delegating to AI the construction of something that will be mine. Of course, it takes more work. And again, we return to Teresa Amabile with the importance of motivation. It’s easier for me to ask the AI to write a text about creativity. I ask it to write and I post it, done. But it’s harder for me to actually read it and edit it.

Alternatively, I can say to the AI: “I believe that creativity is not important. Bring me arguments to override that.” It will bring me some points that I may find interesting, but not all. Among those, one can be a starting point for me to look for some research that proves it, for example. The idea is to interact and explore together with an artificial intelligence, something that even with the most solicitous person would be difficult. And I have this “person” available there anytime, who requires more motivation, the desire to make it better. So, at the end of the day, it will end up that the most dedicated people will be able to have better answers and results.

Of course, common sense will continue to be common, and people will be leveled to another level, but to stand out, you will need the intention and perspiration to make it happen.

Jean Rosier’s book Hacked Creativity is available on Amazon. You can also learn more about his work on the Perestroika website or connect via LinkedIn.

For this third interview of the book series, I had the pleasure of talking with Prof. Keith Sawyer about his new book, Learning to See. Prof. Sawyer is a Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he leads pioneering work on creativity, collaboration, and learning. A prolific, award-winning author, he has published 20 books and over 100 scientific articles. Beyond academia, he is a jazz pianist and a sought‑after speaker and consultant, sharing his insights on creativity in businesses, schools, and organizations globally.

So, here is my first question (and I love to start with this question): Why did you write this book? What motivated you to write this particular book right now?

I started interviewing professional artists and designers back in 2010, almost as an accidental project. I had a sabbatical leave at an art and design school, and I found the interviews to be very compelling. The stories that the artists and designers were telling about their creative process, and then how they teach students in a professional art and design school, were also very compelling. Honestly, I wrote the book to tell their stories. I couldn’t find any book that described the creative process used by these artists and designers, particularly how they teach students to engage in the same kind of process of creating. There was no book that told their story, so I wanted to write it for them. I guess I would say I’m telling their stories.

But why now, ten years after you started?

I’ve been working on it for a long time and I started by publishing academic journal articles based on the interviews. I’m an academic scientific researcher, so I don’t only write books. I also publish articles in academic journals. That was my first step: to do some rigorous analyses of these interviews with the artists and designers. Then, I made some observations of what they do in their studio classrooms. I started submitting technical analyses—peer-reviewed academic journal articles—and I wanted to go through that process before I wrote the book. I wrote ten different academic journal articles. Those typically take a year or two to go from finishing to submitting. The first one was published in 2016, and the most recent was published in 2022. So, I guess you could say there was an eight-year process. I like to go through the peer-review process because I get feedback from peers, people who are experts in the area, and then I get an opportunity to use all of those comments later, when I start working on a book.

You mentioned that you landed on this project to work with professionals from art and design schools by accident. When did the idea of the book actually emerge? When did you feel, “Okay, I can write a book about this”?

The accident was that I had a sabbatical leave coming up from my university, Washington University in St. Louis. At that university, professors are given a one-semester sabbatical every seven years, and I had one coming up in the spring of 2010. I didn’t know where I might go, but I’d been invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference in Savannah, Georgia, at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). I went there to give the keynote talk, and I fell in love with the city. It’s a very old and historic city. I told my wife it was wonderful, and I told some leaders at SCAD that I really liked it there and would enjoy coming back. And they invited me.

This was in early 2009, so I had one year to plan moving with my wife and son to Savannah for six months. By that time, I had already developed a reputation as a scholar studying creativity. I already had numerous books. So, the benefit to SCAD as an institution was to have a creativity researcher giving them perspectives on how they might teach more effectively. I wasn’t planning at the time to study art and design. I was known then for my studies of improvisational performance—jazz and improvisational theater groups. I had not done any research on visual arts or design. So that was new to me. Being there in Savannah and having the opportunity to interview artists and designers, that’s when I realized they had incredible stories to tell about their own creative process and about how they teach students to create more effectively.

Talking about your improvisational background, did these experiences influence the decision to write this book and the way you approached it?

This new book, Learning to See, is about visual art and design. I personally don’t engage in that type of creativity, so I consider myself to be an outsider. When I first went to an art and design school in 2010 in Savannah, I had never been in a studio. I had never watched someone paint. I had never seen a painting halfway finished. I’d never seen anyone design a typeface or an architect build a model. I’d never even been in the room or in the same space as someone engaging in those types of activities. So, I would describe myself as a complete outsider trying to learn what was going on in this very different environment. I’m not sure there’s a direct link with improvisational jazz performance, except at the cognitive and psychological level of what goes on in the mind when people are creating. There’s a lot of similarity across disciplines. But this book and this research don’t engage with my past work on improvisational theater. The word “improvisation” appears quite a bit in the book, but I don’t mention jazz performance or theater. It’s really a focus on art and design.

Yes, but I mean on a personal level. Since you have this artistic side, though not in the visual arts, did it influence the process of writing a book about art and design?

One thing that’s shared across all creative fields is the creative process. That’s how I would describe what I study in creativity research field. Some of my colleagues study the personalities of creators, whether they’re introverted or extroverted, for example. I don’t do that. I have some colleagues who study the creativity of the product. They might analyze different characteristics of a painting or a scientific theory. I don’t do that. I’m interested in the process that creators are engaged in, and that’s what I focused on when I interviewed artists and designers. It was easy to focus on the process with these interviews, because the artists and designers all say that’s the essence of what they do. That’s what they wanted to talk about. So, I would say that my perspective on the importance of process fits in very nicely. From my perspective, being an improvisational creator myself, the creative process in improvisation is exploratory. You don’t know where it’s going, and you don’t know where it’s going to end up. That characteristic of improvisation also applies to the creative process over longer periods of time. So, this type of creative process also has characteristics of conversation.

Let’s talk about the design of the book. It’s very visually engaging. Did you think of the book as a kind of artwork in its own right while writing it?

Oh, thank you for saying that. Yes, the book is a beautiful object. You can read it on Kindle, but I highly recommend the physical book because there are some interesting design features, and it just feels great. The binding is wonderful. It is in full color, so the images of artwork look beautiful. But no, I wasn’t thinking about design while I was writing it. This is all the work of the designers at MIT Press. I guess my contribution at first was choosing MIT Press as the publisher that I wanted to publish with, because they have a reputation for publishing great-looking books. Even though MIT is known for technology, they also have a long history in design and architecture. Their architecture school dates back to the 1920s. As a result, the MIT Press has a long history of publishing books of design and architecture, so I knew that it would be a good publisher for a book like mine, and I was confident they would do a good job making it look great. Emily Gutheinz was the graphic designer. I never spoke to her directly, but I reviewed her early drafts and provided feedback during this iterative design process. She was great to work with, and the ideas were all hers.

But you somehow participated in this process, right?

Right, and from the beginning, as I was still writing the book, I got to a point in the writing process where I realized that the book was going to be primarily for artists and designers, and not so much for academics and scholars, as I initially thought. A book for artists and designers needs to have a certain quality as an object, because if you’re a visual creator and you see a book that looks ugly, you might be less interested, or you might respect this book less. So I contacted my editor and said, “This book really needs to look great as an object”. If you’re a professor at an art school, you know you would like to have a very good-looking book on your desk. Or other people would see this nice-looking book on your desk, and then they would want to buy it, too. So, having this design quality, my hope was that it would appeal to artists and designers.

But about the book features, for example, I was influenced by a book called Design School Confidential, which is a collection of projects that design professors had assigned in their studio classes. That one is a hardcover book, and as with all hardcover books there’s a piece of paper that is glued to the back of the cover, and there are the names of all the institutions. I thought this was a great idea, because I’ve got 50 institutions myself, and it would be nice to communicate to the reader the scope of the book that this is a very comprehensive one, which has 50 different colleges, universities, and institutes instead of just one or two. Initially, I wanted the book to be hardcover, because I think it would look nicer. But once we knew it would be paperback, Emily, the graphic designer, knew about my suggestion, and she told me that there was a way to print images and text on the backside of the paperback cover. I’d never heard of that before or seen it in any other books! So, that’s a very unique feature of this book, for example, and like you said, of how it’s a very special physical object.

That’s true. And as you said earlier, it’s interesting to see the interaction with the materials, not just the book as a material object, but also the process of printing or understanding how to produce a book actually transforms the final product. Then, how do you think writing this book transformed you? Did any of your preconceptions about creativity get challenged by the teachers or students you met, or by how they interacted with materials?

My process of writing this book was very different from any of my previous books. And this is my twentieth book. I’m an experienced author. I know how to divide a book into chapters, how to make them the same length, how to organize them, how to schedule writing, and of course, there’s the writing itself, where you’re focused on the text. Originally, I thought the book would be a very academic and scholarly book. As I mentioned earlier, I began by publishing academic journal articles, and they refer to theoretical frameworks that are not known by the general public, not even known by artists and designers. But they’re theories from my field, which are cognitive science and the science of how people learn, and they are academic contributions. And, you know, to get published in an academic journal, you have to go through a fairly rigorous process of having your manuscript reviewed by experts in the field, and they have to make a decision that it actually represents a contribution to the field. The first article from this project came out in 2016. Then I kept discovering new things in the data—interview transcripts and video recordings from studio classrooms, which led to more articles. In total, I identified eight separate findings that were well-suited for journal articles. I didn’t want to start writing the book until I had shared the research findings with my academic community. After that step in the process, I felt I had said everything I could in a journal article format. So, I turned to the book.

Initially, I thought the book would largely be a compilation of those academic findings and be aimed at cognitive psychologists and education researchers. I imagined something like my previous scholarly books—filled with citations, references, and theories. But as I was writing, I discovered that the interviews were so compelling, the stories were fascinating in and of themselves. Even without theoretical analysis, and even without any rigorous methodology, there were very compelling stories about the creative process. So, it was during the writing process that I realized it would not do justice to the material to write an academic book. Instead, I wanted the book to focus on storytelling, representing the voices of the professors and students I had interviewed. That led to a more narrative format—no citations, no references to existing theory or findings. That choice made the book more accessible to a broader audience. I wanted artists and designers not just to be able to read the book but to feel engaged, like they were hearing reflections of their own experiences. And I hope that my colleagues in creativity research will still find value in it. I believe it contributes to our understanding of creativity, even though I don’t talk about theories or methodologies.

Exactly. In your book, you highlight how materials shape thinking. I wonder: do you see your book as a “material actor” in that sense? How do you think readers will interact with the book? More specifically, how do you think the book will teach them how to see?

Yes, you’re referring to Chapter Two, which is called Materials. It’s about the importance of engaging with physical materials in the creative process. Each chapter has a one-word title. The first chapter is Process, because that’s the core concept. Chapter Two is Materials, because artists and designers emphasized how central their materials are, like paintbrush and canvas, wood or clay, or even digital tools. But the process of dialogue between creator and material is very similar. That same dialogue happens whether it’s a physical or digital artifact.

As for the reader, I don’t think they would have the same relationship with the book as they do with the raw materials, because the reader of the book isn’t engaged in a creative process, or at least I don’t anticipate that. But it’s an interesting thought. Is reading a book like the creative process? Well, my immediate answer would be no, I don’t think so (laugh). But it’s an important part of the creative process for these artists and designers. And that is different, you know, you asked about jazz improvisation and improvisational theater, my original research. I don’t think the creator has the same relationship with a material artifact. When you’re playing jazz, you’re creating sounds, but the sounds don’t continue to exist in some external physical artifact that you then interact with, at least not during the moment of performance. Perhaps successive performances where you record each one and you modify each time, then the visual record of a performance or the audio record could play that role of supporting a dialogue between the creator and the artifact. But in the moment of improvisational performance, no, I don’t think you have that same type of dialogue.

This is interesting. As a trained designer, I can tell you that sometimes the material guides you. You have an intention, but you don’t know exactly what will happen. You’re just experimenting. Like you said in the book, sometimes a mistake becomes a path for new ideas. Or you take that mistake and repeat it until it becomes something. I think that interaction is always fascinating, and you really nailed it with the name of the book, Learning to See. But I read that you originally planned to title it Learning How to Create. Can you tell me more about that?

I’m glad it resonates with you and your own design practice. That was my hope that designers would read it and agree with what’s in it and see themselves in it. I interviewed over a hundred artists and designers, and everything in the book is shared by everyone that I interviewed. So, I guess that’s one, maybe unique feature of the book, that it’s the shared underlying essence of visual art and visual design. It’s not a book only about architecture. It’s not only about painting. And that’s not the structure of the book either. I suppose I could have had one chapter about painting and how painters teach. Then, chapter 2 could be about typeface designers and how typeface designers teach. And then chapter 3 could be about architects. No, I didn’t do that. The entire book is about something that all creators do or engage in or teach.

The first 5 chapters are about what is taught, and that is the creative process. And it’s the creative process used by professional artists and designers, because the people who teach at these institutions are themselves professionals. So, half of the book describes the creative process and of them describing how they teach. They have to describe what it is they’re teaching. I suppose, in a sense, it’s obvious that when you talk about teaching, you would also talk about what you’re teaching. But in this case, it’s fascinating because what they’re teaching is their own creative process. They’re not teaching denotational knowledge like math formulas or facts about ancient cities. It’s not something you can state or give a lecture about. It’s something much more intangible. These first 5 chapters are about what they do, but they don’t like to use the term creativity, even though I recognize it as a version of the creative process used in all fields. And that was interesting to me, that they didn’t like the word, because, as I was looking and listening to what they’re doing, it looks a lot like the creative process as studied by creativity researchers.

They told me they didn’t want me to use creativity in the title of the book. My working title for the project was Learning how to create. Because I’m a creativity and education researcher, that’s how I conceived what I was studying: how people learn how to create. But the artists and designers did not like that sentence or that title at all, they said. Some of them said very firmly, “Don’t put creativity in the title.” So, what should I put in the title? And many of them told me explicitly that they were teaching students how to see. That was a consensus across many different types of artists and designers: learning how to see. It’s my challenge, then, to describe what that means, and their challenge was to tell me what it means. It resulted in a lot of very powerful and compelling conversations. I can’t tell you in this interview what it means to see, but I can tell you some reflections, or evidence, of what learning to see is.

For example, I mentioned the importance of engaging with materials in the creative process, and that it would be a dialogue between the creator and the material object that they’re working on. And you mentioned failure, which is actually chapter 4 of the book, which, in the conception of these artists and designers, they think of failure as a moment when the materials don’t do what you want them to. So, you have an intention as a creator, and then the materials talk back, and they don’t do what you want. Many people might perceive that as a failure. But professional artists and designers, instead of perceiving it as a failure, perceive it as something intriguing and interesting. “Why is it that the materials did something I wasn’t expecting? How is it that I can use that unexpected response to take my own process in a different way?” So, you’re learning how to see opportunities that are presented by how the material responds rather than perceiving it as a failure. And if you perceive it as a failure, what you’re really doing is prioritizing your intention. You’re placing the primary value on what you were trying to do and your initial idea for the work. And when you do that, you’re losing an opportunity to grow and to explore.

This is what these professors told me that beginning students do. They start with an idea or intention, and then their vision of the creative process is simply to execute the idea that they have before they start the process. All artists and designers said that this is a mistake. It’s not the right way, or it’s not the best way to create. This is blocking students from realizing their full creative potential, because more powerful creativity emerges from engaging in the process, and things happen along the way that you could not have anticipated at the beginning. Actually, chapter 3 of the book is called Emergence, representing this phenomenon of surprising new things happening while you’re engaged in the process. That can happen if you focus too much on your original idea, because then you won’t see the opportunities that emerge from engaging in the process. So, there’s a certain type of awareness that you have to learn to be a successful creator, and that awareness is an example of learning how to see.

I could say a lot more! I hope this is enough to communicate how elusive and sophisticated this concept of seeing is in the context of professional art and design.

You are definitely right. And talking about awareness, I’m curious about the part when you mentioned that most teachers and professionals told you not to use the word “creativity.” As a creativity researcher, how did you receive it? How has it influenced your approach to creativity?

I think they are describing and teaching creativity. I think their process as artists and designers is a creative process. But I also understand why they object to the word. I think there are at least two reasons. One is that many people think of creativity as having a brilliant idea and then executing it through a fairly linear process, so that what you’ve generated at the end is pretty much the same thing that you were intending to do at the beginning. You’ve realized your vision. And that leads you to a conception of creativity that is associated with having a big and brilliant idea. That is not how creativity works, and creativity researchers have documented this in many different creative disciplines, including science and engineering. You don’t have to have a big, brilliant idea to get the creative process started. The way the creative process works is that you engage in the process, and ideas emerge along the way. Researchers have found this in creativity research for a very long time. And that’s what’s going on with these artists and designers as well.

The second reason is that they are used to people who are not artists or designers. So, I think that’s what they’re rejecting: this mythical view that creativity is about having a big idea, and that’s not what they do. What they do is engage in a particular kind of process, which is wandering and exploratory, and improvisational. But they know when they’re talking to people who are not artists (laugh). They know that those people don’t get it. They don’t understand what it is that they really do. So, what they’re objecting to is the mythical conception of creativity. But then, when we talk more at length and they describe what it is they’re doing, and they talk about this process, they might say halfway through the interview, that yes, this is creativity. But they still didn’t want the word creativity in the title of my book.

Yes, it was a good idea to leave it out. Also, it adds to the mystery—what does it mean to see? Leaving the concept of seeing in the title is intriguing. Throughout the book, we get to explore these different perspectives and experiences. And as a reader, we sort of “learn to see” the way the artists see, and we also build our own perspective on it. There’s no ultimate definition of what it means to see.

Thank you. I think so, too. I think for creativity researchers, it offers a fresh new perspective that comes directly from the stories of artists and designers. The chapter themes all touch on creativity research. Chapter Four, for example, is about Failure, and there’s a lot of research on failure in the creative process. Chapter Six is about the role of Constraints, and again, that’s been well-documented in creativity literature. Chapter Seven explores Ambiguity and uncertainty in the process. There’s been research on that too, including the concept of tolerance for ambiguity.

But then, many of the other chapters introduce new perspectives on creativity, and I think everything in the book is consistent with creativity research, but it is a new perspective that maybe creativity researchers haven’t thought about exactly that way. There’s nothing in my book that challenges the consensus of creativity research. I think everything that’s happening in art and design and everything that’s happening in these studio classes is completely consistent with research on creativity. And it’s also consistent with research on education, one of the topics you, Felipe, write about. Your blog is about creativity and education. So yes, that’s exactly what my book is about, and I think that it’s completely consistent with the science of how people learn.

You’ve been studying creativity and collaboration for a long time. Did immersing yourself in the world of art and design change how you see your previous work? I know that you mentioned that it’s pretty much consistent with creativity research, but did it bring you any new insight that you never thought about?

I never thought about the importance of the role of materials of an external artifact. I suppose we would say more academically that the material artifact is the object that’s being generated during the creative process, and then the importance of engaging in a dialogue or an interaction with this artifact that you’ve generated. It’s very much the way I write, and I think studies of writing creativity have found that this is common with all writing. It’s very much like what I see in the visual arts in my book. Writers do multiple drafts. These are professional, successful writers. Maybe not every writer, but writers tend to start writing without necessarily knowing exactly what their book is going to be about (laugh). Maybe even the plot and personalities of the characters in the novel emerge from the writing process, and writers will describe the characters in their novel almost like they’re separate, independent people with their own desires and agencies. And that’s very much like the way visual artists talk about their work.

It’s also the way I write. I generate many drafts. I’m very much an iterative writer, where I’ll do maybe a new draft every week. I don’t think a whole lot about each draft, but I go through and revise it, and don’t try to make it perfect, and then I print it out and go through with my red pen, and then I do another draft. Then, I read an academic journal article, which gives me some new ideas, and I put those in. So, my own creative process is this way. It’s iterative and exploratory, and I think these are key characteristics of the visual arts, at least in my book. But what I hadn’t thought about was that my own process was this notion of engaging in a dialogue between me and the evolving work. Then, I think about the article or book, or whatever that I’m working on, as a product emerging from this dialogue. I hadn’t thought about my own process that way until I was interviewing these artists and designers.

Speaking of process, was there a particular chapter in the book that felt especially meaningful or personal to you?

I don’t think I could pick just one chapter as my favorite (laugh). The scope and structure of the book changed many times. I moved materials around. I might be able to choose stories that I thought were particularly compelling, like the one I started the book with. It is about an artist named Judith Kruger, who is an American, but while visiting Japan, discovered a type of traditional Japanese art called Nihonga. Then, the story goes on and on, through several career turns and iterations; it’s such a compelling story that I started the book with it. I had her review the story, and she approved and authorized everything in the story (laugh). So, if I were going to highlight features of the book, I think it would be the stories, and each chapter has many stories in it.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the next frontier in your research on creativity and learning? Has writing Learning to See changed how you’ll approach future projects?

Yes, it’s going to influence my next book, which is going to be for a broader, more general audience. This book, Learning to See, is primarily for artists and designers, but I think the messages in it are so powerful that they can apply to anyone who’s interested in living a more creative life. We’re all dealing, for example, with the risk of failure in something we’re engaged in in our personal lives. People want to be able to see themselves more clearly, or to see what’s going on around them in a deeper and more profound way. So yes, all of these things that artists and designers told me, I think, have some benefit for everyone.

Prof. Keith Sawyer’s book Learning to See is available at Amazon. You can also learn more about his work at his website and subscribe to his newsletter, The Science of Creativity.

In this post, I decided to do something different: an interview. I’ve never done it before here. And I have to say that it was a lot of fun!

I have known Prof. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle for quite a while, but mostly through reading her papers and newsletter. We met in person around two years ago at a conference, and we have been in touch from time to time to discuss projects, ideas, and creativity (of course) ever since.

If you don’t know her, let me introduce her to you. Prof.  Zorana Ivcevic Pringle is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence studying creativity in all its forms, from that of artists and scientists to professionals at work to creativity in everyday interactions and relationships.

She recently wrote the book The Creativity Choice, so I seized the opportunity to ask how the process behind writing the book was. This opportunity is precious, especially when we are talking about creativity, because we normally only see the final result: the book, edited and published. But, how to get there (as she will explain) is the complicated part. And as one of my favorite quotes in the book goes, “creativity is fundamentally social even when the act of creation in itself is not.”

To start, I’d love to hear something more personal: What drew you to your field? Was there a particular moment or experience that led you to become a researcher, focus on emotions, and pursue an academic career? How do these different aspects (being a researcher, a writer, and so on) come together in your work today?

I first became interested in the study of creativity when I was an undergraduate student and considering a topic for a thesis. My approach was to read broadly to see where inspiration would come from. And I came across a line by Frank Barron, creativity scholar from the 1960s, which was the first golden age of research on this topic, spurred by the space race between the US and USSR. He said that creative individuals are, “occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner than the average person”.

I found that so intriguing that I knew I wanted to study creativity and never looked back. For a long time, I was interested in conducting basic research about the nature of creative individuals and the creative process. With time, I noticed that much of very good scientific research is not translated accurately or effectively to the general audiences so that those who want to promote and teach creativity can do it with the best tools available. And that got me started on writing and speaking to everyone who is interested in creativity, but does not happen to be a scientist.

Now, and perhaps the most important question, why did you decide to write this book in the first place?

I came to realize that most things in life happen serendipitously. A few years ago, a colleague whose opinion I respected, mentioned that I should write a book. She recognized something that I did not yet – that I am able to communicate in ways that are accessible, but rooted in science. I started writing for Psychology Today and recognized that she was right. My writing struck a cord. In the book, I talk a lot about how we can harness the power of emotions to boost creativity. And I recognized that the excitement of putting out a regular a column is telling me that writing a book is something that I should pursue.

What was the writing process like for you? Were there any moments that surprised or challenged you along the way?

The writing process was hard. Because creativity that takes a long time, such as writing a book, is hard. It was made more difficult by the fact that I had a demanding full time job and a family and somehow had to make it all work in the same time. And the only way to do that was to reflect on how to take my own advice and use the tools I discuss in the book. I had to create a distance between my day job and writing and I did it by physically changing where I work; so much of the book was written at a local bookstore.I also reminded myself of the relationships between feeling and thinking and arranged my writing to take advantage of daily fluctuations in emotions. I am not a morning person and tend to be gloomy in the mornings; these moods facilitate critical thinking and are great for editing. So that is what I would do in the morning. My mood is sunnier in the late afternoons and that is when I would do new writing. And finally, I remembered that the strategies to get out of a creative block. Even when it felt I had no time to take a break, that is at times necessary to take the edge off from the feeling of being overwhelmed by frustration of being stuck.

Is there a chapter that feels especially personal or meaningful to you? What makes it stand out?

Two chapters are probably most meaningful to me because they deal with the aspects of creativity that are rarely discussed in other writing. One is the chapter on harnessing the power of emotions and the other the chapter on the creative block. Creative work is full of emotions, from anxiety in front of an empty screen to excitement of new ideas, to frustrations when facing obstacles. It seems intuitive to people to think that emotions are something that is in the way of clear and effective thinking, but the fact that emotions can be an asset and boost creative work is something rather surprising to many people. It might seem that creative blocks would be something commonly talked about, but rather puzzlingly, it is not. What I found most meaningful in writing about this topic is that these experiences are so difficult that we need to apply all the tools, especially those dealing with emotions, that are discussed in the rest of the book.

Which chapter was the most challenging to write, and what made it difficult?

It was most challenging to write about the creative block. And this is for a surprising reason. Although people engaged in creative work experience this state of being stuck to the point that it could be considered a common part of the creative process, it is rarely studied directly. I had to pull from different kinds of research and put it together in a coherent whole. It made it the most challenging, but also one of the most meaningful chapters.

Finally, I’m curious to know: did the process of writing this book change or deepen your own understanding of creativity? If so, how?

The process of writing this book made me see the different strands in creativity research in a more unified way. In the world of science, some people study the traits of creative individuals, others the emotional side of the creative process, and other still the social influences on creativity. Writing this book pushed me to consider not just each of these topics individually, but also how they fit together. And I came to an understanding that our beliefs and attitudes (especially about risk and how we think of our own creativity) are primary influences on whether we will even decide to act on creative ideas we have.

The tools for how to effectively direct our creative drive, how to use and manage emotions, how to identify, frame, and reframe problems are all strategies that enable persistence on long-term creative work. And finally, the social side of creativity – interactions with others who influence our work in ways implicit or explicit – constitute opportunities that make creativity repeatable. So that one success does not become a one hit wonder. 

If you are curious to read The Creative Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action, you can order it on Amazon here. Zorana can be found on her website, Substack newsletter, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.