• We live for the next trend

    We live for the next trend

    In my sophomore year, I had an incredible art history professor who, when explaining modern art, once said: “Today, we don’t know which rules to break because there are no rules. We don’t know what to do because we can do anything.” She was referring to how, in the past, groundbreaking artists understood the rules well enough to subvert them meaningfully. Now, with no clear boundaries, true innovation has become harder to define.

    Her point applies far beyond the arts. When creation in any field can be anything, it becomes incredibly difficult not only to do something genuinely innovative but also to judge what’s not innovative enough —without slipping into the ridiculous or the bizarre, or both.

    Looking at previous generations or decades, we can often define an era by its trends. As Jason Parham, a senior writer at WIRED, puts it: “A generation’s currency is measured in trends. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform.”

    Before the internet, radio, TV, and magazines were the main gatekeepers of culture trends. For example, music videos on channels like MTV were a must-watch if you wanted to stay attuned to the latest fashion, style, vibe, and slang. Today, digital platforms dictate trends, based on sketchy algorithmic metrics and on how easy it is to replicate them. “Mediated through platforms, all trends, to a degree, become memes, our primary language of the internet, the digital tongue we all speak”, Jason commented. And maybe sharing the same feeling as my art history professor, Jason called it the Age of Everything Culture: a cultural soup where anything can be thrown in—yet no matter what, it lacks flavor.

    “Every day virtually there’s a new kind of micro culture, micro niche, aesthetic or vibe,” explains Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London. ​“And what is happening, in a way, is not new at all. It happened many times in popular culture in the past. (…) What, of course, is new, though, is that the technology and the access to media has changed, and the media itself.” He continues: ​“First [there were] the internet and messaging, then mainly verbal platforms like Twitter and Reddit. But this has moved to much more visual-based platforms. That’s what helps to shape these micro trends. Because of the way TikTok and Instagram work, that’s helping to generate this kind of new media.”

    As I’ve written elsewhere, material actors —our tools and technologies— shape how we think. And as the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything else is a nail. In this case, if you have Instagram and TikTok, everything else is a potential new short video.

    But does that mean trends are essentially dead?

    In this brave new online world, anything vaguely popular must be named and packaged to be sold as the next big thing. “No one is sure exactly what a trend is anymore or if it’s just an unfounded observation gone viral,” writes VOX reporter Terry Nguyen. “The distinction doesn’t seem to matter, since the consumer market demands novelty. It creates ripe conditions for a garbage-filled hellscape where everything and anything has the potential to be a trend.” 

    For example, Terry points out that “TikTok plucks niche digital aesthetics out of obscurity and serves them up to an audience that might not have known or cared in the first place.” Whereas aesthetics once played a meaningful role in shaping subcultures, they’re now flattened into vague, viral visuals stripped of context and meaning.

    However, the problem isn’t trends themselves—it’s how they’ve spiraled into a meaningless cycle of consumption and reproduction. And this trend-induced brain rot has spilled into how we communicate.

    This kind of binary, oversimplified communication reduces rich, complex culture into a doom-scrolling feed composed only of meaningless stuff. In other words, what symbolized a certain group breaking away from some social norms by creating their own, now resembles an army of Rick and Morty’s Mrs. Meeseeks, all screaming, “Look at me!”

    In this chaotic media landscape, calling something a “trend” often serves as hollow propaganda—a desperate plea for attention (“Look at me!”). And the truth is, no one really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, most people don’t see a way out of it, leading to what writer Alexei Yurchak describes in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, as hypernormalization. He explained that when the USSR began to collapse, politicians and citizens kept acting as if nothing had changed, because they couldn’t imagine an alternative status quo. History, it seems, repeats itself.

    Taylor Lorenz, writing in The Washington Post, observed that “virality has changed dramatically over the last decade,” due to fragmented platforms, inflated metrics, and ever-shorter media lifespans. In this environment, even the idea of going viral has become devalued.

    However, an even deeper issue has emerged: when anything can be something, and no one really knows what’s happening, we create room for grab-and-go specialists, ready to make big statements that might go “viral.” The louder your opinion, the more attention it gets —because this is the new metric of “success”. And just like a virus spreads sickness, culture begins to rot.

    When having an opinion becomes mandatory for “succeeding” in the digital world, everyone is expected to chime in —even when they know nothing. But unsolicited opinions have consequences. “They can catapult people into public positions they aren’t ready for, resulting in frequent and intense internet backlash,” says Kate Lindsay, an internet culture specialist. I’ve seen people completely change their careers or audiences after being cancelled in their previous space. And not surprisingly, there are always people who are consistently determined to willfully misinterpret what you said —which only makes things worse. “After 10 years of algorithmically driven feeds that give users extra incentive to comment on trending topics and reward increasingly ‘hot takes,’ users are making the choice to opt out or otherwise radically alter how they post their thoughts online,” Lindsay notes.

    This issue extends to creativity as well. If everyone is “creative”—in everything, everywhere, all the time— so nothing really is, because everything is. So, how can we actually measure creative potential without becoming a fortune teller? Or else, if creativity can be anything, why even try to define or assess it? In the end, when we’re constantly chasing the next shiny thing, there’s no time left for reflection. And thinking takes time. Creativity takes time. As Becky Korich beautifully wrote: “What’s missing is the lack. (…) It’s not with excesses that voids are filled. More than that: some spaces exist precisely in order not to be filled.”

  • Is Simplicity Killing Creativity?

    Is Simplicity Killing Creativity?

    Unfortunately, we live in a world that idolizes simplicity. The mantra is always the same: make it clear, make it fast, make it scalable. But what if that very impulse — to strip away messiness, nuance, and contradiction — is quietly suffocating the conditions creativity needs to thrive?

    Reading Sand Talk made me sit with that question. Tyson Yunkaporta, an Australian academic and author, delves into the roots of Australia’s indigenous culture, past to present, moving in spirals, loops, and seemingly disjointed stories that slowly start to weave something coherent (if you’re willing to engage with it). But he does that not by offering a traditional argument, but by offering knowledge as a system.

    And at its heart is a powerful challenge: what if knowledge doesn’t live in discrete facts, but in the dynamic, often messy connections between them?

    In Western traditions, as he argued, knowledge is often seen as something to be collected, stored, and transmitted in discrete units. However, knowledge is not a commodity; it’s a living flow. By thinking of knowledge systemically, we see that “every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system, or it will stagnate”. This shift, from knowledge as object to knowledge as movement, reframes our assumptions not just about learning, but about creativity itself.

    Creativity, in this perspective, is not the product of isolated minds generating ideas in a vacuum. It’s an emergent property of interaction and participation. Therefore, instead of focusing on the things (isolated parts or individuals), we should focus on the connections between them, and then, beyond those connections, see the patterns they form. Creativity, then, is what becomes possible when we stop trying to impose order and start allowing systems to self-organize, paying attention to their delicate connections.

    Another argument that I particularly loved in the book was the tendency to oversimplify complexity. “Viewing the world through a lens of simplicity always seems to make things more complicated, but simultaneously less complex”. This sentence captures something I see frequently in creative and educational settings: the pressure to streamline, to scale, to make things manageable, often ends up flattening the very dynamics that make real innovation possible. In trying to control systems, we kill the complexity needed for creativity to thrive. Simplistic views generate simplistic ideas.

    This view of knowledge as a living system also informs his critique of education. In his words, “Any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity”. Real learning, he argues, comes from experiences that connect abstract ideas to real-world contexts.

    He outlines five ways of coming to knowledge: close observation, helping, storytelling, deep listening, and reflective thinking. These are not individual activities; they are relational ones. They emphasize context, participation, and feedback—precisely the conditions in which creativity thrives.

    Sand Talk doesn’t just talk about systems—it behaves like one. It is a book that resists hierarchy, embraces ambiguity, and invites the reader to enter into its logic rather than extract points from it. In a world saturated with information but starved for meaning, Yunkaporta’s book reminds us that knowledge doesn’t live in parts. It lives in the space between.

    In a modern culture that praises objectivity, control, scalable solutions, and knowledge in easy-to-digest pills, could we be losing the very complexity that fuels creativity? If we are to see knowledge as a system, we must first realize that “information is in each part, but the knowledge lies in the connections between them”. In doing so, we step away from the algorithmic logic of simplification, and toward something older, more human—and perhaps more sustainable: human connection.

    When we rush to simplify, we often end up severing the very ties that make things meaningful. Of course, simplicity has its role. But if we make it our guiding light, we risk flattening the world into something digestible but without flavor.

    So maybe the real question isn’t if simplicity is killing creativity, but rather if we are willing to sit with complexity long enough for creativity to emerge.

  • Creativity is social

    Creativity is social

    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.

  • Can AI make us less intelligent?

    Can AI make us less intelligent?

    The emergence of AI is calling into question what it means to be intelligent. However, the problem may not lie in tech vs. humans, but instead in our very definition of it.


    I’ve been playing for a while now with the idea proposed by Donald Clark that our education is mainly text-based. “From 5 to now 25 [years old],” explains Donald, “young people spend almost all of their time reading, writing and critiquing ‘text’ in an educational system”.

    If you think this through, it makes sense. Our very definition of intelligence is text-based. Intelligent people are those who know how to read and write very well -or do something that comes with knowing how to read and write very well. Considering that less than 200 years ago almost 90% of the population were illiterate, if not more, knowing how to read and write puts one among the 10% and gives access to information, ideas, opportunities, and long-range communication.

    However, even today with most young people having access to education, reading and writing performance continues to drop, but we do not exactly lack brilliant people doing extraordinary things. Why?

    In 1921, psychologist Lewis Terman began an audacious experiment that would span decades and shape our understanding of intelligence and success. Armed with IQ tests, stacks of questionnaires, and an unshakable belief in the power of intellect, Terman set out to answer a question that had haunted educators and psychologists alike: What happens to gifted children when they grow up?

    Terman and his team scoured California schools, identifying 1,528 children with IQs above 135—an extraordinary threshold. These children, whom Terman affectionately referred to as his “Termites,” became the subjects of one of the longest and most ambitious longitudinal studies in history: the Genetic Studies of Genius. The premise was simple but profound: if intelligence was the key to success, these children were destined for greatness.

    However, intelligence, Terman would discover, is only one part of a much larger equation. At first, the results seemed promising. Many Termites excelled in school, pursued higher education, and secured stable, respectable careers. Some became professors, scientists, doctors, and lawyers. Yet, beneath the sheen of success lay a messier reality. Some Termites with extraordinarily high IQs failed to meet expectations, while others with merely “above-average” scores achieved remarkable feats.

    By the time of Terman’s death in 1956, the data painted a nuanced picture. Intelligence correlated with success, but it was far from a guarantee. Motivation, perseverance, emotional intelligence, and even sheer circumstance mattered just as much, if not more.

    Just like Terman concluded, a text-based education is not nearly enough to prepare students for what comes next. However, with the upcoming threat to text-based education, the Large Language Models (LLM) AIs, most traditional education systems are advocating against it like antibodies fighting a disease. I have explored this threat in education before, but the same is happening in the workplace.

    Doing meaningful work demands automating as much as we can in the systems, with technology doing better and faster the work we shouldn’t be doing anymore. This principle is not new in civilization; humans always created tools to make life easier, automating parts or all the work.

    For those who work depend heavily on text, automation may be seen as a threat, not an opportunity, as we will see these jobs be transformed or even disappear. But as Kenneth Megill explains in his book, Thinking For A Living: The Coming Age Of Knowledge Work:

    “An enlightened ‘owner’ of his labor has a very different attitude. Automation is welcomed, for the work becomes easier and if tasks are taken over by machines, this is a liberation, not a threatening force. The work of the enlightened ‘owner’ is the work of someone who is open to, and eager to, innovate and create. These are the primary characteristics of knowledge work.”

    Not surprisingly, many of these systems, such as educational and organizational, are perceiving the use of AI as cheating. But if an AI can pass university tests and job interviews, is technology the real problem? Or is it how we insist on doing things?

    Just like we changed horses for cars and iron cogs for silicon, my point here is that our systems need to change or adapt to this new technology. In other words, our modus operandi should be revised.

    For good or worse, AI is now part of our daily lives, and excluding it from education and the workplace (or at least think that it is possible) is just nonsense. If we are in need of good ideas, AI can be just what we need if we only know how to use it correctly –and for that, we need to learn how to use it.

    Anyone is now able to do at least mediocre work using an AI that otherwise would be just bad work. In contrast, this is also an opportunity for incredibly competent professionals. They are free of mediocre work (because the clients can do it themselves now), but having the knowledge of how to do outstanding work or even knowing what outstanding work looks like is still reserved for them.

    Also, knowing how to work with an AI will be also a challenge. There is a big difference between going through an iterative process with an AI and just asking it to do it for you. If you need brilliant and effective work, hiring a flesh-and-blood professional still is your only option.

    Just as Terman’s study revealed the limits of text-based intelligence in defining life outcomes, AIs are exposing the flaws of relying too heavily on it. The rise of AI challenges not only our traditional systems of education and work but also our deeply ingrained definitions of intelligence.

    From the printing press to the internet, technological advancements have consistently forced us to redefine our understanding of the world. Intelligence is no different. The question is not whether AI will make us less intelligent, but whether we are willing to redefine intelligence in a way that embraces these “new ways of doing business”.

    Intelligence in the AI era will belong not to those who fear or reject it, but to those who learn to work with it, question it, leverage it, and push it to new creative and intellectual frontiers.

  • What 2024 Taught Me: Key Insights on Creativity, Education, and the Future of Work

    What 2024 Taught Me: Key Insights on Creativity, Education, and the Future of Work

    Looking back on 2024, I realize how much my writing has revolved around a core tension: the balance between the boundless potential of human creativity and the structures—both external and internal—that shape or constrain it. Whether it was through exploring mentorship, curiosity, technology, or attention, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the spaces where growth meets resistance, where the unfamiliar nudges us toward discovery, and where stillness becomes a prerequisite for insight.

    Mentorship, for instance, isn’t just about receiving guidance—it’s about humility. It’s about acknowledging that our individual perspective is limited and that growth often comes through the courage to accept someone else’s wisdom. In contrast, curiosity thrives in solitude and uncertainty. The unknown is often uncomfortable, yet it carries within it a gravitational pull—a quiet promise that something meaningful lies just beyond our current understanding.

    But curiosity and mentorship alone can’t counteract the pressures of an overstimulated, overly efficient world. Technology, for all its transformative power, often threatens to make us passive—content with algorithmic certainty rather than driven by messy, unpredictable exploration. Creativity suffers when everything becomes optimized, measured, and predictable. We become spectators rather than participants, mistaking efficiency for excellence.

    Attention, too, became an obsession for me this year. In an economy that thrives on fragmentation and surface-level engagement, deep focus has become an act of rebellion. The ability to sit with an idea—unrushed, uninterrupted—has become as rare as it is valuable. But this ability doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it requires a deliberate choice to slow down, embrace boredom, and allow thoughts the space to unfurl naturally.

    Flexibility became another recurring theme—a kind of currency we trade in the pursuit of meaningful work. Too much rigidity stifles us, yet boundless freedom can leave us directionless. There’s a delicate balance to be struck between discipline and adaptability, and maintaining it requires self-awareness, honesty, and a willingness to recalibrate when things start to tilt too far in one direction.

    And then there’s education—a space where all these threads converge. The conversations I encountered at the Creativity in Education Summit reminded me that our systems, much like our individual lives, often prioritize short-term outcomes over long-term potential. If we fail to nurture it in our schools, we risk raising generations who are adept at following instructions but incapable of charting new paths.

    As I weave together these reflections, I’m struck by how interconnected these ideas are. Curiosity fuels creativity. Attention sustains it. Mentorship refines it. And flexibility protects it. Technology, if wielded mindfully, can amplify it. These aren’t isolated concepts—they’re part of a larger, intricate ecosystem that shapes how we think, how we create, and ultimately, how we contribute to the world.

    If there’s one lesson I’m taking forward, it’s this: the most meaningful progress happens not in grand leaps, but in small, intentional moments—when we dare to ask better questions, when we allow ourselves to get bored, when we listen to a mentor, and when we choose to embrace the discomfort of not knowing. Creativity isn’t a switch we flip; it’s a state of being we nurture, protect, and fight for. And in a world that often feels like it’s moving too fast to notice, that might just be the most radical thing we can do.

  • Insights from the Creativity in Education Summit

    Insights from the Creativity in Education Summit

    Recently, I attended the Creativity in Education Summit at the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning and OECD headquarters in Paris, organized by the Global Institute of Creative Thinking.

    It brought together a global and diverse group of education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and innovators to discuss the critical role of creativity in shaping the future of education. With a focus on reimagining traditional learning environments, the summit addressed the challenges and opportunities for integrating creativity into global education systems and presented projects from different countries that are already adapting education to foster innovation, problem-solving, and critical thinking in the face of rapid social and technological changes.

    During the event, I had some insights that I considered key to rethinking Creativity in Education. I’d like to share them here with you in the hope that they can be food for thought and lead to new reflections and inquiry.


    1 – Creativity “toolkits” and assessments will not make a difference to already overloaded teachers and overcrowded curricula

    If you talk with any teacher, chances are that they will tell you that they are burdened with heavy workloads. In the rush to address all the demands of packed curricula, the introduction of creativity tools, techniques, methodologies, frameworks, and assessments can easily be seen just as another task to the long to-do pile. Also, if students’ fate depends on their standardized test scores, teaching creativity is ludicrous.

    In other words, if we do not address the root causes for the absence of creativity in the classroom, such as lack of time, support, and space for flexibility, it won’t change much. For creativity to flourish in classrooms, systemic changes are necessary. Creativity should not be an add-on but integral to the curriculum and embedded in a way that reduces teachers’ burden rather than increasing it.

    So, how can creativity be integrated in a practical way in the classroom without overburdening teachers?


    2 – Schools have little incentive to change since education is mandatory

    Be honest: would you change the way you do things if, despite the quality of your product or service, clients keep coming in by the thousands?

    In most countries, if not all, education is mandatory (thankfully!). However, it creates another problem: schools may not face the same competitive pressures that businesses do, where poor service may lead to losing customers, resulting in schools’ resistance to innovation or improvement because their “clients” do not have another option if not accept it as it is. If we want real change, it may need an external push—whether through policy, community demands, or creating more avenues for student, parent, and teacher feedback.

    What mechanisms can be introduced to incentivize schools to innovate and improve the quality of education?


    3 – Students do not have many options for learning formats besides traditional schooling

    You probably met some colleague that was “not made for school”. But this same colleague may have thrived if another learning format were available for choosing (or at least experimenting).

    Henry Ford famously said that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In the same sense, most formal education still follows the 19th-century model: a teacher lectures, students take notes, and exams measure success. This old structure may have been powerful in the past, but it does not address today’s needs anymore. As pointed out in the insight above, schools’ “clients” such as students and parents have few learning options available, if any. The same goes for teachers. We should expand educational choices to include various formats, such as project-based learning, collaborative problem-solving, or hands-on experimentation, giving students and teachers more control over how they engage with learning.

    How can schools diversify learning formats to offer students alternative pathways to traditional schooling that better support individual learning styles?


    4 – Learning is (mainly) social, so incorporating creativity in education doesn’t need to be that complex

    Creativity doesn’t always need fancy tools, exquisite frameworks, or fancy lesson plans. In a recent research conducted by my colleagues and I, we observed that fostering a positive and supportive learning environment where students feel free to explore, experiment, and learn at their own pace is essential for creative behavior.

    As a professor once told me, doing the simple is the hardest thing, and achieving the simple without being simplistic needs extra effort. So, in order to incorporate creativity in education, it requires a simple shift in mindset: from viewing education as a rigid process of knowledge transmission to seeing it as a dynamic, collaborative, and social activity, where the role of the teacher becomes that of a facilitator instead of the holder of knowledge.

    So, how can schools create simple yet effective environments that nurture creativity through social interactions and self-paced learning?


    5 – Creativity is an abstract concept, so the focus should be on the skills that potentialize it

    If you think about it, creativity is an abstract concept—or an ideology, as Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson likes to say—and as an abstract concept (like freedom, justice, or beauty), people may adapt it to different situations or contexts.

    When it comes to Education, rather than focusing solely on creativity as an abstract end goal (creative to whom?), which can be tricky to control or even measure its full spectrum, educators should focus on fostering the skills that potentialize it—such as critical thinking, risk-taking, perseverance in the face of setbacks, flexibility, and tolerance for ambiguity, to cite a few. When students are encouraged to inquire, challenge assumptions, and push through difficulties, creativity becomes a natural byproduct of the educational process. In other words, creativity shouldn’t be an adjective for specific tasks or lessons, but a collateral of good education.

    How can educators shift the focus from creativity as an abstract goal to fostering essential skills like critical thinking, perseverance, and flexibility, which naturally support creativity in the learning process?


    6 – Focusing on idea generation and divergent thinking is not enough to promote creative behavior

    Idea generation and divergent thinking may be seen as crucial aspects of creativity, but it’s not the whole picture. If we want to promote creative behavior in our students, we need to give them time to think and space to sit with ideas, reflect, experiment, and figure things out on their own.

    Education systems often prioritize efficiency and quick solutions, but creative thinking requires a deep engagement that only comes with time. Instead of rushing students through assignments and jumping from one “creative solution” to another, we should allow them to explore different paths, make mistakes, and learn through trial and error. Therefore, the focus should shift from immediate “visible” outcomes to long-term cognitive and socioemotional development.

    How can education systems allow students more time to reflect and experiment, promoting deeper creative engagement and evaluating long-term achievements?


    7 – Problem-solving is a great way to develop creativity, but the type of problem matters

    Problem-solving and creativity often walk side by side. However, it concerns me which kind of problems we are giving our students to solve, since we may be giving only the ones we think are important. While societal problems like climate change, hunger, and poverty are “everyone’s problem”, students must also have the space to work on problems they think are important, ensuring that they have a voice in the problems they are solving.

    If we only present them with predefined problems, we may end up with students incapable of thinking critically about their contexts. They need the opportunity to identify and work on problems that resonate with them. Ownership over the problem construction process is key to creative work.

    How can educators balance guiding students toward societal issues while ensuring students have the autonomy to solve problems they identify personally as important?


    8 – There is an art bias in creativity, but it should be about “thinking like an artist” and not just “making art”

    Creativity is often mistakenly equated with artistic expression. However, what it needs is not just “making art” but rather thinking like an artist. Quite often, artists follow a hunch, without really knowing where it will lead them. Artists experiment and try things out to see what happens, embracing uncertainty.

    Traditional Education prioritizes knowing the answer over the process of discovery, and not knowing where you are going is not a desirable situation. But this could be exactly what we might be missing: let ourselves follow a hunch (or even have one) wherever it leads us. This artistic mindset—one of curiosity, exploration, and risk-taking—can be applied across all disciplines and potentialize creative behavior.

    Cultivating an environment where students feel comfortable with not knowing where their exploration will lead them can do wonders in the learning process. This embrace of uncertainty is where creativity takes root, and artistic thinking may aid us in this process better than any other thinking style can.

    How can we shift the narrative around creativity to focus on the process of “thinking like an artist” rather than confining creativity to artistic disciplines?


    9 – The OECD Summit may have missed key voices in education

    While this Creativity in Education Summit brought together policy-makers, researchers, and heads of educational institutions, it may have missed the perspectives of other key pieces of this educational puzzle that were not in the room: students, parents, and teachers.

    To make meaningful changes in education, we need to hear from a wider range of voices and understand how they participate in our learning ecosystems. Including students in these conversations would provide insight into what works and what doesn’t from the learner’s perspective. Parents could bring valuable insights about the home-learning environment and the skills students need to thrive in the real world. Finally, teachers can make vital contributions to educational reforms by sharing their hands-on classroom experience, offering insights into effective strategies for diverse learners, and shaping practical, realistic policy recommendations that reflect classroom dynamics.

    How can we include more voices from students, parents, and teachers to drive more holistic reforms in education?


    The insights from the Creativity in Education Summit offered valuable directions for rethinking how creativity is approached in education. However, to foster meaningful change, we need broader participation from all those who make the education system happen.

    Therefore, I would like to invite you to join this conversation. How do you see creativity evolving in education, and what steps should we take to make it an integral part of the learning process?

  • Budgets of Flexibility

    Budgets of Flexibility

    Creativity requires not just a “high level of art” (i.e., expertise), but also being up to date with the “state of the art” in your field in order to make an effective and relevant contribution.

    In the eagerness to “be creative”, most people forget the effort required to make this contribution. For example, although we consider people like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton to be geniuses, we ignore the fact that it took both of them more than 20 years to make their new “art” work.

    The famous phrase “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” (the percentages can vary by 2 points more or less), normally attributed to Thomas Edison, poorly portrays the effort required for creativity. For this effort to be sustainable over time, we must consider what Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson called in his forthcoming book, Creative Work and Distributions of Power, the “budgets of flexibility”.

    As he explained, we need to consider three different aspects:

    • First, the relations between components of any system worked within budgets of flexibility, and over/under spending over long periods would stress the components.
    • Second, the people involved. They need to be wise in prioritizing the long-term commitments as well as the needs of their larger environments.
    • Third, the ecologies of ideas. Attention to the needs of larger systems draws on unconscious sensibility but also requires conscious awareness when using ideas. The ecology of ideas works like evolution; whether an idea survives depends on its repetition and its relation to other ideas.

    In short, and for the effect of the point I’m trying to make here, each person can be flexible in situations outside their comfort zone for a certain amount of time, which can vary from situation to situation.

    For example, if you have to learn how to use a new software at work, this will be uncomfortable for a while until you master it, and will therefore take up little of your budget. Now, if that software changes every week and you have to learn everything from scratch again and again and again, one day you won’t have the patience or energy to deal with it. The same goes for small situations that accumulate. You will spend a bit of your budget on each one, making it unsustainable to keep up with them all at once.

    Many have experienced that during the pandemic. From one week to the next, our lives were turned upside down and we had to deal with many things at once, like family, health, work, sanity, etc. For those who were already at the threshold of the budget of flexibility (which has unfortunately become the default mode for most people), the pandemic was the final blow. And when the budget runs out, the symptoms are high stress and, eventually, burnout.

    Therefore, having a low flexibility budget makes it impossible to devote yourself to any creative activity.

    But that’s only part of the problem.

    In today’s Attention Economy, getting around all the distractions has become one of our biggest challenges. Creativity demands time, which quickly runs out when “just 5 minutes” on social media costs us an hour. The search for entertainment, powered by algorithms and AIs, keeps us anesthetized until we realize that the day is over and it’s time to go to sleep -to do it all over again the next day.

    Creativity goes far beyond the simple generation of ideas. You will need to know how to manage your resources (flexibility, attention, and time, to name a few), as well as how to put in effort and intention for prolonged periods of time until you finally get meaningful work done.

  • How boredom moves the world

    How boredom moves the world

    [This text is part #2 of the trilogy I wrote with my dear friends William Barter and Mirian Rodrigues. The idea for exploring these topics further came from our podcast episode together. You can read the full text of part #2 in Portuguese here.]

    Technology has undoubtedly made us less susceptible to boredom. Any idle moment has been replaced by the scrolling of a screen, whose main function is to keep us entertained.

    In his controversial article Quit Social Media, published in 2016, Cal Newport commented that “at the time, in response to my critique, it felt like a cultural immune reaction. The idea of completely moving away from powerful new tools like social media was simply not acceptable. (…) The use of the phrase ‘quit social media’ in the title of an important publication was like a temporary glitch in the matrix that needed to be quickly corrected and then explained.”

    But the immune system of “entertainment at any cost” has been fighting boredom for a long time. As communication theorist Neil Postman explained in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death back in 1992, the struggle between technology and traditional values has been resolved, with technology emerging as the clear winner.

    The result has been the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technology. For example, it’s not hard to see 2-year-olds today with tablets in hand to keep themselves entertained at family dinners, where the smartphone is the main guest. “Once a technology is accepted, it fulfills its role: it does what it was designed to do,” Postman wrote, “our task is to understand what that design is, in other words, when we admit a new technology into the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”

    So, it takes an initial effort to resist the urge to turn to our pocket boredom-killer in favor of something that may not be so pleasurable initially, but which can be much more rewarding in the medium or long term: thinking.

    Reflecting on the questions we want to answer can provide interesting answers for both our personal and professional lives.

    But what would be the “price” to pay for having to deal with boredom?

    As I’ve argued elsewhere, you must both restrict yourself to freedom and balance the relationship between autonomy and dependence.

    For author George Dyer, “films and books make us think that there will be certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand and unique gesture of renouncing or defending a certain principle, we will be liberated, free. But there’s no escaping everyday life. In fact, it takes a daily effort to be free. Being free is not the result of one decisive action at one time, but a project to be constantly renewed.”

    Dealing with boredom is the same thing: a project to be constantly renewed. Only, in accepting boredom, the real question is not to be free from what, but to be free for what.

    Moments of boredom will always exist. This means that embracing boredom means choosing the freedom to reflect and/or devote yourself to other things. So, it’s up to you to make a conscious daily decision about where you’re going to spend your time.

    Less screen time to avoid boredom equals more time to devote to what really matters.

    As psychologist Howard Gruber has argued, meaningful work depends on how we reorganize our resources. Therefore, the “freedom for what” is our autonomy, and the “constraints” are our dependencies.

    Our freedom is negotiated daily, balancing the autonomy-dependence relationship so that we can devote ourselves to what is most important to us. In other words, giving up the entertainment of technology in order to face boredom will always be a trade-off (“Do I want to give up X for Y?”).

    So, know what questions you’re trying to answer and be ready to free yourself from certain dependencies to ensure maximum autonomy in learning to deal with boredom.

  • Attention Shortage

    Attention Shortage

    [This text is part #1 of the trilogy I wrote with my dear friends William Barter and Mirian Rodrigues. The idea for exploring these topics further came from our podcast episode together. You can read the full text of part #1 in Portuguese here.]

    The current generation of the Creative Economy is based on doing and led by the makers. The democratization of personalization, greatly stimulated by the Internet, was also, in a certain way, the democratization of creativity. Now we all have the means to make and create. For example, we can identify the growing popularity of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture, as well as fast and free access to tutorials, materials, and educational content on different digital platforms.

    Shifting the focus from the product to the creative process was the great leap of this generation.

    However, what we are now more obviously persuaded to consume are the means to create. As Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix, once said, “we want the same, but different”. In the age of the Creative Economy, creating has become a lifestyle, packaged as an experience. Unfortunately, so much creation has left us blind to what really matters. “Doing for the sake of doing” and “doing more and faster” keep us anesthetized and inattentive, while giving us the illusion that we are being productive. Without realizing it, we keep creating more of the same, but different. It doesn’t matter how many cat videos you’ve seen or created – there’s always room for more.

    At the same time, we see a growing concern about the impact of our attitudes and creations. Just creating is not enough – we also need to ask ourselves why it matters. But the answer to this question has been forgotten and its responsibility transferred to algorithms, which now tell us what should and shouldn’t be created.

    Undoubtedly, this process of shifting the focus from the product to the process was important in gaining more autonomy and freedom to create. However, in this new era in which social responsibility is essential for the development of creativity, the need to evaluate our creations is once again of the utmost importance and can no longer remain exclusively in the hands of algorithms.

    But this evaluation shouldn’t only take place at the outcome; it must take place throughout the process, from identifying and analyzing the problem, proposing possible solutions, and, finally, accepting or rejecting these solutions. In other words, creativity is the consequence of the continuous evaluation of the creative act by the individual and, subsequently, by the group. From this point on, we need to practice what I have called deliberate experimentation: our intention must be oriented towards experimentation, self-evaluation, and learning, and our attention oriented towards both processes and results.

    Furthermore, with the emergence of complex environmental, social, and humanitarian issues, the mind of a single individual doesn’t seem to be enough to meet these new technological demands. So, with the maker generation, we have creativity as a social construct. It is integrated into the thinking of culture and society, actively collaborating in its construction through creative ecosystems.

    We always build using what is already available. We create new technologies using technologies that already exist and, by doing this, we grow exponentially. The same happens with the development of ideas and concepts since they come from existing knowledge. It’s no different with creativity; we’re building on the shoulders of giants.

    We experience the contradiction of keeping what we already know the way it is, while, at the same time, yearning for novelty and change. But this conflict between being conservative and disruptive is what makes the wheels of culture and society turn. As much as we like what creativity symbolizes today, we need to accept the fact that, like everything else on the planet, it is also constantly changing.

    In the words of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “There’s a more powerful feeling than getting attention: paying attention.” Therefore, our attention must turn to the impact of our actions and creations, to stimulate attitudes that promote social and cultural development. Creativity is not only responsible for personal self-realization but is also the fruit of social interactions.

    Creativity will only be fulfilled when we are able to cultivate ecosystems of questioning minds, where the exchange of ideas and the construction of knowledge are its most valuable assets.

  • Technology is making us boring

    Technology is making us boring

    As the words come to my mind, I write this article using my computer. Also, sometimes I translate my thoughts using an AI tool to find better words to enrich the text. Then, I publish it and share it with people all over the world via social media platforms. Just for the brief life of this small piece I just composed, technology is all over the place to help me make it happen.

    When it comes to new technology, I believe it is only natural for one to think: “how these technological tools can help me think and improve the quality of what I do?”. We have been doing this for a long time -especially in science- but couldn’t we have gone too far?

    Recently, I came across this post from Patrick Ryan, where he argued:

    [In basketball], when you run the numbers, the only places it makes sense to take a shot from are outside the D (3 points) or right next to the basket (2 points). As a result, nowadays every team in the NBA plays basketball this way. But it is not just basketball (or, famously, baseball) that has adopted “moneyball”. Like an incredibly contagious virus, the philosophy of moneyball has rapidly spread, infecting the entirety of human culture. In 2022, the 10 most popular films in the world included eight franchise sequels (Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Avatar, Minions, a Shrek spinout, three Marvel movies), and a rehash of Batman. It’s the same story in music. The music industry has been getting steadily more data-driven (read: boring) since the early ‘90s. Studies indicate pop hits are getting more similar over time. Country is fast becoming one of the most popular music genres in the world, and it all sounds the same.

    In Formula One, teams’ engineers collect 30 megabytes per lap of live stream data generated by the car while it’s running, and two or three times more is downloaded from the car once it hits the pits -what can easily reach a terabyte of data per race. However, teams got so good at building cars that F1 became boring due to its predictability and lack of competitiveness –Lewis Hamilton’s words, not mine. In short, the best tech wins.

    In the eagerness to get it right, or to win, or to be better, we have delegated most of our lives to technology. In a data-driven society, the unpredictability of human thought and the imperfections of human actions became undesirable. In other words, you can make a thing so perfect that it’s ruined. But the real problem with this data-driven approach is not actually what we can do with the data, but what we miss because of it.

    During World War II, fighter planes returned from battle with multiple bullet holes. Upon landing at the base, these aircraft were analyzed to understand which parts were most commonly hit by enemy fire to strengthen armor and to reduce the number of planes shot down. Interestingly, while some parts were riddled with holes, others were largely intact.

    That’s when mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that maybe there was another way to see it: the reason certain areas aren’t covered in holes could be because the planes that were shot in those areas didn’t come back. This realization led to the reinforcement of armor in the parts of the plane where there were no holes and, consequently, reduced the number of planes shot down.

    So, could we have been adding armor to the wrong places when it comes to technology?

    In 2020, a mysterious account reached an impressive 800K followers on TikTok by posting videos of sink reviews. Dean Peterson, a filmmaker from NY and the face behind the account, said that what started as an alternative to dealing with pandemic times quickly became an obsession on social media. “What was really weird was when it started to get media attention”, he recalls, “there were articles in Curbed, Apartment Therapy, Time Out, The New York Times. Even Drew Barrymore’s show emailed me.” But commenting on his relationship with the algorithm, he said:

    I had this fun, creative outlet where I could review sinks using the same criteria and vocabulary that you might use to review a piece of art. But as time went on, I started getting a little burnt out. Nobody was forcing me to do them every day; that was something I imposed upon myself. But it slowly started to dawn on me that if you don’t feed the TikTok beast consistently, that the algorithm begins to turn its back on you. I knew that it was really over for me when doing them started to feel like work.

    Sadly, this is not an isolated case. Out of personal curiosity, I’ve always followed up with people who became famous doing what technology told them would work (a.k.a. “trends”) basically to see what’s next. It turns out, most if not all had the same end. When technology becomes our boss, it is easy to get stripped away from all the pleasure and personal fun for the sake of getting better numbers. As Patrick Ryan argued:

    Thanks to short form video on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram, you are now fed a constant, frustratingly addictive stream of the-same-but-slightly-different video clips whenever you open your phone. Algorithms optimize [what] they know you’ll like just enough to keep watching. As AI becomes more ingrained in our culture, the media we create and the very paper we write on gets embedded with universal, data-driven, computer generated “intelligence”. This can almost wholly replace human curation, creation and even relationships.

    Put differently, what used to be a human role to both create and curate their work, technology slowly took over these responsibilities and now we are its manual labor and the tools doing its bidding.

    I argued elsewhere about the importance of doing meaningful work, and one thing that became clear to me after all the fuss around AI is that machines think differently than us, with different goals and values, but putting our work in their hands will eventually end badly for us. Cases of depression and burnout have skyrocketed in the past years, and I can’t stop wondering if behaving like machines is not at the heart of the problem.

    Maybe it is time to rethink what we really want to accomplish with the help of technology. As an educator myself, I believe that if we ever want to change this scenario, the best way to do it is to incorporate the conscious use of technology in Education. As Professor Boris Steipe from the University of Toronto put it:

    It’s up to us as professors to provide an education that remains relevant as technology around us evolves at an alarming rate. If we outsource all our knowledge and thinking to algorithms, that might lead to an unfortunate poverty in our curiosity and creativity. We have to be wary of that.

    Also, in Neil Postman’s book The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he proposed 7 questions we should ask when developing new technology:

    1. What is the problem to which technology claims to be a solution?
    2. Whose problem is it?
    3. What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?
    4. Which people and institutions will be most harmed?
    5. What changes in language are being promoted?
    6. What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?
    7. What alternative technologies might emerge from this?

    So, when evaluating a new technology, we should reflect if it is really needed or useful at all, and if by eliminating the human element we do not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

    When it comes to using tech, do not lose focus on one thing: YOU are the keeper of ideas, historical memory, compassion, context, and hope, that the algorithm cannot understand and technology cannot automate. So do not forget to act like it.

FELIPE ZAMANA

Professor, Writer, Speaker, and Researcher. His work aims to bridge academic knowledge and professional practice through Education.
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