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.