Unlocking Creativity

I was asked by Alys Bryan of Design Insider and Method Communications to write an article for their Annual Directory for Commercial Interiors. She had read a few of my earlier articles about education and creativity and wanted to include something similar in the Editorial Section. We discussed the notion of creativity generally and thought it would be useful to comment on not simply education but its prevalence and acceptance in professional life too.

The article below is the full unfettered version I sent to her for an initial review. As is typical of my writing, it was far too long and waffly, so I was asked to reduce it to 1000 words for print. The edited, somewhat more concise version can be found here as an Issuu Flipbook on the Commercial Interiors website. To be clear, this was unpaid and all opinions are my own. I have no affiliation with the publication or any of the companies featured. It just felt like a fun thing to do.

So…here’s the long version…

Creativity is magic.

Many have tried to define it but it evades definition.

It’s the fizzle in your fingertips, the synaptic gymnastics that connects absurdity to pragmatism, the sticky brain goop that sometimes flows, sometimes sticks. It’s the vital ingredient that drives business forward in ways that other disciplines simply cannot.

It can help you leap.

I’ve been working in the ‘creative’ industry for 30 years, inspired by a book written by a future boss who appeared to paint future realities using only felt tip pens, black fine liners and gouache (Tipp Ex was the student replacement). It captivated me at age 13 to a level that drove me to pursue a career in ‘Product Design’ and strive to ‘create’ using only my imagination and whatever tools were at my disposal.

Those 30 years have seen me work entirely in the consultancy game, either employed by others or of my own making. I’ve had a hand in designing something from most corners of industry… food, healthcare, industrial, defence, hi-tech, lighting, petcare, retail, municipal… and most in between…although somewhat ironically I’ve never designed furniture!

For the last 15-20 of those years I’ve been a firm advocate of supporting university placement students as part of whatever business I’ve been supporting and since 2020 I’ve spread my focus to multiple other areas of education and creativity as I’ve had the time to do so. This has led to offering hundreds of pro bono support sessions to undergraduates and recent graduates looking for direction and advice, helping teach and deliver A-Level Product Design to 6th form students, offering my time as a judge to the RSA student design competition and working with Universities to help them steer their curriculum toward modern design practice. All while continuing to offer ‘creativity’ to clients who wish to work with me.

This period also marks a time when I find myself evaluating education and the teaching of creativity as father to two teenage daughters. One is currently at University and my youngest is wrestling with University course choices. I’ve supported both of them through A-Level ‘DT’ and have been on more University open days than I care to count.

So with all of this in mind, I feel I have started to build a fairly comprehensive picture of the teaching of ‘creativity’ in school, the encouragement and application of creativity at University and the requirements of creativity within industry. So I thought I’d offer some key observations that might help industry and students alike.

1. Going through the motions at school.

One thing that struck me about the ‘teaching’ of creativity at school is that it’s not. And this is not a criticism of the teaching or the facilities, but of the expectations of the system. Schools (and more importantly exam boards) reward individual endeavour and academic prowess. Things that can be measured. Output that can be statistically ranked and listed. So curriculums are created to assign marks and values to specific parts of the so called design process in a way that students now simply go through the motions and create content they know will get the marks rather than seek solutions that challenge and provoke. You get marks for creating a number of different ideas, but the ideas themselves are not critiqued. There is significant investment in ‘kit’ but none in ‘time’. Lots of shiny new tools to make things quicker but nothing to help you think. If you simply follow the yellow brick road, you get to the Emerald Kingdom.

Unstructured free flowing creative exploration is not actively encouraged nor rewarded.

It is why I think the Diploma system or Art Foundation courses are often a better way to allow students to open up and see how their mind works and how far it can travel. There’s no grading system per se. Unfortunately, these courses tend to mean that students have to actively step out of the school system at a critical age, away from their social/friendship networks and other subjects they may wish to study simultaneously. It’s too much of a binary choice and schools are too locked into the exam board system to offer something similar or find ways to combine traditional academic subjects with creative exploration. Which is a shame. I think it’s why creative subjects are seeing a decline in students taking them at A-Level and then at University. I’ve had so many conversations with pupils and parents looking at further education choices who are so torn between the desire to do a subject they love and the obligation to do subjects they feel they need.

2. Creativity needs encouragement, not teaching.

The notion that creativity can be taught is a strange one and something I struggle with. On the one hand I think some individual minds are – by nature – better at ‘being creative’ than others, but I also believe that people who don’t think they are creative can be given the tools and encouragement to find that creativity and let it nurture. I’ve seen some of the least (apparently) creative people think in ways that have been astoundingly creative by giving them the freedom and framework to do so. Removing prejudices. Providing simple stepping stones. Permitting absurdity and ridiculousness. Supporting collaborative idea bouncing. Letting failure be an accepted output. Avoiding any form of ‘grading’. Trusting your gut.

But most importantly, you need time. Positively courageous time.

Time to explore. Get lost. Flog a dead horse. Meander aimlessly. Pick up random objects. Try stuff. Break stuff. Fail miserably. Appear to succeed and then fail again. That sort of time.

Time with encouragement and a bit of guidance is powerful. Really powerful.

3. Move with the times and allow new tools to be explored.

Each new generation of creatives bring a new suite of tools to the table. But typically, it is the infrastructure of the employers that tend to stifle the adoption of these new tools. For sure, industry can’t simply keep swapping out everything they use and the kit they’ve invested in every five minutes, but I see a fair amount of fear and ignorance in adoption.

AI is a perfect example. There’s a lot of chatter about stealing jobs and ‘cheap output’ but as with every significant shift in ‘creative power tools’, these tools are just that. Tools to help creative people work faster, smarter and better. If you think that these tools will replace creativity you are wrong. A Kevlar tennis racquet doesn’t make Roger Federer succeed, but it helps him shift his power to delivery with greater efficiency, which in turn makes him a more potent player. AI in the right creative hands supercharges creative output, but doesn’t replace the act itself. You don’t get better ideas with AI alone, but if you give a brilliantly creative individual these astounding AI tools, you can give them the equivalent of Nitrous Oxide and to fuel that already creative synaptic ability.

So if you are an employer and want to make the most of this, don’t simply look to find ways to get less able people to use AI to get the same level of output. Give these tools to really capable creative folk to embolden them to rise further and fly faster. It’ll pay dividends.

But remember what I said about time and encouragement!

4. Try to look at thinking, not output.

Every single student that I speak to who is studying some form of design based subject at University, tends to think that portfolios need to include kick ass, shiny renders of beautiful objects, alongside heavily curated pages of sketches that have been Photoshopped to within an inch of their life. And every single one of those conversations ends in a realisation that employers are more often looking for an ‘ability to solve’ rather than an ‘ability to polish’.

Throughout my career, whenever I’ve interviewed young designers, I am invariably looking for their ability to work through a challenge in a way that yields a great solution. That typically involves trying to get inside their head and understand how they think, how they approach things, how they connect the dots and how they craft a solution to a point where it has poise, finesse and logic. I want to see scribbles, prototyping, evolution, hypotheses and refinement. I don’t need to see realistic renders and hundreds of curated digital sketches of the same thing. That simply tells me the person can use a computer, but not necessarily their own mind.

I would much rather hire someone with a little less polish but with oodles of curiosity, a desire to solve and an eagerness to learn, than someone who can render the shizzle out of a shampoo bottle. Presentation skills and rendering ability is absolutely a bonus (like CAD or digital editing) but these can be taught relatively easily. Curiosity is innate and is gold dust.

Words and communication are also incredibly important. Particularly in an industry that is often misunderstood. But if I had to opt for one set of skills over another, I’d go for creative curiosity any day. The rest is workable.

5. Creativity can be applied to business, not just artistic endeavour.

Creativity is often matched and synonymous with art or drawing. Typically we expect a creative person to be artistic or flamboyant. But this can be a dangerous preconception.

Not only can a hopelessly uncreative individual impress simply because they ‘look and sound’ creative, but similarly someone who might not fit the ‘creative’ trope may equally be harbouring creative dynamite. Creativity needn’t be about ‘drawing’ or ‘colourful imagination’. It can be something equally at home in Marketing or Finance or Management. Creativity is a mindset, not an output.

And in a professional landscape where roles and titles are shifting like sand and where solutions can be physical or digital, tangible or experiential, a one off or seamlessly ongoing, ideas can take multiple forms and require all sorts of different perspectives. The way I catch a bus. The way I book a dentist appointment. The takeaway I have on a Friday evening. The new phone I’ve recently upgraded. All these things require huge levels of creativity to deliver points of difference. Empathy for the user. Interrogation of the status quo. Awareness of parallel and peripheral industries. Inclusion or (often more importantly exclusion) of new technologies. Delivery and service. All of which are recipes that require dollops of creativity along the way to bake.

So don’t assume creativity has a ‘look’ and don’t be fooled by ostentatiousness. It’s sometimes a cover for ineptitude.

6. Industry can often struggle to understand what it needs.

One of the biggest struggles I’ve seen of late is the disconnect between knowing what you want and what to ask for (as a business within an industry looking for talent). Unless you are an industry who regularly hires in ‘creativity’ in new recruits, it is sometimes a bit of a confused and murky swamp that you find yourself in when looking to find the right person.

This isn’t helped by a swathe of new titles and job descriptions (not to mention whole new disciplines) entering the market. Or even worse, well established job titles being stolen and morphed into something entirely different. ‘Product Design’ used to be about the physical item, but now it’s about digital platforms. From a lawnmower to a hotel booking App. Confused? You are not alone. And not everyone has moved with the zeitgeist. Some physical product designers still call themselves as such, making everything really rather muddy indeed.

Then you get seniority confusion. Some see a ‘senior’ as someone with 2 years under their belt. Others need 15. Are you a ‘Head’, a ‘Director’, a ‘Principal’, a ‘Lead’….probably all and none depending on where you work. I had a conversation only yesterday with a peer who was advertising for a ‘Design Manager’ when they needed a ‘Head of Design’. Small differences in title but huge differences in expectations and talent pool reach. Particularly in an age where the rising talent are of a generation that typically avoid direct conversations and judge by ‘search’.

If you are a business looking for talent, then be careful about you ask for. Do your research. Ask the industry.

Use human words, not industry-speak.

I’ve mentioned just a few observations that span the creativity interpretation chasm. They range from school to industry but they are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve explored all in much more depth in individual articles on my website if you are interested in reading more around specific topics.

Needless to say, creativity is an amazing thing to harness, but an elusive little beetle to catch. Time are changing fast, but the principles of creative problem solving are still as ever present as they always were…we just keep changing the rules of engagement, or the terms of description, or the measures of success. But good ideas are always that. Good ideas.