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To explore the nature of creativity, we built a wish list of creative leaders to speak with – artists and writers, musicians and chefs, titans and upstarts. We are blown away by the level of talent willing to talk about creativity.
Here are highlights and transcripts from our first 14 interviews:
American technologist and product experience leader. VP Artificial Intelligence and Design at Microsoft. Author of five books including How To Speak Machine and The Laws of Simplicity.
On creative juicing: "I like that process of starting from chaos and then trying to reduce...the more diverse set of things you begin with, when you boil it down, it's kind of got the juice of everything."
On accepting failure: "The hardest part of creation is accepting you will most likely be wrong. Although your skin is thick, you realize the pain does get through. And you're ready to embarrass yourself."
On constraints: "Constraints are the only way you find a path to a conclusion. Unconstrained problems are hard to solve, so a constraint is like a gift."
Renowned contemporary graphic designer and typographer. Co-founder of the famed Sagmeister & Walsh. Awarded the Grammy Award thrice and the National Design Award.
On different creative fields: "I think all of them need ideas. All prize surprise or uniqueness. All try to be emotional. And then of course, they are still very different from each other because by now, we are all living in an extremely sophisticated society."
On creative flow: "What stops your flow faster than anything? Any sort of interruption. So I created an environment where those are pretty much at a minimum."
On inspiration sources: "Probably that would be the Edward De Bono Thinking Method. I try it out all the time."
World-renowned chef with many Michelin stars. Co-owner of Ever in Chicago. Awarded Forbes Travel Guide’s Five-Star rating and AAA’s Five-Diamond rating. Inspiration behind The Bear.
On conceptualizing dishes: "I'll start with an ingredient. And once it's on paper, we start to talk about the three supporting elements to that main ingredient. How do we utilize those elements to achieve an entire dish? How can we utilize each to their fullest?"
On mise en place: "If we walked into the kitchen now you'd see my station, it would have all the things that I need to create. There's pad of paper, there's notebooks, there's full towels and knives and spoons and the things that a chef would need to make my job efficient in that kitchen."
On creative hobbies: "Playing music is a creative outlet for me. I've been learning to play the bass the last six months or so. Makes you think about lots of things."
Composer, sound designer, percussionist, author, educator. Appears on labels such as Ghostly & Global Underground. Recently commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Staatsoper Stuttgart and Carnegie Hall.
On getting started: "What comes to mind immediately is the one about setting up your workspace. Like mise en place. Plus, trying to make sure that the tools at hand are ready to go when you need them."
On creative stages: "It's super important that you separate the stage of ecstatic creativity from the stage of figuring out what was good. If you try to put those together, it often turns into a mess."
On commonality: "That's the premise for your whole project here, right? Looking for a kind of grand unified theory of creativity. I don't really know...common themes seem to be work and time and persistence, and just a willingness to get dirty with it."
New York Times bestselling illustrator. Film animator who pivoted into publishing comics and picture books. Created the popular online art challenge Inktober. Cofounded SVSLearn.com, an art education platform.
On "thinking chemicals": Reading some research on how creativity works and how brains work, I came to realize that your brain actually just gets filled up with thinking chemicals, to put it in the simplest way.
On attention: Attention, they say, is more valuable than oil. Now, it's a bigger industry than oil is mining people's attention....in that sense, you could create something that gets attention. And if attention is something valuable to you, then it has value.
On being "finished": You want to have something finished that's not perfect because it shows you what you were able to accomplish at that point in your life, and you can see the progression as you move forward.
2D animator in TV, film and gaming with a focus on hand-drawn art. Won the Annie Award for Best Video Game Character Animation for Cuphead. Fine artist with paintings exhibited around Canada and the world.
On the thrill of animation: There's no high like it. It's just little drawings that you made move, and it's laborious and time consuming and awful, but it's such a high. It came to life, it's alive, it's moving, and you made it happen. I can't get enough of it.
On the value of mentors: As soon as I found a mentor who really took the time to unpack my work, really push me, really give me solid advice, my little progression suddenly took like a giant leap forward.
On constraints: “Do whatever you want”...you kind of get overwhelmed. You don't know where to start. There's no hook where you can grab something and bounce off of it. So I think constraints do help.
Italian and American cartoonist, comics scholar, art exhibit curator, bestselling author. Winner of the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic of the Year. Faculty at Columbia College Chicago.
On loosening perfectionism: "When I start, I'm nervous and uptight and worried...when I'm actually working, I'm less of a perfectionist and more accepting of the mistakes that actually lead to progress or new ideas."
On constraints: "I tend to be somebody that prefers to have constraints, that could be deadlines or a size restriction...but then with every project, there comes a point where you have to break your own rules."
On improvisation: "No matter how much practice you've had or how much you think, in the act of actually doing something creative, you're flying by the seat of your pants to some degree."
Japanese graphic designer. Director of 21_21 Design Sight. Work includes "Pleats Please Issey Miyake" and the logos of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Nature & Science in Japan.
On channeling ideas: "Sketching is taking something that comes to mind...through your own eyes...and putting it out through your hands. It is a work that repeats output and input using your body."
On inspiration: "There is a feeling that ideas come down from above. Rather than coming up with it yourself, forget your ego and free your mind as much as possible, and there will come a moment when you realize, 'Ah!'"
On getting unstuck: "Distract yourself by doing something you are passionate about, such as surfing, listening to music, or reading a book. When I go back to the original issue, my mind is reset and clear, so I can come up with good ideas."
Design servant-leader, entrepreneur, best-selling author and speaker. Background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion. Author of Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation.
On creative heroes: "John Maeda is my polymath hero. He's done so many things across engineering, computer science, art, design, computation, AI. He's willing to try different things and orient his life to try new chapters."
On collaboration vs going solo: "I make sure to block the time where I'm alone in my own thoughts, making and drawing and synthesizing a point of view. But then I'll carry that into the other half of the time, where I'm engaging teams and sharing and getting feedback."
On commonality across creative fields: "All of them share this desire to make serendipitous as well as intentional sparks and connections across disparate inputs in surprising ways, that's actual creativity."
Brazilian electronic musician, composer and producer. Released eight major studio albums under the London-based Ninja Tune record label. His music has also been featured in movies (like the Italian Job and 21) and TV.
On discomfort: "If you're progressing in any way, it's because you're kind of marching out into the unknown and that's not a very comfortable place to be. Your discomfort is probably a healthy creative ingredient."
On continuous exploration: "If you make music, you tend to open more doors...it tends to be an unending, excited search going nowhere, but lovely all the way."
On misunderstandings: "One of the most frustrating things is when my intention is misunderstood. Let's say I make something without any percussion, and the listener says this is great but would be so much better with drums. And you just go, 'Why are you walking into my Mexican restaurant demanding Chinese food?'"
Founder of AIRLAB, a multidisciplinary lab spanning architecture, science, arts, digital design and manufacturing. Professor at Singapore University of Technology & Design. Won Design of the Year from London Design Museum.
On creative flow: "I try to create is a certain storm...typically by putting myself to extreme conditions, either like extreme short deadline or extreme pressure, or extreme intensity."
On growing by teaching: "When I teach, I need to break down my knowledge into something someone else can understand. And typically for that, I need to prepare...what I do intuitively needs to be a bit more clear, and that helps me consolidate my findings."
On the value of feedback: "It's very important to understand how people see your work, so you are understanding them and the world better... It's not that I do it for the people, but I try to connect with my art or with my architecture with people."
Fine artist who explores the “beauty of the bittersweetness of life” through painting, performance, film, and fashion. Emmy and BAFTA winner. Illustrator for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal and the bestselling board game Cranium.
On good vs bad ideas: "The good ideas give me a reason to live, and the bad ideas just suck. And you wanna throw those away and let some other sad, mediocre artists use those."
On Mark Rothko as an inspiration: "I remember being in front of those paintings for the first time... I wasn't sure if it was having a nervous reaction or anxiety attack, but I took that emotion as a love and thought, if those pieces can make me feel that strong of emotion, if I can create work that others can feel that way, that's what I would love to do in my lifetime."
On his 156 sketchbooks: "The sketchbooks are a type of diary, a type of souvenir for my travels...a way to look back at where I am in my life and what I was doing and thinking and hoping for then. Kind of a marker on the times that we're living in."
Professional illustrator for sequential art, publishing, board games, and animation. Comic artist for hits like Fart Quest and Choose Your Gnome Adventure. Enjoys hiking, birding and rocking the accordian.
On creative decision making: "What is my purpose of that piece? Am I trying to evoke emotion, or to display some kind of technical ability? All of my decisions along the way should ideally support that end goal."
On multimedia inspiration: "For this ghost detective story, I won't just find comics doing the same thing. I'll watch a movie or TV series, or listen to podcasts or music that evokes the idea of suspense or mystery, and allow those other media sources to saturate my brain."
On constraints: "Constraints breed creativity because you've now given yourself a problem to solve, you have to accomplish a thing, but you have to do it within these parameters. That often is where creativity is truly born."
American animator, producer, writer, storyboard artist, director. Creator and executive producer of shows Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and Rock, Paper, Scissors (Nickelodeon) and Yin Yang Yo! (Disney). Emmy Award winner.
On creative routine: "I don't need certain lighting or candles or music or anything like that. For me, the thing is just creating some sort of routine...like in the mornings, I know I'm gonna have oatmeal and coffee and I'm gonna have my sketchbook or my notepad."
On skill and creativity: "Sometimes your skill isn't at the level where you can get your creative ideas across. It just takes time for skill to catch up with your creative mind...a lot of doing over and over again, and learning from experience."
On "finishing" the work: "Nothing's ever really finished. You can always make things better, you can always rethink things. Usually time is the decider on when you're done. Or you get to the point where you're making the most minute adjustments only you would notice."
UPCOMING INTERVIEWS:
Conducted but not yet posted (check back soon)
Hassan Ragab – Interdisciplinary Designer, Conceptual Artist, and Architect
Leidy Klotz – Author, Engineer, and Professor at the University of Virginia
Antón García Abril – Architect, Master Builder, Founder of Ensamble Studio, and MIT Professor
Giorgia Lupi – Author, Partner at Pentagram, Data Humanist, and half of the Dear Data project
Nobumichi Asai – Media Artist, Futurist, pioneer of real-time face mapping and projection
David Patterson – Turing and Draper Prize winner, Author, retired Professor at UCLA, and Google Engineer
Natalie Nixon – Author, Founder of Figure 8 Thinking, Thought Leader, and Speaker
Not yet conducted
Robert Williams – Father of both the Lowbrow Art movement and Exponential Imagination
Steve Albini – Grammy Award winning Sound Engineer and Musician (RIP)
CREATIVE THEORIES WE'RE DISTILLING FROM THESE INTERVIEWS:
Unified Theory of Creative Elements
Unified Theory of Creative Elements
There are ingredients and catalysts of creative works that transcend different disciplines. See work in progress >
Unified Theory of Creative Process
Unified Theory of Creative Process
The creative lifecycle follows common paths and approaches, which can be optimized. See work in progress >
Unified Theory of Creative Personas
Unified Theory of Creative Personas
There are common characteristics of creative people that combine into clear archetypes. See work in progress >
Want to get involved? We're still early, but moving fast. Contact Greg Cohen at greg@distillingcreativity.com
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