My guest today is Dr R Keith Sawyer, one of the world's leading experts on creativity and learning. Keith is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovation at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, beautiful part of America. He began his career as a video game designer for Atari, earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago, and is also a lifelong jazz pianist and improviser. That unique blend of science, art and improvisation runs through everything he does.

Keith has written over 19 books and more than 100 scientific articles exploring the science of creativity, collaboration and how people learn. You may know him from his early works like Group Genius and Zig Zag, which explore how creativity happens in teams and how individuals can build innovative lives. His new book, Learning to See Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools, takes us into the studios and classrooms of top BFA and MFA programs across the world.

Based on 10 years of immersive research, Learning to See explores how students are transformed, not just in skill, but in perception, awareness, and the way they think. It's a book that challenges how we define creative education and offers powerful lessons for anyone in any profession looking to unlock deeper creative thinking. In today's conversation, we'll talk about what it really means to learn to see, the surprising ways that creativity is taught, and how these lessons apply

far beyond the arts to business, innovation, leadership, and everyday life. Keith, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.

Keith (01:42)
Well, thank you. Well, that's a great introduction.

James Taylor (01:45)
Now, you've had a very fascinating career. You've moved from game design, computer science, first of all, then pivoted jazz improvisation, and eventually in what we know you for today in creativity research. Was there a key moment that kind of pulled you into this kind of work that you do today?

Keith (02:05)
I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and get a PhD because I was interested in collaboration and human social dynamics. So I went to University of Chicago. I didn't know at that time that there was a field of research called creativity research. In my first semester in graduate school at University of Chicago, that's where Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a professor and he offered a course called psychology of creativity. So right at the beginning of my graduate study, I discovered this fascinating

area of research that people could really use their psychology expertise to study creativity. And so I'm glad I learned about that in the first year of my PhD program because ⁓ I was hooked and that's where I spent the rest of my career and continuing in my current career to focus on studying creativity as a scientist to come up with rigorous findings and understandings that often are quite surprising.

rising.

James Taylor (03:06)
Now in this book and over the past 10 years or so of your work, you've really immersed yourself in this, world of top art and design schools, ⁓ architecture, interior design, all different types of design as well. Was there a particular reason you kind of thought, okay, this is the area I'm gonna focus on initially for this book? Was there a key story or a key conversation that you had? thought, actually, this is worth investigating.

Keith (03:35)
I don't know anything or at least I didn't know anything about art and design. I don't have an art degree or an architecture degree. I'm a jazz pianist and that's why I got interested in creativity research. I wanted to study the improvisational dynamics of an ensemble. And you mentioned my book group, Genius, which is based on my studies of Chicago Improv Theater and jazz ensembles. I decided that I should ask some artists and designers, some visual artists,

about their creative process to see how much of what I knew about performing creativity would generalize. So I went to the first place I went to, I've gone now to...

over 10 art and design schools across the United States. The first place I went was Savannah College of Art and Design, which is known by its acronym SCAD. And the first couple of interviews I did there were with painters and with graphic designers. And I was really astonished at how compelling and how articulate these artists and designers who are professional creators, but who also teach in BFA and MFA programs.

is to teach people to create at the highest professional level. And even though I was already a creativity research expert at that time, I still discovered a lot of new things about the creative process that I found very compelling and that's why I wrote the book.

James Taylor (05:05)
I heard one of the first interviews that you did when I think you spoke to one of the professors there and you talked about, know, tell us about your work teaching creativity. And I think she took a bit of umbrage at this. said, well, actually that's not really kind of what I do. So tell me about those kinds of first conversations and, you know, did you have to, did you have to kind of change your own perception, first of all, about what creativity means in the context of the work that these people are doing?

Keith (05:35)
Well, you're exactly right that these artists and designers that I talk to really reject the term creativity, ⁓ which when I first went into my interviews, had, like any researcher, I had a structured interview and I had a list of questions I was going to ask. The first question was, how do you teach students how to be creative? So in the first interview I did, the painter I was talking to was visibly uncomfortable.

with the question, but also trying to be polite. ⁓ Was a very nice person, Sandra Reed, and very articulate about what she does and how she creates. But yeah, she said, I don't think I'm doing that. I don't think I'm teaching people how to be creative. ⁓ Which to me, like most of us, if painters aren't creative, then what are you teaching? So like a good researcher, I didn't insist on using my terminology. I pursued that

I said, well, what are you teaching then? And this went on. Actually, I kept asking that question in all of my interviews, even though after the first few, I knew people were going to say, no, I'm not doing that. But it turned out to be a really good way to get the conversation started, to use the term creativity. And everybody pushed back, graphic designers, architects, painters and sculptors.

So yes, what are they teaching? And then, you know, I ended up writing a whole book about it. The main thing that they say they're teaching is how to see. They're teaching students a new way of seeing. And then think about that for a minute. Everybody can look, everybody can see. And students who enter these programs are already quite gifted creators. So you have to submit a portfolio of work to go into a painting program. You have to already have a lot of paintings.

and you submit that with your application. So you're really quite skilled at what you do. So what is it that you still need to learn? And this is what these artists and designers tell me. They're quite experienced themselves and they know how to create visually. And they say, yes, the students are good at making things that look good on the campus, but they really don't know how to see yet. And that's very difficult to teach. And all these professors tell me it takes

at least two years.

James Taylor (08:03)
So let's break that apart, learning to see. The learning piece, I heard one of other things that you found that some of these people, these professors, these wonderful schools, don't even, they kind of, they feel a little bit uncomfortable using that word teacher sometimes as well. the learning, so how do they often refer to themselves in terms of what is their role that they see or how would they describe themselves to others?

Keith (08:28)
They all say that primarily they are professional creatives. This is their identity. So the painters, to get a job at these top universities that I went to, you have to be a star. You have to have your paintings and collections. You have a dealer that you sell your works through. I talked to several people who have their paintings in the Museum of Modern Art.

the graphic designers. interviewed a couple of typeface designers, one named Jeff Keady, whose typeface KeadySons is in Microsoft Word. So these are the types of people I interviewed. So they know what it means to create at the highest levels. But many of them, ⁓

pretty much all of them did not start their careers as educators. They refer to themselves as accidental teachers. So they don't even join the faculty at one of these places until they're maybe 30 or in their 30s. So they already have established a career. And then they come in and that's kind of like a second identity for them.

But when they're in the classroom, in the studio classroom, what they bring to it is their professional success and their expertise.

James Taylor (09:45)
So in the third part of that, the word of your book, Learning to See, is the C part. What are they trying to help them see? Is it literally the canvas, the work that they're creating? Or is it something more internal? Or is it taking, I mean, I have to think in terms of jazz music, you're jazz musician as well, there's that balance between craft and the art. Our art might be up there, what we...

imagine we want to create this thing to sound like is up there but our craft is down there and so there's that kind of gap that bridge that has to happen and sometimes it takes a little bit longer than others so those professors you spoke to what were they teaching people to see? Was it internal or something more external?

Keith (10:34)
Well, you raised an interesting paradox for me because if you read my book You will not know how to see at the end So I can't teach you how to see and I guess the first thing I would say is you can't tell someone how to see Nobody lectures in a painting class and no one lectures in an advertising class ⁓ What what do you have to do? So really you're guiding someone through a personal transformation. It's like if you were in a therapy session

and your therapist says, you're being too needy in all of your relationships, stop being needy. ⁓ That doesn't work. You can't just tell someone to stop doing something that's so fundamental to who they are as an individual and to their practice. So this is what happens to students who come into a painting program or a typeface design program. They have learned

over their entire lives, probably since the age they were 10. They've learned how to generate works that are quite good. But that ties them to an existing way of working that I call a linear insight model of creativity. And you see this in a lot of creativity research as well. This idea that creativity originates in a great idea at the beginning and then the creative process is a matter of executing or realizing the vision that you have at the beginning.

And this tends to be what people who enter an art or design program do when they're creating. They have the idea at the beginning and then they execute it. But what these successful artists and designers tell me is a better way to be creative is to go through an exploratory iterative process where you don't get too attached to the idea that you have at the beginning because a better idea is going to emerge while you're engaged in the work.

really you need to learn a different way of thinking about the creative process and a different way of engaging with the canvas or with the paints that you're learning. So you mentioned a sort of maybe more abstract level up here and then the level of working with materials and technique. What I hear when I talk to these individuals is that they're closely tied together. That a lot of people will say making is thinking. That you need the materials and you need to engage in the material

embodied process of working with those materials because it's that dialogue with the materials that results in the emergence of surprising new ideas that you couldn't have had at the beginning. So you need to teach people, I guess, teach them out of this instinct to have an idea at the beginning and then execute that idea. And it's difficult to do that because the students have been quite successful with the linear model. I mentioned that they have to submit a portfolio and the portfolio

the works are going to look pretty good. So how can you teach someone to stop doing something that's been very successful for them, but that ultimately is preventing them from attaining the next level of realizing their creativity?

James Taylor (13:43)
I was just reading on that on that point I was just reading an interview the other day with Vivian Westwood, ⁓ the fashion designer, and was talking about her relationship with Malcolm McLaren for the early punk, early versions of punk and all those kind of what we now think of as punk. ⁓ she said the difference in their creativity between the two of them was Malcolm was very, he had like one big idea.

And like his idea, and it kind of came early in the work he was wanting to do. And it was all about execution of the idea. The skill bit was maybe less such of a thing. It was just like, the idea, the value of the idea. With Vivian Westwood, because she came at it really as a crafts person in terms of understanding crafts and material, as you were saying, she was, she just kept moving and kept adapting and kept evolving. And so it was creative. And she went through different stages in terms of her creative ⁓ mind and creative work as well.

And there was always this little bit of a conflict between the two of them where Mark was like one big idea and she was constantly evolving as well. know at University of Chicago you mentioned we had a guest on the show a while ago, Professor Galinson, who talks about these two types of creativity, you those people that are just, they just kind of just come out of the gates like all firing, but they tend to burn out quite quickly. And then there's those others who are constantly evolving and refining and developing their work and they might have a...

few key things, but they're kind of trying to develop it over time. When you worked with some of those professors and they told you about many of students that they had, were the majority of the students they tend to have really the kind of more Malcolm McLaren ⁓ side, they've got like one big idea and it's like that and that's the energy in that, or were they more open to being that more iterative way of working and developing and maybe moving into different materials and different art forms?

Keith (15:36)
successful way of working I often refer to it as the dialogue of creativity. It's an iterative process where you're engaged with work with materials in an exploratory fashion where you're open to ideas emerging from the process. So Galinson and I agree with this terminology. We talk about the difference between problem-solving creativity and problem-finding creativity. So the problem-solving creativity is that linear process. You pose a problem for yourself at the beginning of the

process and then you solve the problem. But greater creativity comes from a process where you discover a problem while you're working or problem finding. In fact the term problem finding was coined by my doctoral advisor Mike Csikszentmihalyi and he did that came up with that term from his own study of MFA painting students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the places I went and interviewed. So the professors all tell me this is what they're teaching. They're teaching a problem finding

process that's iterative and exploratory and then involves the dialogue with the materials. And you're exactly right that different creators have these two different processes, but I didn't see anybody teaching the problem-solving process. I didn't see anybody teaching this linear pathway. So, by the way, I went to people in 20 different disciplines from the design fields on one side to the fine art fields on the other side, and I didn't see anybody teaching this linear

insight problem solving view. So yeah absolutely people often create successful works in that process but you mentioned that it ⁓ limits you and I heard a lot of professors tell me this as well. They say yeah they might have some success at the beginning of their careers but it ultimately it's not going to nurture them it's not going to feed them over time because they're going to run out of the material that they have. It's that dialogue of creativity that keeps refreshing

you and keeps giving you ⁓ new opportunities and new vistas to explore.

James Taylor (17:43)
Did they, when you were talking to these different professors, did they give any kind of guidance in terms of how that individual is going through that four year program, how they can ensure that they keep something that's true to them and like who they are, their own voice or their own way of seeing the world, their own point of view, where they're often having to learn the works of lots of other creatives in their fields. I mean, I think you mentioned, we talked about Chicago there, but I'm always, the thing I love most about Chicago is the architecture.

where it feels that the buildings are talking to each other. kind of style is that that style and that style is a different style, but it's kind of, they're kind of reflecting on each other. talking to each other as well. And I think there's, there's that, how do we kind of, how did the, professors, how do they think about how to balance that thing between saying something, your own point of view, your own way of looking at the world, but also developing craft and learning from others? How do we, how do we get that balance right?

Keith (18:40)
I like that question because I think you're right when I talk about teaching people how to see in a new way, you might perceive that as, I don't know, almost depressive. Like the way you're working is bad or the ideas that you're having, you know, stop thinking about those. ⁓ And it's maybe subtle for me to explain what's going on. What's going on is that people who haven't learned how to see yet, they actually don't really know how to articulate what it is that they want to say or what it is that they need to

is say, a lot of students who are beginners come into a program thinking that, for example, they want to do work about the environment. So this comes up quite a bit. They come in, I want to do some paintings about the environment. Professor will say, absolutely, ⁓ go for it. And then the student, this is what often happens, is that they'll paint something, and then they bring it into class, and they're going through a critique where the professor and all the other students are looking at the painting.

And in many cases,

you don't see environment or environmental issues anywhere in the painting. It's just not in there. The student who's painted it thinks it's about the environment, but it's not on the canvas. So that's an example of not being able to see yet. You think what you've done, what you put on the canvas really has solved your intention, but when everybody else looks at it, they say, no, that's not what you've generated. That's very surprising for a beginning artist that other people don't see what they see.

that's the learning opportunity is to guide that person who's put in on the canvas to see that what they think is there isn't there yet. There's not a unity between your intended message and what other people are going to get out of the work. Now what happens is professors in that case, I call it a mismatch, what they don't do is they don't tell the student go back and repaint it. Go back and repaint it so it looks more like the environment.

That's not what they do in this exploratory process. What they do is they guide the student, look at what you've generated and value that and then see what it is that you've generated. You've generated something that you don't realize yet that you generated, but it came out of you and there's something powerful about that. And you might not realize yet what that message is. So really it's a kind of personal transformation where you're discovering something about yourself that you don't see yet. It really has to be a

between what you say the work means and what the work really does mean. So the fact that, and I hear painters say this all the time, it doesn't matter what the intention is. I don't even ask students what they were intending when they generated the work. We need to talk about the work that's on the wall and what's there.

and I'm gonna help you see what it is that you generated. So when I talk about professors teaching students how to see, it's not about oppressing them away from what they want to do, it's about helping them discover themselves at a deeper level so that they actually better understand what it is that they want to do.

James Taylor (21:53)
I know with like improv comedy, one the things that makes jokes funny is you think you're going along in one direction and suddenly it just kind of veers off and it takes you to a different place. When you were doing all these interviews with these different professors as well, was there one in particular which made you kind of almost have to of veer off slightly in terms of where you thought the book was going and where your research was going and it opened up a new area of exploration, either for this book or maybe...

future work, you're like, this is interesting. This is something I want to look at in the future.

Keith (22:25)
I thought it was going to be a much more academic book because I'm a learning scientist and I'm a psychology researcher. ⁓ A lot of what I saw is completely aligned with the research. So I already mentioned this concept of problem finding creativity and problem solving creativity. I only use those words in the book on one page. I don't use a whole lot of academic language or psychological terms because I think the words of these artists and designers are so articulate.

What I really wanted to do was tell their stories. So that changed for me. When I started writing the book, it was going to be a very academic book. I was going to have a whole chapter about problem finding, creativity, research, and sight studies, and the people who had done problem finding research in science or wherever.

And then, the more and more I started working with the transcripts of these interviews, and I also went into studio classes, and I made videotapes of what's going on.

when professors interact with the students and you know, let's look at what's here on the wall and talk about what it is that you've generated. So I have a lot of videotapes of that dialogue as well. So that's how the book changed and emerged for me, is that it became a much more of a storytelling book that I wanted to represent the compelling aspects of these stories. And I ended up leaving out the science. I don't have very many citations. I have less than 10.

citations at the end of the book and I don't have those parentheses, know, like academic journal articles have or so-and-so said this in 1974. I left all that out because I wanted to tell the stories. So for me, that's how it evolved. That was not the book I started out to write, but the book I ended up writing is a book that I think is a lot more accessible, especially to anyone who cares about art and design that ⁓

This actually is what people are doing, but they don't always know how to articulate it themselves. Because a lot of exceptional creators, they just do what's right. They do what works for them. they've been, many people, they've been able to discover for themselves this exploratory iterative process. But maybe not when they were 16 years old or 17 years old. These students are coming in at 18 years old. This is the value of going to an art school or a design school is that it's going to

accelerate for you this ⁓ learning of how to do, how to engage in this kind of process instead of you know stumbling along until you're 30 or later and then realizing that you know this is ⁓ a better way to accomplish my intention.

James Taylor (25:15)
Now a lot of people listen to this show are in business, they're business executives, they're CEOs, CFOs, they're in finance, they're in engineering as well, things that we often don't get labeled with the creative label or something within the creative industries anyway. You mentioned this kind of problem finding and problem solving, so I'm just going to go back on that one as well because I think that's the interesting distinction. We're seeing lot of obviously work just now in artificial intelligence where

the focus around increasing productivity of people, is kind of the, it feels like the problem solving bit, know, how can we make people work a bit faster? There seems to be less work going into the problem finding, which is like kind of creating entirely new ways of doing things, new industries, new types of products and services. For those people who are listening to this show who maybe don't come from the traditional arts world or the creative industries world.

What can they learn about the way that artists and those working in those industries think about the problem finding bit, how they develop their eye to be able to help find those problems?

Keith (26:26)
I think the lessons are absolutely transferable. You mentioned in the introduction that I have a background as a management consultant. My undergraduate degree is in computer science and in fact, in the 1980s, I was doing custom software in artificial intelligence. The much older algorithms that were being used in the 1980s. And then I eventually wrote my first business book. It's called Group Genius, where I'm applying the lessons of improvisational theater and jazz ensembles to

a more general model of collaboration when you want collaboration to drive creativity. So when you think about this contrast between problem solving and problem finding creativity, in a lot of cases in business you know what the problem is. So in that case problem solving creativity is absolutely what you need. I would certainly not dismiss problem solving creativity. But research shows that you get more surprising breakthrough creativity from a

problem finding. You have an opportunity to discover or to formulate a new problem that's different from what everybody else in the industry thinks the problem is. And it's that ability to see, honestly, it's that ability to see it when a new way of thinking about the problem presents itself to you. The finding of the new problem emerges from the process. You don't just sit in a room by yourself and think really hard about what kind of new problem is there. The new problems present themselves to you.

from engaging in the process. This is why you hear entrepreneurs talking about pivoting and about minimum viable products and entrepreneurship classes. And absolutely, I would endorse this, that you need to put something out there in the world and then be very alert and aware to what's going on with the thing that you've generated. And often, what happens with that thing you've generated, whether you call it a minimum viable product or something else,

it doesn't respond or the market doesn't respond in the way you thought it would. And then being aware to that and then being ready to go in a different direction, that's what people call the pivot. Or in my case, I talk about the zigzag process because I think when I look at the history of invention and innovation, I see more than one pivot. It's not just that you change direction one time, but people who are serial innovators who are really good at doing this, they continue

are aware and looking for opportunities that again they emerge from the process. So that's what I see artists and designers learning how to do. It's that ability to work with the materials that they're generating, the work that's in process, and it's very much like ⁓ pivoting in entrepreneurship or in product development.

James Taylor (29:16)
Now with these professors, they're obviously giving human feedback to those students and giving them advice on helping them kind of learn to see, as we're speaking about here. I'm wondering, you know, I see a lot within journalism and writers where now with artificial intelligence, I can write a piece and say, okay, imagine you're an editor from the New Yorker, critique this, show me the weaknesses, show me how I can improve on it, show me the weaknesses in a particular argument, for example.

So within text-based, it's art that's already happening. We have seen copilots. I'm wondering with the more visual arts, those who are in sculpture or painting, for example, are there any kind of AI tools or things that are coming across in terms of almost having that copilot or somewhat critique that can sit there at the side, kind of watching as you're working and maybe helping you see things that you can't necessarily see in what you're trying to do.

Keith (30:15)
I haven't seen it yet.

No, I haven't seen and I use Gen.ai all the time and I've experimented with it in many different ways. But first of all, the problem finding process is something that chat GPT and other generative AI, it's ⁓ ineffective or it just doesn't happen. You don't find this problem finding process because it's disembodied. It's in the computer. So there's no dialogue with materials. There's no generation of something and then interacting with it. And it's a dialogue that drives

the creative process for a human artist or designer. at least at the moment, AIs just cannot do that. They're not designed to do that. It's not a flaw, but it just is not possible with the current understanding of it being in a computer. Maybe someday when it's a robot and it's embodied in the world, maybe then there would be this opportunity. So that's number one, is that I don't think today's gen i create that way and I don't think

they ever will. They will not create in a problem-finding fashion. And number two, you asked about professors teaching students how to engage in this kind of process that I call the dialogue of creativity. And what they do is they talk to students in a classroom by engaging with the work that the student has generated. So the dialogue is between the professor and the students work. And they are modeling their own way of thinking about engaging in the process for the student. It's very custom.

It's very customized. It's very one-on-one. It's different for every single student. So there's not a formula because every student's different and every student's mindset and the path of personal transformation is uniquely for them.

So that is an incredible gift for a teacher to be able to do that. The people I interviewed have an average of almost 20 years of experience as teaching. And that's on top of the years they were a professional creator before they first stepped in a university classroom. It's not easy to do. So there's two things I don't see Gen.I.I. doing any time in the near future, and probably never with the current designs of neural networks or machine learning.

are not gonna be able to engage in problem finding creativity, number one. And number two, they are not going to be able to guide you in learning how to engage in a problem finding process. So yes, you can use them to help you solve problems, but you're not gonna get problem finding from today's AI.

James Taylor (32:51)
What about the those those teachers that you saw as they working with students? you go talk about that path piece? They're kind of softer side, the more like a psychological side where that student has self doubt or burnout in the work that they're doing as well. Did you notice anything in terms of those great teachers that they were doing in? Because obviously this is something that can not just within the visual arts, for example, but lots of industries see this way you have new members in the organization who

just they're kind of going through that process of learning their craft or whatever their thing is. And they have doubt, they have a lot of self doubt there. They have that crisis of confidence perhaps at a certain point in their career. Or they just get burnt out, they're just producing at such a rate, they kind of feel that they lose it. Was there anything you saw from some of those great teachers that they would provide their students in terms of way of looking at their creativity or way of just having a practice of some sort to of keep them soul and body and mind?

Keith (33:49)
I'm glad you asked that because it's almost a truism in creativity research that you have to fail or that failure is essential for creativity. So and I think that's true, but I think what I see from these artists and designers is a different way of thinking about failure. It's not a failure. At least that's not the way they think about it. And they say this happens to me all the time in my own professional practice. But what most people think of as a failure really is a mismatch between what you intended

and what actually has happened. And in many cases that mismatch is productive, which is what people mean when they say you need to fail to be successful. The failure is what leads to the pivot, or the failure is what leads to a turn in the zigzag. So it's a different way of thinking about it when there's a mismatch between what you've done and what you wanted to happen, is to see that mismatch as an opportunity to shift in direction, as opposed to seeing the mismatch as a failure to do what

you intended to do and then you said I didn't do what I intended to do I'm gonna throw it away and start over again. No that's not the way to be a successful creative or super creative the way to do that is to look at what you actually have done and then use that as an opportunity. So now you you mentioned self-doubt.

Students don't, at least according to these professors, they haven't learned the ability to successfully manage failure. And they haven't learned the ability to see the opportunity and the failures, the mismatches that they've generated. So they do get very discouraged. I mean, you're there in a top university. You've got a professional painter at the front of the room who's 20 years older than you, who has a work in the Museum of Modern Art, and you feel like you failed in front of that person. That's very intimidating and discouraging.

So these professors the ones who are very skilled they have learned to manage Failure to guide the students to not get discouraged and to see what they've done in a different kind of way It's part of learning to see and yes, absolutely. I heard this metaphor from three different professors saying I Here's what they say. They say I put the student in deep water and then Once they start to play around flail around

in the water, then I'm there in a canoe and I hand them an oar. But they say it's essential for the student to be in the deep water and to start flailing. You have to let the student do that because otherwise there's no learning. But you also have to be there to help them get past that discouragement and that depression. mean, you know, imagine you're 18 or you're 19 years old. So you're still learning how to...

use those mismatches of those failures to be productive. So effective teachers really do create a supportive learning environment and they really are just so gifted at helping students get through that discouragement and learn how to use what they might perceive as failures to drive the process forward.

James Taylor (36:58)
And was the one practice that you noticed in terms of those teachers were teaching their students in terms of helping them learn to see, as this book's been about, that you think could be applied to that executives, perhaps listening to this show just now, the engineer, the AI engineer that's listening to this show. We often talk about things, we have our guests on the show that we talk about something as simple as a morning pages, Julia Cameron, which is just this very simple way of just helping reflect and spend a little bit time in the morning, kind of reflecting.

giving them a sense of who their voice was. Is there kind simple little practice like that you notice time and time again that many of these teachers were teaching in terms of helping their people learn to see that could be applied outside of the traditional creative industries?

Keith (37:42)
I can think of two and one is the importance of constraints or guiding parameters that if you don't have any guidance whatsoever, you often will flail around. You can't just tell someone go be creative or go generate a painting. It's not gonna realize ⁓ their potential to generate good work. So having some sort of guidance or constraints on the process and it's difficult to do that for yourself. This is one reason why there's a value in going to art school because you have these

who know how to design carefully constrained assignments that are going to channel you through the optimum learning pathway. But successful artists and designers and graphic designers, they tell me that they have learned how to present to themselves structure, the guiding structures or parameters, especially when you're stuck and you don't know what to do next. That can really help.

to give yourself some constraints on the process. Like, for example, ⁓ pick a certain material. Let's say you always draw with a pencil. So you say, okay, I'm stuck. Today, I'm going to, ⁓ I don't

I don't know, use a crayon. And instead of doing it on paper, I'm going to find an old piece of wood, and I'm going to use a crayon on a piece of wood. So changing your tools or changing your materials can be a form of constraint. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the sort of thing.

James Taylor (39:10)
No, it's like a jazz

musician, have a form within which to play, but then within that, there's lots of different ways they can take that.

Keith (39:21)
Oh yeah, exactly right. And so there's the standard mid-century jazz where you play off of these 16 or 32 bar song forms from Broadway musicals. And many of them are similar. They're kind of predictable with the cycle of fifths. And there's a certain 251.

So you get very good at doing that, but talented jazz musicians, really do seek out these 16 bar song forms that have an unusual chord progression, where it's a challenge now to fit a melody line into what's going on, because it's different from all the other ones. Now, if you're sitting at home without the 16 bar song form, and you're just blowing in your horn,

just for practice. Sure, you can be very creative that way, but the reason why jazz musicians seek out these 16-bar standards is because that structure actually can lead them to discover new melodic shapes that they wouldn't have without that harmonic structure.

James Taylor (40:20)
Now for those listening that aren't jazz fans, is structure within the chaos, believe us, believe us. It's wonderful having on the show, if someone wants to take one step towards becoming more creative perceptually, and you wanna learn more about your work, the book, where should they go? Where's the best place to come and have more of an engagement with you?

Keith (40:43)
I'd recommend my podcast, which is called the Science of Creativity and my sub-stack newsletter is also called the Science of Creativity. So there, like you, I have some fascinating creatives who are articulate about how to do this. And of course, there's always my book, Learning to See, if you're particularly interested in what goes on at the highest professional level of art and design. And I'm just astonished that no one has written this book already. If you want to find out what goes on in the world's

art and design schools.

What book are you going to buy? There's no book. I still can't believe it that my book in 2025 is the first book where someone went into art and design schools and found out what's going on in those studio classrooms. It's so fascinating and compelling. And I spent over 10 years doing it. And the whole 10 years I was working on it, I thought someone else is going to publish this book. I need to write this, but someone else is going to publish this book. But I kept interviewing new artists and designers because they're just so fascinating.

James Taylor (41:38)
Hahaha

Keith (41:45)
and that's why it took me so long to write the book and no one else ever wrote the book. So yeah, if you wanna know how to teach people how to learn to see, then yeah, my book Learning to See, that's the one.

James Taylor (42:00)
learning to see Inside the World's leading art and design schools is out now. Dr. Arki Soyer, thank you so much for coming on the Super Creativity