Contents

I. An Introduction to An Incomplete List of C-Words for the Creative Course

C-Word Sections

1. Care
2. Craft
3. Composition
4. Curation
5. Curiosity
6. Consistency
7. Countenance
8. Concepts
9. Currency
10. Collaboration
11. Convergence
12. Comprehensive
13. Charrettes
14. Critique
15. Context
16. Complexity
17. Codex
18. Conversation
19. Clocks
20. Clouds
21. Culture
22. Change

See Also: An Illustrative Introduction to a Curious Compendium of Incomplete Lists for Productive Practice

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An Introduction to An Incomplete List of C-Words for the Creative Course

In 2002, Richard Florida, an American urban studies theorist and author, released his bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida’s book chronicled the emergence of a broad socio-economic group which Florida labeled the “creative class.”¹ Florida’s book identified a segment of the workforce whose economic function is to create new ideas, technologies, creative content, and more. Florida also explored the impacts and implications of the creative class on the economy, regional planning, and other areas of concern. In the book’s original preface, Florida estimated that the “Creative Class” encompassed 30 percent of the US workforce and broadly defined this class as those “who use creativity as a key factor in their work.”² ¶ About four years after publishing The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida published a follow-up volume titled The Flight of the Creative Class, in which Florida took things one step further by arguing that competition for creative talent would be not only national but global. Florida’s books are highlighted here at the get-go largely because Florida’s notion of the creative class helps frame the typical “who” I’ve encountered in my own creative courses over the years. Thus, the c-words listed below in someways reflect and are also geared towards the “creative class” taking an undergraduate creative course. In fact, it was in my creative course syllabi and lectures that I first developed a variation of the annotated c-word notes summarized below. Beyond reflecting the college classes I teach, the word course in the title of this c-word list might also suggest a direction—a route or path to a particular goal, destination, or place. ¶ As is noted above, Florida’s creative class, when viewed as a socio-economic group or broad demographic, may help readers “bucket” this wide group of contemporary creatives. This bucket, of course, includes designers, architects, writers, artists, and musicians. But more interestingly, Florida also included those who use creativity in their work [emphasis added]­—professions and professionals, working in or across business, education, healthcare, law, and more.³ Fast forward to the present day, and some might argue that Florida’s broadly defined creative class is even wider than it was in 2002. A recent article by Sheon Han serves as a fitting, albeit somewhat anecdotal, example. In a 2024 issue of Wired magazine, Han, who (at the time of this essay) is a Software Engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, wrote, “Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves ‘creatives.’”⁴ Han, who is originally from Seoul, South Korea, first came to the US to study philosophy, literature, and computer science.⁵ ¶ As a college educator teaching undergraduate courses, I frequently encounter a wide swath of students who possess a variety of skills and interests. Like Han, some of these students—regardless of their academic major or goals—view creativity as integral to their identity, profession, or both. For them, creativity is not merely a “soft skill” listed on a resume, but rather a way of doing, thinking, or being. Some of these creativity-inclined students sense that studying, practicing, or just attempting to better understand creativity will help elevate their professional, personal, and civic pursuits alike—this is, in many cases, why they enroll in my course. Like Han and others, they view creativity as integrative and integral. Thus, as we explore the c-words below, specific applications are not necessarily the focus. Instead, this list merely highlights and explores language, terms, references, and ideas that [I hope] may spark further interest and exploration. ¶ Calls for broader disciplinary connections around, to, and through creativity are certainly not new.⁶ As such, this c-list largely attempts to resurface some of these ideas in a semi-logical order and in memorable groupings. Along these lines, this c-word list maker owes a debt to a long line of c-word list makers who came before him. For example, in 2015, Sir Ken Robinson published Creative Schools, and within chapter six, “What’s Worth Knowing?” Robinson listed eight c-word competencies. They were: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship.⁷ Another c-word-themed exploration appeared in a 2023 paper by Branden Thornhill-Miller et al., who published, “Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration: Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills for the Future of Work and Education.” Thornhill-Miller et al.’s paper not only conveys and explores these ideas but also, to some degree, offers an assessment that goes beyond mere valorization.⁸ For those interested in writing, Wendy Bishop and David Starkey cover ten c-word sections in their 2006 book Keywords in Creative Writing. As Bishop and Starkey note in their Introduction,⁹ their book follows in the tradition of similar works, including Peter Vandenberg’s Keywords in Composition Studies (1996). ¶ As many educators and educational administrators can attest, terms such as skills, competencies, abilities, attitudes, practices, literacies, and behaviors are sometimes used and [unfortunately] abused interchangeably. Furthermore, we [educators] often speak of “soft skills” versus “hard skills,” or practical skills versus theoretical ones, without a clear understanding of the differences. ¶ In yet another c-word-oriented effort from 2023, the Royal Society of Arts convened a group of over 50 businesses and educators to explore life-centric values and perspectives. Their effort yielded what they labeled the “Capabilities for Life” framework, which built upon Sir Ken Robinson’s aforementioned 8 c’s while adding two more (“change” and “courage”).¹⁰ ¶ In this thick forest of c-words and pedagogical pairings, I hope students are not already “lost at c.” Thus, let’s slow down and imagine a spectrum with practice-oriented language, such as “skills,” on one side, and more analytical attributes, such as “competencies” or “theories,” on the other. Such a spectrum affords us a horizontal view of knowledge, thereby enabling a more nuanced discussion that avoids tired discourses of “higher” versus “lower” order knowledge. ¶ While dozens of c-words made this list-maker’s short list, and while some c-words could be added later, I’ve selected an initial set of terms that I sense are timely. I understand that timeliness is subjective, but by selecting these big-tent terms, students and fellow educators can use them as frames for considering the multivariate challenges and opportunities before them. States of knowing, making, and doing continually and dynamically shift in response to new technologies and more. With this in mind, I invite students to view this list critically, or perhaps even with skepticism. Doing so will further define and cultivate one’s own practice, pathways, and perspectives. Even if one supports the ideas presented here, I would also encourage students to ponder what Thornhill-Miller et al. describe as “the challenges of teaching and institutionalizing”¹¹ them.

be a list maker

As you explore the c-words that follow, I encourage you to make your own word lists and, likewise, ponder how these references might open up new pathways, possibilities, or perhaps even help close perceptual gaps that can prohibit creative collaboration. But what is a perceptual gap? In their 2002 book Creating Breakthrough Products, Jonathan Cagen and Craig M. Vogel briefly explored differences in disciplinary perspectives—labeling them “perceptual gaps.”^12|13 In my creative practice and teaching, I have witnessed these project-stalling disciplinary gaps firsthand. The good news is that we can proactively prepare for and manage these gaps. Despite a sometimes common misnomer that creatives “live in their own heads,” high-performing creatives, architects, designers, directors, and others tend to be quite adept at closing perceptual gaps and disciplinary divides. But like any skill, the ability to productively gather people around ideas takes practice, and some are better suited to the task than others. ¶ With each problem and project, creatives can become more adept at navigating the complexity of the creative process itself: at once seeing the opportunities, challenges, perspectives, and innumerable factors before them. This is where things get “fuzzy”—in business and creativity alike—because this knowledge or skill becomes tacit, making it harder to qualify and quantify. But those who practice and master the creative process may be well-equipped to solve some of the peskiest problems and close such otherwise persistent perceptual gaps. ¶ In 2005, just a few years after Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class, Daniel H. Pink, another creativity-minded American author, released his best-selling book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Somewhat akin to Florida’s book, Pink posited the growing value of creative and critical thinking in a post-information age economy. For many—this list-maker included—the book struck a creative chord. In fact, Oprah Winfrey, as part of her 2008 commencement address at Stanford University, gave Pink’s book away to all graduates.¹⁴ While one might view Pink’s right-brain provocations as wishful thinking or dated in the age of AI, one could also consider the opposite: creativity could be one of the most vital tools in one’s tool chest. This is because the human brain can do so many things computers cannot—imagine, reason, invent, negotiate, assess, discern, and more. ¶ In 2010, about five years after Pink published his book, a global survey (led by IBM) of 1,500 CEOs across all sectors revealed that, in their view, the most important leadership quality for business success was creativity.¹⁵ In another survey of CEOs conducted seven years later, 77% of respondents reported struggling to find the creativity and innovation skills they needed.¹⁶ Moving into the present day, one might again wonder how rapid advances in technology and automation will further affect and shape the landscape of practice. Unfortunately, I do not have a crystal ball—but we can certainly look around for answers. ¶ In 2024, I was invited to attend a lunchtime seminar with Veda C. Storey, the Tull Professor of Computer Information Systems at Georgia State University. In a fascinating talk, Storey presented a brief, mostly chronological overview of her efforts to connect research across two areas: 1) information systems and 2) design science research. In just over an hour, Storey deftly described the arc of her research, providing attendees with key milestones and scholarly perspectives. Towards the end of her talk, Storey mentioned a recent paper¹⁷ co-authored with Alan R. Hevner and Victoria Y. Yoon. The paper immediately caught my c-minded attention. The abstract of the paper suggested that “The field of decision sciences is undergoing significant disruption and reinvention because of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the design of complex human-artificial intelligence systems (HAIS).”¹⁸ In her talk, Storey noted a section¹⁹ of the paper that outlines Design Science Research challenges for Human-AI systems design, which was subsequently followed by a set of key design challenges identified by the authors.²⁰ To my delight, the challenges were presented as a taxonomy of eight c-words: composition, complexity, creativity, confidence, controls, conscience, certification, and contribution. When Storey shared this c-word list, I nearly fell out of my chair. Many of the c-words in the authors’ taxonomy also appeared in my own creative course c-word short list. This I immediately found fascinating. ¶ Alas, before we jump into the actual c-words, I will lastly note that, throughout these notes, I admittedly forgo any in-depth critical analysis or commentary around emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, I intentionally focus on the matter at hand—human intelligence (HI). Furthermore, as we ponder these c-words and creativity itself, I encourage students to explore and discern the endlessly fascinating, big-tent notions of creativity presented, while attempting to mix and match them, along with others, using principles of “combinatory play.^“21 Together, we will expand, celebrate, interrogate, and challenge various notions of creativity. Like a journey across an endlessly vast creative terrain,²² I thus present An Incomplete List of C-words for the Creative Course.

C-Words

1. Care: One could easily argue that individuals who identify as creative generally want the things they make, contribute to, or engage with to be well considered or well made. If this assumption is at least partially true, we might furthermore assume that, generally, when it comes to such matters, creatives care. ¶ In creative work, maintaining a high level of care is not always easy, nor is it always straightforward. Just as in life, one’s career, or any particular practice, there are always competing forces, limitations, concerns, ideas, and demands—many of which are out of our control. These concerns may include, but are not limited to, time, budgets, health, energy, resources, non-alignment, and more. ¶ In this list-maker’s field of design, one might expect to find a rich body of literature concerning care, but as Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman suggest in their 2016 Chapter, “Designing with Care and Caring with Design,” it [care] remains fairly “understated and unexplored in design discourse and practice.”²³ Imrie and Kullman’s Chapter provides readers with a care-oriented overview that explores how practices of caring and designing have converged and diverged over time. Imrie and Kullman’s Chapter was published in Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, which primarily focuses on urban environments. As is typical in academic scholarship, this edited volume seems to have been derived from a narrowly focused academic gathering: in this case, the Royal Geographical Society conference in 2014.²⁴ Despite this narrow disciplinary lens, the editors sought to “redress the relative lack of writings about design and care, and to explore how care and design may be conjoined in ways that enable places to function better.”²⁵ The good news, as is even evidenced by the aforementioned volume itself (and also noted by its editors), is that there seems to be a relatively recent upsurge of interest in care. ¶ Just as the authors of Care and Design offer many methodological and pedagogical ideas, critiques, and perspectives, this list-maker likewise puts forth care as a big-tent c-word for creatives in this course. At the intersection of creativity and care, we posit the interdependence among action, artifacts, empathy, quality, craft, understanding, translation, and more. Thus, building upon the earlier supposition that care is not easy, we will explore its meaning and implications in creative work and beyond. ¶ As we ponder care, it should be noted that over time, high-performing creatives across disciplines learn to navigate and manage care-related concerns, and in fact, care seems to be a key tenet of nearly any productive practice. These high-performing creatives also understand both the independent and collaborative nature of creative work. But as we will see and explore within our c-words, even though creatives generally care, they oftentimes care about different things. This predictable tension is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as it is properly facilitated by stewards adept at the creative process. ¶ Creative stewardship differs slightly from other forms of leadership and management. Creative stewards are hybrid-brained leaders who attempt to center people, perspectives, and resources around a shared creative vision. They thereby exhibit a sensibility and sensitivity well suited to cultivating ideas, fostering consensus, and elevating performance. Creative stewards tend to be care-oriented. ¶ Care-oriented creative stewards are alignment-minded in that they welcome critiques, questioning, and varied perspectives that balance pragmatism and aspiration. As a broad humanistic trait, care and acts of care may also foster motivation. This list maker has noted that care-oriented creative leaders and participants often operate more like volunteers,²⁶ even when they are paid. In fact, one great way to practice creative leadership is to volunteer for or work for a non-profit organization. ¶ Based on these learnings, notions of creativity and care may serve as a catalyst for sustained engagement in a variety of things: projects, tasks, problem-solving, curiosity, learning, and more. ¶ Like creativity, care is indeed a “big tent” humanistic term. Writers care for their readers, nurses care for patients, and artists care for the art. Care is connected to our sense of empathy and understanding, our notions of time, observation, and more. Care appears on this list because it naturally maps to a wide range of creative identities, industries, interests, and careers. Those who work in healthcare, education,^27|28 childcare, elder care, culinary arts, engineering, design,²⁹ actively and tacitly engage with care as a sensibility, mode, and aptitude. ¶ In education, there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between education and notions of care. Some scholarship even lists caring (alongside six other c-words) as desirable outcomes for positive youth development.^30|31 ¶ As creatives, there very well may be times that you feel like the only care-oriented voice at the table—the only one willing to advocate for something you care about. Being the lone voice for creativity or care can be especially difficult when your care-oriented concerns are not easily quantified or when additional expenses are attached. For artists and designers, this presents a timeless dilemma—how does one advocate for the things one cares about? This is in part why, as a creative, you need to be clear, cogent, articulate, and compelling. Depending on your goals, doing the work is not enough. Several strategies are explored in the c-words that follow—so keep your footnotes. ¶ At the very least, as we begin our c-word journey, I hope you begin to formulate and reflect upon the many connections between creativity and care. Caring, care, and being careful lead quite naturally to our second “big tent” c-word—one that, in many ways, embodies notions of care. When something is made with intention, attention, or extra care—or when something is carefully performed, well-composed, or elegantly solved, an observer very well might observe or remark that such an effort is “well-crafted.”
   
   
2. Craft: Unfortunately, in the mainstream, we all too often associate the term “craft” with hobbies and hobbyists. Despite this narrow use of the term, craft has been and remains a critically important concern for those who undertake a wide variety of creative work. It is no surprise, then, that ancient Greek philosophers viewed “craft” as a central philosophical pillar—one that served as a springboard for vigorous discourse into many facets of society and life. As Plato, Aristotle, and others sought to describe and explore craft, these ancient Greek philosophers used the word techne (or “tekhne,” [τέχνη] in Greek)—which today might translate to mean, among other things, “applied knowledge.”³² Fascinatingly, techne is the root of the modern English word “technology”—but its original meaning was much broader. While the long history of craft and its varied uses cannot be adequately summarized here, craft seems to have evolved from a way to describe goal-directed knowledge to the present day, where craft is used to describe or identify properties such as care, patience, intent, quality, and more. ¶ As is noted at the outset of this section, in the 21st century, in the mainstream, many narrowly associate craft with hobbies or “side projects”—things made with glue sticks, colored paper, and popsicle sticks—handicrafts, if you will. Along these lines, a Google image search for “craft” will yield countless images of yarn and items made of paper-mache. I am not against these forms of craft—but by including them on this list, I suggest we explore their broader meanings and potential. ¶ For those in this creative course, like the ancient philosophers before us, I urge you to explore craft as a mindset. Adding craft as a “mindset” will help shape and inform your creative and designerly practices. With all this said, and as I note in my Illustrative Introduction to a Curious Compendium of Incomplete Lists for Productive Practice, in her 2024 Tanner lectures, Rachel Barney quite appropriately describes craft as “a very big tent.”^33|34 Thus, if you have not done so already, like many before you, I encourage you to embark on a journey to explore craft. ¶ As an extension of the c-word section on care, the term “craft” might be well served wby pondering that which is well-crafted. Things that are “well-crafted” often exhibit discernible evidence of attention, detail, patience, or care. Curiously, evidence of care may be “felt,” sensed, or understood, and, like one’s sense of care, perceptions of craft may vary based on one’s own taste, culture, beliefs, and aesthetics. But generally, humans can sense when extra time, empathy, effort, or consideration goes into the formulation, production, and making of a thing. ¶ But how can craft be “sensed”? Let’s use a small, seemingly inconsequential artifact as an example, such as a button or snap on a jacket. When we use a button, we, as its [the button] users, are the recipients of the designer’s consideration (or lack thereof) of its form and function. This helps shape how the button feels when we use it, and by considering how it “feels,” we in part begin to discern and evaluate its craft. How easily does the button snap? How easily does it unsnap? What does the physical snap look like and sound like when snapped and unsnapped, etc? Who then cannot claim to appreciate a perfectly proportioned button that snaps magically into place? And so, in a snap, craft can sense. If we extend this button example, we can observe and consider craft in many things. We can sense craft just as much in a musician’s ability to conclude a performance with a final note that feels “just right.” The craft in this latter example is likely the product of the musician’s many hours of practice, which then develops into muscle memory—a kind of intuition that informs split-second decisions about timing, volume, and pitch. This practice-to-craft-to-muscle-memory cycle applies equally to the detailed work of a surgeon and to the plumber who seals a pipe with perfect precision. ¶ Sometimes we sense something is well-crafted when we hear it, or experience it, when we touch it, or use it. Akin to what is described above, in a section of Richard Sennett’s 2008 book The Craftsman, the author stresses, “the positive, open role routine and practicing play in the work of crafting physical things.”³⁵ But Sennett also moves beyond physical object as he explores practice and craft, noting that “so too do people need to practice their relations with one another….”³⁶ Interestingly and in this writer’s view understandably, Sennett intentionally avoids the word “creativity”—suggesting that “the word carries too much Romantic baggage—the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius.”³⁷ Setting such creativity-oriented concerns aside, Sennett’s book reinforces craft as a crucial “big-tent” connection between making and thinking. ¶ Lastly, we might ask ourselves, “If craft and care can be ‘sensed,’ can a lack of craft be equally sensed?” Here, the answer may be nuanced. An expert professional baker will have very different expectations of bread from the average consumer. Despite this varied sense of craft in any given discipline, and even when the maker or provenance of a thing is unknown, tangible traces of the invisible creative hand are “baked into” a final product, artifact, or thing. Craft is thus a distinctive, subjective, and humanistic property that is evident in some of our oldest human-made artifacts.³⁸ Artifacts and craft thus reflect, substantiate, and “embody” our longstanding innate penchant for tangible evidence of human care. ¶ There are some tensions that arise as one engages with notions of craft. These issues center around time, cost, material, and energy use, and another might even concern pride. For instance, in one’s seemingly noble pursuit of excellent craft, how does one develop pride in one’s work without conflating such a practice with pride in oneself? How does one then appreciate the work of others without sliding down the slippery slopes of appropriation or envy?³⁹ Beyond this, one might posit how to craft cogent artifacts or maintain clarity of vision while also considering others’ perspectives. ¶ In popular culture and occasionally in marketing, the latter question is oftentimes [overly] positively celebrated when a product, brand, or creator is viewed as “uncompromising.” Thus, as students explore notions of craft, they will no doubt encounter these issues, trade-offs, and more. ¶ So welcome to the very big tent we call craft. As Ezra Shales states in the introduction to his 2017 book The Shape of Craft, “The most I can hope is that I whet your desire to touch craft and cultivate increased respect for the myriad anonymous craftspeople at work in the world.”⁴⁰ As students posit craft, the term quite fluidly leads to adjacent concerns involving the careful ordering, synthesis, assembly, or arrangement of things. This general concern for ordering and arranging things leads us to our next two c-words: composition and curation. Let’s start with the former.
   
   
3. Composition: Composition describes the formal arrangement or ordering of media, materials, spaces, content, objects, ideas, and more. Big-tent principles of composition span many disciplines, not limited to music, math, writing, film, art, computer science, design, and more. Thus, composition can apply to paintings, poems, architecture, sonatas, and sculptures alike. Of course, composition generally describes the act of composing [and sometimes recomposing] multivariate material(s). ¶ How something is shaped, ordered, arranged, or composed determines its structure, form, and sometimes, as a product of a particular structure and form, its significance, value, or meaning. In elementary school, I remember being handed a small black notebook with the word “Composition” on the cover. Within such composition books, students are generally instructed to explore the process, craft, and technique of writing. Over the past 50 years, the study of composition has been generally referred to as composition studies. Even in this relatively short time period, our thoughts around composition—how it is taught and what it encompasses have evolved significantly. For instance, in 1973, Peter Elbow published Writing Without Teachers, in which he suggested that we write not only to compose or record our thoughts, but also to cultivate our thinking. For some, this idea may seem obvious, but for others, this notion of writing, and likewise composing to cultivate, might serve as a fresh frame. In his book, Elbow states that, “Putting a thought into symbols means setting it down and letting the mind take a rest from it.”⁴¹ This, as we will see in the d-word section on “Drawing,” is quite similar to how folks in the visual arts approach sketching—which likewise allows us to rapidly bring ideas into the world. Elbow later states, “A principle value of language […] is that it permits you to distance yourself from your own perceptions, feelings and thoughts.”⁴² If we thus extend this logic just a bit further, we thereby posit human composition as a reflective “thinking” process. Furthermore, this reflective line of reasoning lends itself to many other forms of making and doing. ¶ As we further consider composition, in the 21st century, even what we might consider less “tangible” material arrangements could fall into compositional categories. Data, visuals, or code are also considered languages or materials and, thus, when arranged, they form compositions. As is fairly typical in creative classes such as this, students create compositions in part so that we can analyze, discuss, describe, evaluate, and better understand their formal qualities. ¶ When creatives talk of the formal, we’re not describing a middle-school dance. In conversations around composition, the formal refers to a resultant quality. The formal is thus a way to discuss and discern certain elements and principles that inform composition, or, said more plainly, the arrangement of things. ¶ In his 2003 book, Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, Leonard Koren suggests that arranging things “has two aspects: (1) the selection of the objects—things—and (2) the manner in which the objects are arranged.”⁴³ Interestingly, Koren adds a footnote after “arranged,” noting that his book is primarily concerned with arranging and that “object selection should be the subject of another book.”⁴⁴ Likewise, this short memo on composition is followed by a section on curation, which briefly explores notions of culling and selection. ¶ “Forms,” when viewed as a big tent term, can be understood as a way to ponder organizing principles that shape texts, objects, or even ideas. For instance, in her 2015 book Forms, Caroline Levine notes that, “Over many centuries, form has gestured to a series of conflicting, sometimes even paradoxical meanings,”⁴⁵ but the author later shares that, “‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping.”⁴⁶ Fascinatingly, although Levine hails from the world of literature, she uses affordances,⁴⁷ a term from the fields of psychology and design, to think about form. ¶ As we will see, c-word forces, including curation, composition, content, and concept, are in various ways highly intertwined and interdependent. Together, such concerns generally contribute to the substance of a work. Composed material can be physical, digital, or even ephemeral—and, as noted earlier, these days material can include images, shapes, language, sounds, text, code, matter, data, ideas, and more. ¶ Depending on the medium, material can be manipulated and arranged with various elements and principles in mind. These elements and principles might include, but are not limited to, contrast, hierarchy, scale, duration, texture, volume, pattern, and more. ¶ In the interest of brevity, I might suggest that we ponder 10 decent “starter” structures as we explore creative composition. They are: 1) sequential (or “linear”) composition, 2) non-sequential (or non-linear) composition, 3) framed composition, 4) dynamic composition, 5) looped composition, 6) systematic composition, 7) material composition, 8) recontextualized composition, 9) derivative composition, and 10) spontaneous composition. Sequential composition, for instance, encompasses most time-based works. Most films, music, and writing produced today are linear—meaning that they have a generally definitive start, middle, and end. Framed composition can be used to describe works that are contained or constrained within a frame, plane,⁴⁸ or space. This framing may also be conceptual, which means that the “ideas” can be composed or constrained within a “conceptual frame” or defined within an “idea space.” Along those lines, framing is a great way to constrain both form and ideas. Non-sequential and dynamic composition encapsulates work that may be unframed; such works may be interactive, instructional, generative,⁴⁹ spontaneous, random, participatory, and more. This latter category can even encompass dynamic works that change and adapt over time. These dynamic works might also be defined or informed by live or systematic data inputs. Looped composition, by contrast, is defined by continuous or semi-continuous repetition or repeating structures. Systematic⁵⁰ composition is defined or driven by a structure, system, matrix, or grid. Material composition refers to the specific “ingredients” that make up a substance and the proportions in which they are combined. Recontextualized composition is a broad category that includes reuse, remixing, and recontextualization. With well-known artistic figures such as Marcel Duchamp⁵¹ (1887–1968) in mind, this last category might include found or discovered objects as new or reconstituted compositions. This latter form of composition is in some ways connected to derivative⁵² composition, an example of which might be a sequel to a film. The last form of composition listed here is spontaneos composition—which can be observed in forms of improvisation, dialogue and even conversation. ¶ This list maker is most certainly not the first to posit composition as a multimodal and multidiscipary space. For instance, in 2026 Sarah Huber published Creating Formats Across Media and Disciplines: Assignments Beyond the Essay. This volume contains contributions by over a dozen educators who provide tools, lesson plans, resources, and narratives—each with clearly defined learning outcomes. The goal of the book seems to be centered around developing fluencies at the endlessly interestung intersection of media and meaning. Unsurprisingly, a whole section (Part 2: Lesson Plans: Compositional Principles)⁵³ seems to grapple with many of the aforementioned compositional structures. The first two lessons (authored by Huber) within this composition-oriented section largely deal with framed composition. Then, the third lesson, provided by Alyssa Nez, deals with nonlinear storytelling.⁵⁴ Nez points out that, “Everyone knows a linear story structure. It has a beginning, middle, and end. But not all stories fit this structure.”⁵⁵ Then Nez shares that, “Since time immemorial, Indigenous Peoples have told stories in nonlinear structure.”⁵⁶ Nez then provides scholarly and cultural examples that highlight cyclical and relational structures and how they differ from more typical linear⁵⁷ models. The last lesson within this section is penned by Sara Veglahn. Veglahn’s contribution titled “Making Poems: Exploring Ekphrasis and Text/Image Poetics”⁵⁸ seems to live at the intersection of composition, language, and meaning. To do so, Veglahn provides two prompts: one that provides students an opportunity to create meaning with found texts, and a second that explores the composition of descriptive texts. In this way, these two prompts are less about poetry, and more about understanding the varied compositional attributes of text. Ekphrasis, for those new to this term, has been used since classical antiquity as a highly descriptive or detailed storytelling technique.⁵⁹ ¶ Of course, some projects necessarily fall into multiple compositional categories. No matter which type of composition you are dealing with, creating a composition usually requires making choices and selections. Creative choices can be informed by evidence, feedback, experience, taste, input, intuition, and more. ¶ Luckily, in creative fields, we use another c-word to describe this process of narrowing down choices, or even a series of choices or compositions. This process of selection and ordering, which is often closely linked to notions of composition, is frequently called curation.
   
   
4. Curation: Whether we are aware of it or not, most of us curate. In fact, many of us perform acts of curation on a daily basis. Selecting tracks for a musical playlist, for example, is an act of curation. Choosing your clothing and wardrobe is also a form of curation. Assembling a food menu is a form of curation, as is selecting artists or works for an exhibition. For the latter selection process, museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions often employ full-time curators. ¶ To briefly ponder curation, one contemporary curator may be worth mentioning here. Since 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist has been co-director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Beyond a curator’s core role in selecting and arranging works for galleries and museums, in his 2014 book Ways of Curating, Obrist suggests or implies that curating also involves making connections. This distinctly human ability to envision and make complex humanistic connections is in part why curation has been elevated as a c-word topic of concern and exploration in this course. By framing curation as a connection-oriented process, Obrist helps us ponder the curator’s ability to “make junctions, to allow different elements to touch.”⁶⁰ A bit more abstractly, Obrist describes curation as a kind of “map making that opens new routes through a city, a people or a world.”⁶¹ Much like a map, which oftentimes orients, this big-tent view of curation suggests that matters of arrangement also connect to matters of wayfinding and even understanding. ¶ Curation as a discipline and practice involves a rich mix of organizational, aesthetic, and historical knowledge. Curators such as Obrist are valued for their unique perspectives, which in turn are informed by a general sense of discernment or discretion. ¶ Lastly, in Ways of Curating, Obrist notably describes an influential 1986 meeting with the Italian conceptual artist Alighero Boetti. In that meeting, Boetti suggested to Obrist that “curating could be about making impossible things possible.”⁶² This imagination-infused, future-oriented notion of curation required Obrist to continue doing something he already seemed inclined to do early on in his career—talk to artists. In his book, Obrist chronicles these studio visits and conversations with artists. The reader thus comes to understand and appreciate how such conversations help shape and define Obrist’s curatorial process and, in turn, his understanding and interpretation of the artists’ works. Obrist thus shares a quality, or “trait,” that is common across many creative disciplines: an attempt toget to the source. This creative “trait”—one that seeks out sources, information, footnotes, material, and materials sometimes drives the creative’s innate motivation to learn. This innate motivation is explored in our very next c-word section: curiosity.
   
   
5. Curiosity: At the beginning of each semester, one of my colleagues asks his business school students to raise their hands if they see themselves as creative. Unfortunately, he reports that many, if not most, students do not raise their hands. Thus, as we dive into notions of curiosity, now may be the perfect time to challenge one of the most significant misconceptions about creativity: that only certain people are creative. ¶ Out of curiosity, I also started conducting this informal poll around creativity in my courses as well. I then ask those who have not raised their hands whether they would be comfortable sharing why they view themselves as “not very creative.” Some state that they cannot draw or paint, or play a musical instrument. Some simply say, “I’m just not very artistic.” ¶ The reality is that all humans, to various degrees, are creative. Creativity is, in fact, one of the core attributes that make a human being human. Thus, when one says “I am not very creative,” I tend to think it is akin to saying “I am not very human.” So please stop all that non-creative nonsense—and stop it now! ¶ One goal for students in this course might be to explore various ways to harness and develop their creativity. Generally, if one wants to become more creative, a good place to start, or better yet, a good word to ponder, is curiosity. The reason for this focus on curiosity lies in its power to spark, drive, and sustain creativity. In fact, in this list-maker’s opinion, curiosity is like raw fuel for creativity. But beyond such hyperbolic statements, how do we know any of this is true? ¶ As children, we are naturally curious. In fact, curiosity shapes how children develop, explore, and understand the world as they learn and develop skills such as language. As a big-tent c-word, curiosity has been a longstanding area of scholarly interest in psychology, business, the arts, and beyond. ¶ While research around curiosity initially focused on links between curiosity and motivation,⁶³ renewed 21st-century interest and research have begun to explore more expansive possibilities. In their 2016 paper “Deconstructing intellectual curiosity,” Christopher Powell et al. describe this renewed interest as the ‘third wave’ of curiosity research.⁶⁴ Fascinatingly, Powell et al. note that curiosity can include one’s desire or interest in sensory experience [perceptual curiosity], knowledge [epistemic curiosity], intellectual engagement, and more.⁶⁵ Within this “third wave” of research, concurrent links between creativity and curiosity are being further explored by scholars such as Lydia Paine Hagtvedt, whose [multiple authors] 2019 paper is wonderfully titled “Curiosity made the cat more creative: Specific curiosity as a driver of creativity.”⁶⁶ ¶ Notably, at the outset of their paper, Hagtvedt et al. present two flavors of curiosity: “diversive curiosity [emphasis added], which reflects broad interest in exploring and learning, and specific curiosity [emphasis added], which entails a desire to solve a particular puzzle.”⁶⁷ ¶ The kind of research undertaken by Hagtvedt et al. is timely, not the least because designers and creatives of all types are increasingly being challenged to engage in problem-solving on a vast range of scales and within a variety of domains. At the complex end of the problem-solving spectrum, we encounter problems often described as “wicked.”⁶⁸ Wicked problems are ripe for creative solutions from curious, creative, and entrepreneurial minds who (as we discussed in the section on curation) can make new and vital connections. ¶ This list maker suggests that one of the most compelling aspects of Hagtvedt et al.’s paper is thus the authors’ notion of idea linking—a novel mechanism described as “that specific curiosity drives the within-individual cognitive exploration that supports creative idea generation.”⁶⁹ Unlike 20th-century creativity-oriented terms such as “brainstorming”—the notion of idea linking seems to offer creatives a more cogent and scholarly process. Furthermore, Hagtvedt et al. argue that specific curiosity supports our ability to explore multiple or partially overlapping ideas— characterized by an individual’s ability to “develop ideas by linking them together in a sequential manner, using aspects of initial ideas as input into subsequent ideas.”⁷⁰ ¶ With notions of curation, curiosity, and idea linking in mind, we might now ask what separates the highest-performing creatives from us mere mortals? While there are certainly many answers to this question, one crucial, if not obvious, answer is consistency.
   
   
6. Consistency: Despite the hurly-burly of contemporary life, what does it mean to deliberately dedicate oneself to a particular practice? Beyond this, we might ask how one might reflect on that practice and the associated actions embedded within or associated with it. By undertaking this reflective posture, one may begin to see (or not see) difference, discernment, distinction, or improvement.⁷¹ ¶ While the word “commitment”⁷² was also a contender for c-word six, and while these two words are somewhat entangled, it was with special intention that I opted for consistency. My initial interest in consistency was first sparked by imagining the contents of an unwritten memo. In 1985, Italo Calvino, an Italian novelist, was invited to present a series of lectures at Harvard. Unfortunately, Calvino passed away just before his lectures were scheduled to be presented. In preparation for his lectures, Calvino composed a series of essays titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium.⁷³ Within his memos, Calvino sought to explore six literary virtues. The six virtues were: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. While Calvino drafted and edited the first five memos, the sixth, on consistency, was never written—leaving us to ponder or imagine the memo’s contents and significance. ¶ One might suggest with some degree of confidence that Calvino himself was in many ways consistent. As a prolific, committed, and consistent writer, Calvino published novels, stories, letters, essays, and literary criticism. ¶ If one imagined Calvino delving into notions of consistency, one might imagine him exploring the vast linguistic, poetic, aesthetic,⁷⁴ and conceptual spaces in, around, and between the term. One might likewise picture a literary or dialogic⁷⁵ discourse at the intersection of consistency and discursivity,⁷⁶ or, possibly even an attempt to reconcile the two—a focused discursivism, if you will. But then again, who really knows? ¶ For students in this creative course, some key consistency-oriented points to ponder might be centered around time, focus, systems, progression, and habits.⁷⁷ ¶ Calvino himself exemplified a consistent spirit that likely informed his own sense of identity as a writer. In fact, in a letter that Calvino wrote to Luigi Santucci in 1959, Calvino shared the following: “We are people, there is no doubt, who exist solely insofar as we write, otherwise we don’t exist at all. Even if we did not have a single reader any more, we would have to write….”⁷⁸ ¶ With this passage in mind, it might be fair to assume that Calvino wrote every day he possibly could. But we all know that being consistent is sometimes easier said than done. In any practice, this often means carving out precious time, enjoying good health, and having the space or funding needed to adequately support our work. Our consistency, well-being, and commitments are thus intertwined. Enacting consistency and its close cousin, focus, can have a compounding effect. Together, these properties can foster creative flow⁷⁹—which, in turn, canincrease productivity, efficiency, and perhaps even levels of creativity itself. Flow is, in some ways, the antithesis of distraction, or worse still, what creatives often call “analysis paralysis.” ¶ Some creative and skilled work requires us to make split-second, intuitive, or muscle-memory-like decisions, while other types require hours of focus, evaluation, and deliberation. These multivariate creative decisions—how we might make them, evaluate them, and pursue them—might lead us into fields of inquiry that extend to and beyond epistemology, cognitive science, and more. But in a creative and designerly context, if we pull on this thread of decision-oriented and evaluative properties, we encounter a vast range of opportunities for making and knowing ripe for exploration. I can tell by your countenance that you are intrigued.
   
   
7. Countenance: In a 2007 issue of Design Studies, Andy Dong asked, “what is the role of language in the performance of design?”⁸⁰ Dong then notes that, in the design process, language has traditionally been viewed as secondary to visual representation. Beyond this, and in a statement that proves salient to the theoretical exploration that follows here, Dong then asked, “What are the linguistic resources [emphasis added] that produce design practice and the designed work?”⁸¹ Lastly, in a section titled “Appraisal”—Wong broadly asserts that “any clause which functions to express meaning related to affect, judgment or appreciation is considered an appraisal.”⁸² It is with these interconnected issues of affect, judgment, appreciation and appraisal in mind—and also Dong’s aforementioned emphasis on the role of language—that this list maker puts forth the ideas explored below. To do so, this list maker proposes a repurposing of somewhat abandoned language from educational evaluation. Doing so establishes a critical link between designerly ways of thinking, knowing, and doing to “countenance evaluation” ways that designers, alongside participatory partners, evaluate, synthesize, and decide (Fig. 9). Put another way, designers have not, in this list maker’s view, developed compelling, cogent, holistic, domain-defining language to describe how we make, guide, and facilitate design decisions—and moreover the multivariate evaluative frames we employ. In most cases we focus on the parts (e.g. evidence-based design) but not the whole. As a consequence, and not surprisingly, many outside of design still see our methods as fluffy. We need to and can do better if design is to stand on it’s own two feet. In fact, on my d-word section on dynamism,⁸³ contenance is put forth as one of the “four legs” that might support design as the alterplinary domain of knowledge. ¶ If you have already stumbled across the word countenance, it was likely used to describe a communicative facial expression—typically one that suggests approval, disapproval, mood, or some other non-verbal cue or reaction. To this list maker’s knowledge, rarely do designers, architects, and other creatives used this term as a process-oriented linguistic device in the service of making a thing or things, or, more crucially, to describe the process of evaluating a thing or things. The section that follows briefly explores this possibility. To do so, this list maker will borrow scholarly terms and perspectives from educational evaluation. As this list maker argues in this section, the leap between educational evaluation and designerly evalution is one that is well worth examining. This proposition lies in the fact that education and design are both complex and at times difficult to measure. ¶ Countenance is a wonderfully big, big-tent word with somewhat fluid meaning. Since countenance describes expressions of approval, disapproval, or evaluative reactions in general, the term can describe a multivariate approach to evaluation itself. Thus, for this c-word list, I use countenance to describe evaluation more broadly as a design-oriented evaluative skillset or mindset. In this way, we might begin to posit connect countenance as a specific type of mixed-mixed evaluatory method. Doing so requires some brave leaps across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. ¶ Before proceeding further, first, let’s imagine a live jazz ensemble performance before us. Now let’s consider big-tent notions of “countenance” in real time. One might observe the countenance of the jazz musicians as directed toward each other, but also, oddly enough, their reactions to or toward the work itself. When posited as such, notions of countenance shape both the work and the evaluation of the work in a somewhat circular or recursive fashion. ¶ This list maker is not the first to posit the peculiar possibility of employing the word countenance as an evaluative descriptor or method. That linguistic leap was made by the educational researcher and evaluator Robert Stake. To briefly orient ourselves around this linguistic trajectory of countenance within education evaluation I will first point readers to a 2024 video essay by, Michael Quinn Patton, the former President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). In his video essay, Patton provides a critical reflection of Robert Robert Stake’s 2023 memoir, Measuring Education. In this video essay lecture—which Patton cleverly titled The Countenance of Bob Stake, Patton puts forward an appeal for viewers to reconsider one of Stake’s key scholarly contributions—what Stake once termed countenance evaluation. ¶ Over the course of the video essay, Patton then provides a critical review of Stake’s key scholarly contributions. In particular, he revisits Stake’s forumulation of “countenance evaluation,” which, in his essay Patton describes as an “evaluative soup.”⁸⁴ Stake is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and earned a PhD in Psychometrics from Princeton University in 1958.⁸⁵ He is the author of Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work (2010), The Art of Case Study Research (2010), and more. ¶ Curiously, according to the Encyclopedia of Evaluation, Stake did not purposefully set out to create a countenance evaluation model, and “to this day, he would assert that it is not a model.”⁸⁶ But perhaps to Stake’s dismay, the author of the aforementioned entry also contends that “a brief review of the evaluation literature since its publication illustrates its characterization as such.”⁸⁷ ¶ The core premise of countenance evaluation as explored by Stake posited that a more holistic or complete (or “countenance”) evaluation of education might go beyond simply looking at test scores or final outcomes. Stake seemed intent on exploring the entire lifecycle of education—accounting for antecedents, transactions, and outcomes. In this way, an evaluator might garner a more accurate picture of intention versus outcome versus external benchmarks and references. Stake first introduced his “Countenance Model” of evaluation in his seminal 1967 paper,⁸⁸ “The Countenance of Educational Evaluation” (published in the Teachers College Record). With Patton’s notion of countenance as an “evaluatory soup” in mind, Stake’s countenance-oriented ideas are resurfaced here, as they may fill an essential gap in the lexicon of design scholarship. In his Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains, and in the sections on Delta (knowledge) and Dynamism in particular, this list maker traces the still-unfolding maturation of design as a distinct domain of knowledge. In these sections, readers are introduced to some of the discourses shaping design’s disciplinary methods and bounds. Without repeating that discourse here, readers might briefly posit how a field, sometimes described as in-disciplinary, alterdiscplinary, or even antidisciplinary and more, synthesize such a wide array of knowledge as inputs. Likewise how do we evaluate our highly-complex and entangled outputs? “Countenance” as a term, helps us more tangibly frame, debate and discuss these issues. ¶ In his paper, Stake stated that, with countenance evaluation, he aimed to “introduce a conceptualization of evaluation oriented to the complex and dynamic [emphasis added] nature of education.”⁸⁹ Likewise, we might posit that we might introduce a cogent conceptualization of evaluation oriented to the complex and dynamic nature of design. ¶ Let us briefly use architecture and the architectural design process as an example. Scholars of design have described the complex and combinatory-evaluative process of architecture and design as “holistic.”⁹⁰ Likewise, we might map such holistic ideas to those examined in education. ¶ To sharpen the aforementioned education-design evaluative link, readers might consider the following passage from Michael Lissack’s 2019 paper “Understanding Is a Design Problem.” In his paper, Lissack argues that for issues concerning selection, ones which involve agency and choice, designers have a substantial role to play—not as those who decide per se (the more traditional notion of the designer) but rather those who guide—a designer as one who guides and understands understanding. As the author notes, “I assert that the problems associated with the transmission, cognition, and understanding of meaning could be eased if there were a designer involved in the process: someone to set the stage so that the very actions one hopes to enable by a given exchange of meaning might have a better chance of occurrence.”⁹¹ While the links between education and understanding may seem tacit, Lissack’s aforementioned reference begins to reveal a messy intersectional “soup” not limited to desire, belief, value and truth. As Lissack later states in defining the intent of his paper, “This article describes one way out of this cognitive mess—the recognition that understanding is a design problem and is aided when we explicitly recognize the reflexive role of the designer, and of design as a practice carried out by a cognizer who is self-aware.”⁹² This self-awareness is but one reason we need design education—not just to train skilled production, but to train figures who might guide shared decision-making and understanding projects and processes. ¶ Let’s take this evaluative and understanding-oriented role of design one step further. In a 2025 paper Zelenko et al. described a performance-based assessment methodology for the design of housing layouts. In the paper, the authors note that the “assessment of any kind of building design is a complex task due to the differences in human perception of quality based on background, context, expectation and taste.”⁹³ The authors later acknowledge the difficulties of “blurring of subjective and objective measurement methods.”⁹⁴ This latter note reveals a gap in the design lexicon that is beyond mixed methods research. Again, this list maker asks readers to turn to educational assessment for possible answers. For instance, since the late 1990s, figures such as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe have championed notions of Understanding by Design⁹⁵ (UbD). In the second edition of Understanding by Design Wiggins and McTighe ask, “What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge?”⁹⁶ This blending of knowing and understanding also translates to design because some if not many design problems blend subjective and contextual taste(s) with qualifiable and quantifiable knowledge. Beyond this, architects and designers oftentimes encounter and navigate a whole host of other “concerns,” including cost, scale, use, ethics, and more. We might ask: how do designers, users, clients, and communities decide? To fill this gap, over the past few decades, architects and designers have, somewhat sporadically, placed various things at the “center” of design: this is evident in user-centered design, human-centered design, life-centered design, patient-centered design, and more. Paradoxically, in fact, “design” seems to be at the center of design.⁹⁷ This view further supports countenance as a reference point for dynamic modes of evaluation, which in turn supports design-oriented decision-making and discovery-oriented work.⁹⁸ ¶ Curiously, while composing this c-word section, this list maker also stumbled upon the term “countenance” in a passage written by the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright noted that, “Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance [emphasis added] and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with.”⁹⁹ If countenance can be applied to describe something as design-oriented, complex, and “fuzzy” as atmosphere, what or where else might countenance be applied? ¶ In his boldly titled 1986 book A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, American author, speaker, and inventor Roger von Oech included a chapter titled “The Judge,” in which von Oech states, “We’re all familiar with the judge; indeed, it’s probably our most well-developed role. We use it to evaluate everything from what clothes to wear and what books to read….”¹⁰⁰ Later, von Oech suggests, “The judge performs the evaluation function of the creative process.”¹⁰¹ With von Oech’s notion of “the judge” in mind, further exploration of creative countenance might provide creatives with more concrete language for describing and documenting our mixed-creative-evaluatory process. ¶ Notions of countenance evaluation resurface here as they may provide timely language for, and new frames around, building shared consensus through co-design or co-creation. Such a claim speculatively rests upon a plural and collegial attitude and affordance towards “what might count” within any shared evaluative process: especially ones that result in the introduction of artifacts, plans, policies, experiences and organizations. While this may seem like a general statement, it raises the bar for creative leadership—what future creative leaders need to know, and thus what would need to change. While the concepts and references cited above come from scholarly literature on educational evaluation, not design, there may also be opportunities to map this thinking onto initiatives aimed at designing social innovation and social change. While this assertion may at first seem to be akin to awkwardly bending a pipe into a shape and purpose it was never meant to be—such efforts likewise encounter the dilemma of who decides and what factors and decision-making frames inform those decisions. ¶ For architects, designers and creative leaders, fluencies around various modes of knowing, understanding and evaluating might be seen as future-oriented language-based skills—ones which are now on par with the visualization skills that were prioritized in the past. ¶ Another potentially salient aspect of countenance as an evaluatory frame is that it may provide a methodology for shared understanding and stakeholder engagement in change-oriented efforts. Not surprising this list-maker finds shared concerns across education and design. In a column on educational leadership and design, this list maker’s former colleague Carole Wedge, FAIA, once wrote, “Changing the patterns of discourse is a very important aspect of leading a process of organizational change. If different results are expected, they will not be achieved by going through the same old processes.”¹⁰² To support this shift, Wedge then identifies a list of six human factors: championship, ownership, satisfaction, accountability, responsibility, and fulfillment. Lastly, Wedge describes this creative-evaluatory process as not finite but circular, urging readers to consider, “defining feedback loops that allow for continuous adaptation, adjustment, and improvement.”¹⁰³ ¶ What Wedge describes has overtones of countenance evaluation: a messy mix of engagement, evaluation, feedback loops, and consensus building also requires creatives to rethink our standard set of language. Countenance, a term as cited and proposed here, is rooted in years of evaluative scholarship in education and is worth considering in creative and designerly contexts. Yet, in this way, perhaps Stake was right that his countenance model was not quite right for education. However, countenance evaluation may be just right for something as rich and varied as design. As such, depending on the project, community, and context, countenance modes of evaluation and assessment might lead to more cogent critiques, fluid and equitable discourses, and evaluative mindsets that afford richer and more inclusive assessments of pedagogy, plans, projects, compositions, and ideas. But what exactly is an idea? Ideas encompass our human ability to think and imagine. Ideas drive one of our greatest superpowers: our ability to think conceptually.
   
   
8. Concepts: For this list-maker, my first memorable encounter with the word “concept” occurred in one of my undergraduate graphic design courses. Professor Elizabeth Resnick (now Professor Emerita and an AIGA Medalist) taught the course. Resnick crisply defined a concept as “a well-developed thought or idea.”¹⁰⁴ ¶ For this c-list entry on concepts, we might build upon Resnick’s definition to read, “a well-developed thought or idea made visible.” By “visible,” I do not necessarily mean “visual.” Instead, I am attempting to indicate various ways to bring ideas into the world and make them tangible. ¶ While there are many tried and true ways one can develop ideas and make them tangible, a well-explored, highly efficient methodology is to draw^105|106 or even better yet sketch. A sketch, as defined here, need not be a drawing; a sketch could also be made of code, text, sound, or other digital or physical materials. In the world of art and design, there’s a term we use to describe very quick, small sketches meant to work out concepts and compositions. We call them thumbnail sketches. Thumbnail sketches help creatives quickly and efficiently work through and reflect on ideas. ¶ Sketches can also be dimensional (like a model) or interactive and/or functional (like a prototype). For those who work with sound or in performance, a sketch can be a quick recording, an impromptu rehearsal, or an improvisational session. ¶ There are no less than three reasons why this list maker suggests that sketching is not only useful to fellow creatives but essential: 1) Sketching allows one to fluidly and efficiently work through concepts, compositions, solutions, and motifs. 2) Sketching makes one’s thinking visible [or tangible], and thus creates a “breadcrumb” record of one’s progress, process, and thinking; 3) Sketching allows ideas to be more concretely communicated and shared such that they can be discussed, critiqued, evaluated, or compared. ¶ Much like our earlier exploration of writing, sketching is also an active form of thinking. Again, like writing, sketching encourages creatives to bring ideas out of their craniums and into the world, where they can be “read” or even tested and evaluated. ¶ There are many benefits associated with making ideas visible. Beyond sketching, some have described this active conceptual process as “visible thinking.” Project Zero at Harvard defines Visible Thinking as “a flexible and systematic research-based conceptual framework, which aims to integrate the development of students’ thinking with content learning across subject matters.”¹⁰⁷ ¶ Regardless of your focus or discipline, from plumbers to pianists to pulmonologists, there is tremendous value in one’s ability to sketch, think conceptually, and make one’s thinking visible. It is equally important to consider the challenges of bringing concepts and ideas to life. Theodore Levitt’s 1963 Harvard Business Review article, titled “Creativity Alone is Not Enough,”¹⁰⁸ in part seems to do just this. Levitt cautioned that those who focus purely on concepts or creativity alone may “tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation—that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation.”¹⁰⁹ ¶ Somewhat akin to Levitt, in 2026 Jon Kolko explored a creativity-oriented concern that this list-maker had also observed: that the value and measure of creativity all too often is weighted towards novelty. Kolko posits that scholarship from psychology tends to “define creativity singularly through the narrow lens of novelty—that creativity is only concerned with newness, and creativity can (and should) be measured by the quantity of new ideas that are developed.”¹¹⁰ Whether readers agree or not, Kolko views these forms of measuring creativity as reductive. Along these lines, contemporary creative educators seem consistently suspicious of the overtly clever. Along these lines, much like many of the c-words selected for this list (and this list-maker’s p-word list), Kolko seems to elevate process, reflection, context, and more. Without digression, a sharp focus on newness alone unduly narrows the scope of what creatives and designers do—the things they make, and the problems they solve. ¶ In this creative course, we might acknowledge Kolko and Levitt’s perspectives but also afford ourselves a degree of possibility and optimism. In response to Levitt’s article, we might at least agree that the world has changed quite drastically since 1963. The tools we use to research and create have undergone especially profound change. Unlike 1963, today anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can broadcast ideas to millions of viewers with little overhead or cost. Furthermore, we might speculate that notions of a creator economy may continue to gain momentum and shift power dynamics in unknowable ways. Beyond this, as we explored in the curiosity section, we might remind ourselves that our unique human capacity for generating ideas will never go out of style. In fact, in the 21st century, one might say that creativity, conceptual thinking, and taste are steadfastly becoming a kind of currency.
   
   
9. Currency: With every new advancement in technology, automation, and efficiency, new questions, challenges, and opportunities arise that reframe the value of human work, time, skill, contribution, value, and more. In this c-word list, we use the term currency in part to describe this process of examining these ever-emerging questions. This non-monetary use of currency also serves to frame creative capacity and creative capital. Notions of creative currency and creative capital can apply to individuals, organizations, cities, regions, and more. In a section of Richard Florida’s aforementioned book—titled “From Social Capital to Creative Capital”¹¹¹—Florida chronicled shifting notions of social capital as explored by scholars such as Robert Putnam. For Putnam, social capital refers to the networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. Unsurprisingly, creative works, initiatives, and institutions are generally social and thus tend to bring a wide variety of people together. From music festivals to film productions, from startups to salons, people seem to gather around aesthetics and ideas. We might posit these creative gatherings as potluck dinners—organized around themes, problems, projects, media, interests, and more. What you bring to the “table” is your creative currency. ¶ In popular culture, being current might infer that one is somehow “in the know,” or that one is adept at the latest technology, or even up on the latest “trends.” This is not necessarily what is being described here. In this case, currency also maps to contribution. Over time, creative currency may lead to other c-words such as credibility (sometimes called “cred”). ¶ In creative work and perhaps life in general, it might be tempting to compare oneself to others. While this is a natural human tendency, it is also a slippery slope and should be actively tended to with attention and care. With that in mind, one’s creative contributions can be documented in what is often referred to as a “body of work” or, even better, a portfolio. The word portfolio is used in finance, investing, real estate, and other fields, but in the creative world, a portfolio is similarly used to describe the qualities and quantities of one’s contributions. Akin to investing, these are your creative assets or holdings. In creative and increasingly scholarly and academic contexts, a portfolio can quantify and qualify a collection of creative work—sometimes presented as case studies that can include associated information, contextual research, and, when appropriate, process, evidence, and outcomes.¹¹² Somewhat by tradition in academia, such collections of contributions are called a Curriculum Vitae (or “CV”). A CV is a detailed, multi-page document outlining a full history of academic and professional accomplishments. But for those whose work is creative, a resume or CV may fall short because it lacks visuality and context. The portfolio not only contextualizes the work but also attempts to present it. ¶ Regardless of one’s interest, focus, or practice, one can consciously develop a body of work, and (portfolio or not) one can cultivate creative currency by engaging in studio habits of mind.¹¹³ Creative habits not only foster a sense of focus and reflection upon one’s own work but also an appreciation for the contributions of others. Outside of professional pursuits, engagement in the arts and sciences can also fuel interest, support, and appreciation. Half jokingly, I tell students in my introductory arts courses that some of them may become world-class art collectors.¹¹⁴ ¶ In the messiness of our potluck meal of creative production, success is sometimes out of one’s control. Notions of happiness and success are also highly personal, subjective, and relative. But for those looking for exposure and opportunities for collaboration, it does not hurt to make your work visible, or, said another way, to “show your work.”¹¹⁵ ¶ As noted above, portfolios not only “list” one’s experience and achievements, but they also attempt to “show” them. As has been the case for many years in fields such as architecture, fashion, and design, portfolios create a valuable record of past work. For those in academia, creative works can [and should] be viewed as “legitimate and valuable form[s] of research.”¹¹⁶ With these creative currency-oriented perspectives in mind, adding work to your portfolio is like making a deposit into a creative or design research¹¹⁷ savings account. ¶ Like a passbook, ledger, or passport, notions of creative currency allow us to “enter the bank” of creative culture while earning “interest” over time. And fortunately, you don’t need to go it alone. Most students in my courses seem to grasp these collaborative aspects of creative work quite intuitively. In fact, when they want to partner on something, they even use shorthand: “Hey, let’s collab!”
   
   
10. Collaboration: Please join me in shattering a second common creativity-related myth: that highly creative people always work alone. While many types of creative work undoubtedly require considerable time spent on individual work, time spent with others is not only equally valuable but essential. From the salons of the 17th century to present-day creative “collabs” (Fig. 4) like bees spreading pollen, creatives dynamically produce and distribute ideas. ¶ From two-person projects to teams of ten thousand, collaboration is a big-tent creative multiplier that consistently fuels progress, innovation, and invention. Collaboration can encompass circles of interest, shared knowledge, shared work, and more. Sometimes, as teams grow larger, highly collaborative team members might “break off” or “branch out” and start new teams or pursue new ideas. This is common if not expected. ¶ One advantage of identifying as “creative” is that it signifies a willingness to collaborate. One can collaborate within a discipline or across or between fields. For those who venture into or collaborate across disciplines, these creative cross-pollinators are sometimes described as interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or multihyphenate (Fig. 6), and some even exhibit multiple intelligences.¹¹⁸ In 2023, Harvard Design Magazine (published by the Harvard Graduate School of Design) released a “Multihyphenate”-themed issue. In support of this theme, the guest editors invited “an international group of architects, curators, fashion designers, scholars, and artists to question the issue’s theme from different vantagepoints..”¹¹⁹ According to the editors, multihyphenation is “a compound term that points to alternative landscapes of creative production: ‘Collab’ culture; ‘brand X brand’ projects; and multiple, or even opaque styles of attribution or and ownership.”¹²⁰ The term “multihyphenate” originated in the entertainment industry in the 1970s, but it has since expanded to encompass those whose creative work spans disciplines, genres, and fields. ¶ Unlike multidisciplinary or multihyphenate creatives, some alternatively develop “deep expertise” in one particular practice. Naturally, we describe those with “deep expertise” as having depth. ¶ But depth and breadth are not at all binary options. Instead, we might imagine present-day creatives as shape-shifting characters. In fact, since the 1980s, designers and other creative characters have oftentimes been described using the letter T¹²¹ (with the vertical stem representing depth of expertise and the horizontal stem representing breadth). The real magic happens when the capital T’s are placed side by side [TTT] because the top bars visually connect and can thus represent (you guessed it) creative collaboration. From Hollywood to tech to education,¹²² creatives and designers in particular seem to be natural T-shaped collaborators. ¶ Creative collaborators are oftentimes gathered, assembled, or facilitated by other highly organized connectors. These gatherers include directors, architects, principals, producers, project managers, curators, and more. These are the creative connectors, producers and conveners. Convenors are oftentimes the logistical or connective “glue”—the facilitators that guide creative experts, actors, and practitioners. Creative convenors may manage a creative project themselves, or sometimes they hire experts in management, finance, production, and business to join the creative team. ¶ Let’s now imagine traveling along a metaphorical timeline that represents human collaboration over the past few thousand years. As we traverse time, we encounter a vast array of creative, philosophical, scientific, technological, and intellectual ideas that morph and intersect over time. Like dynamic particles, these ideas emerge, diverge, and converge, and collide, and they seem to be doing so with increasing momentum. For the purposes of this c-list, let’s assume that this dynamic trajectory will only continue—and that new (or by today’s standards) even radical forms of collaboration will continue to emerge. One way to explore, posit, or describe this trajectory towards increased collaboration is to consider big tent notions of convergence.
    
    
11. Convergence: The big tent term convergence can describe the merging of ideas, technologies, products, organizations, and more. Convergence is explored and elevated here as a possible 21st-century principle that may be worthy of further consideration and study. Convergence is principally included on this list for its problem-solving potential. Convergence provides a framework or strategy that dissolves disciplinary silos and actively brings together expertise at multiple levels and in ways beyond sporadic collaboration(s). Building upon notions of collaboration, convergence seeks to bring together experts from various disciplines who possess specific tools and mindsets. Convergence thus creates a dialogic framework for exploring problems, productions, and projects alike. As such, creative convergence creates a frame or space in which people, ideas, research, knowledge, and perspectives collide, intersect, or intermix. ¶ As posited here, there are varied flavors of convergence that attempt to blend various disciplines, roles, knowledge, expertise, and skill. ¶ One recent formulation of convergence can be found in Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau’s 2022 book The Nexus,¹²³ which describes and explores the convergence of art, technology, and science. Another example described a few years earlier (2010) might be David Edwards’ book Artscience,¹²⁴ which again posited new forms of innovation at the intersection of the arts and sciences. ¶ Disciplinary integration, convergence, and integrative¹²⁵ thinking have, for this list-maker, been a longstanding area of focused interest. Like streams, rivers, oceans, and other bodies of water, human knowledge flows along sometimes irregular and unpredictable trajectories. One might thus imagine convergence as the various points at which these ideas intersect. ¶ In another example (2011), a group of faculty from MIT authored a report detailing another flavor of convergence. The report was titled The Third Revolution: The Convergence of the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Engineering. In a letter that preceded the report, the faculty stated, “The past decade has seen the evolution of new interdisciplinary research areas…”¹²⁶ while further stating that, “These new fields share a comparable, underlying research model, convergence, [emphasis added] and there is a need to see them as a unity in order to ensure their continued progress. The successful application of this model will require not simply collaboration between disciplines, but true disciplinary integration.”¹²⁷ ¶ One might speculate that 21st-century notions of convergence will present new opportunities in education and industry alike. Such factors may lead to or even demand new formulations of physical space, new models of staffing, new forms of compensation, experimental curricula, and more. Moreover, convergence-oriented work may require changes in mindsets and perhaps even new understandings of ownership and authorship.¹²⁸ ¶ Creatives, architects, scientists, engineers, and designers, in particular, have long been interested in integrated and convergence-oriented structures. This is largely because film, architecture, and design projects alike often require a vast combination of perspectives, expertise, and disciplines. They also oftentimes entertain or pursue many possible answers or solutions to a given problem. ¶ As highlighted in the Introduction section of this c-word list, design researchers Jonathan Cagan and Craig M. Vogel once explored, articulated, and demonstrated the all-too-common gaps across disciplinary perspectives. In a section of their 2002 book Creating Breakthrough Products, the authors note that “Although the need for integration seems obvious, it is not an easy thing to do.”¹²⁹ ¶ The authors memorably illustrate differences in disciplinary perspectives with a qualitative experiment. Cahen and Vogel present three different kitchen colanders (or “strainers”) before a cross-disciplinary team of designers, marketers, engineers, and suppliers. They then prompt the participants to posit the following question: “If you owned a company, which colander would you prefer to sell and why?”¹³⁰ It’s not at all surprising to hear that the variation in colander selections among the participants was “significant.”¹³¹ Cagen and Vogel’s experiment clearly “demonstrates the inherent gap in perception between these different players [from different disciplines].”¹³² ¶ But Cagen and Vogel also mention a sole engineer—one who somehow bridged the perceptual gap. In reference to this figure, the authors share this revealing note: “In following that engineer’s performance in the company, we found him one of the best at negotiating solutions….”¹³³ This latter detail is crucial. Building consensus-based or co-designed solutions requires figures who can effectively align varied perspectives and concerns. These designerly leaders¹³⁴ may be key when seeking convergence-oriented approaches. As such, creatives can productively avoid getting stuck in the perceptual gap. Such figures are key within organizations that desire a designful¹³⁵ or design-forward culture. ¶ Rightfully so, some might fear that convergence-oriented solutions may simply lead to “watered-down ideas” or “groupthink.” While this is always possible, such occurrences are often the byproduct of leaders who mishandle or mismanage the creative process. ¶ Beyond bridging perceptual gaps, convergence-oriented creatives may be particularly well suited for the development of comprehensive solutions. ¶ Comprehensive solutions are dissimilar to one-off projects or fixes and are particularly focused on addressing problems of high complexity. This, of course, is based on the premise that some complex problems require equally complex or “comprehensive” solutions. In seeking comprehensive solutions to a vast range of projects and problems, designerly minds combine “convergent” and “divergent” thinking.¹³⁶ This designerly thinking also attempts to consider short and long-term concerns simultaneously. This is in part why students in this creative class are encouraged to develop, explore, and exercise a “comprehensive view.”
    
    
12. Comprehensive: This list-maker traces his interest in all things “comprehensive” to his design history Professor Al Gowan. As Gowan often noted in his comprehensive-view-oriented lectures, he briefly studied with the well-known 20th-century futurist Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller.¹³⁷ Years later, it was no surprise for this list-maker then to discover that Fuller titled the first chapter of his well-known 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, “Comprehensive Propensities.” ¶ Within the chapter, Fuller makes an argument for a complement or alternative to “narrow, shortsighted specializations.”¹³⁸ ¶ Not to dismiss Fuller’s skepticism of specializations outright, this list maker might suggest that a more nuanced argument might simultaneously recognize the tremendous value of specializations and expertise. Nuances aside, in this creative course, we will likewise attempt to grapple with this notion of “the comprehensive view.” Within his Operating Manual, Fuller states, “Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”¹³⁹ Furthermore, Fuller suggests that “specializations are not comprehended integratively.”¹⁴⁰ ¶ In earlier sections of this list, we lightly touched upon the benefits, drawbacks, and challenges of singular creative visions. If we follow the logic of the “Hollywood model,” one might assume that a single director provides some semblance of creative stability or guidance, and the producer(s) then ensure the “thing” gets made. ¶ But now more than ever, designers and other creatives are also interested in exploring and interrogating participatory, engaged, co-designed, co-created, and collaborative models of making. Designers also need data-driven models, concepts, and plans using a countenance evaluation mindset. Technologies such as artificial intelligence are fueling these data-driven design models, making these capabilities faster and more accessible. Data, media, visuals, text, and ideas can now be shared rapidly and cheaply. Creatives, clients, communities, and stakeholders can likewise meet, communicate, and share information in real or near-real time, and often at no or low cost. Designers may be well suited to facilitate and lead these communal design processes. ¶ Now more than ever, designers are also afforded the opportunity to explore and enact “integrated solutions” that pull from “integrated models.” For instance, many contemporary architecture firms now employ “Integrated design methodologies” and “building information modeling,” which enable information to dynamically converge across the broader team (client, engineer, builder, finance, design, project management, and more). This integrated approach has reshaped the tools, processes, and timelines associated with building, design, and construction. Thus, the present-day architectural “model” (digital, not physical) can and does dynamically update to reflect changes in costs, form, materials, energy use, and more.¹⁴¹ Outside of architecture, as more comprehensive, information-rich creative technologies continue to emerge, it seems even more crucial to bring stakeholders face-to-face at the creative decision-making “table”—and [ideally] to do so early in the process. A great way to facilitate this process is to organize an intensive creative workshop, which architects call a charrette.
    
    
13. Charrettes: Let’s start with what a charrette is not. A design charrette is not a quick brainstorming session or “design thinking” workshop where a group of participants slathers sticky-note ideas on a wall, eats a catered lunch, and calls it a productively “creative” day. ¶ Before I worked in the marketing department of an architecture firm, I had actually never heard of the term “charrette” (also called a “design charrette”). But like a live-action design-research theatre event, a charrette might be better experienced than described. One might describe a charrette as a highly dynamic, sometimes intense, ideally well-planned and well-informed workshop of sorts that aims to interrogate and explore ideas. Charrette can provide direction, solicit input, and sometimes help achieve alignment towards specific objectives, designs, or plans. ¶ The term charrette originates from the French word “cart.” Legend has it that, starting in the 1800s, the term referred to the final push by students studying art and architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, typically made before a major deadline or review. ¶ A creative-design charrette can take place over the course of a few hours, a few days, or even over longer periods of time. When conducting a charrette, as much as possible, it is helpful to have all the decision-makers at the table: experts, stakeholders, users, clients, or community members, depending on the objective at hand. This way, any solutions discussed or developed can capture, or at least consider, a range of concerns, abilities, cultures, and perspectives. During charrettes, architects and planners often create or display sketches, prototypes, data, drawings, maps, and diagrams. Ideally, this is done in a space where such information can be viewed, compared, and contrasted “at a glance.” Oftentimes, reference material or readings are provided in advance of a charrette. Unlike “voting on ideas,” charrettes are immersive, dialogic, and sometimes even emergent. Ideally, charrette participants are surrounded by the problem: its contexts, precedents, and possible solutions. As more concrete ideas emerge and solutions are formulated or proposed, proposals can then be compared, contrasted, combined, and critiqued.
    
    
14. Critique: Who in this class, please raise your hand, enjoys being criticized? Inevitably, when I present this question to students in my creative courses, I rarely see a hand raised. Understandably, for many, having one’s ideas debated or criticized can be an uncomfortable experience. Despite this discomfort, critique is an activity and skill that has long served as the touchstone for how creatives interrogate ideas, form, materials, solutions, and more. One key for beginners to reduce the discomfort of criticism is to remember that you are not your work. Said another way, if the work is being criticized, it’s the work, not you, that’s being criticized. ¶ I have long wondered if creative educators should replace the term critique (or “crit” for shorthand) altogether? My rationale for this lies in what I (and surely others) have termed my creative-course “no like” rule. In my classes, during critiques, I politely ask students to attempt to refrain from using phrases such as “I like” or “I don’t like.” Instead, I ask them, as best they can, to articulate feedback using constructive, non-subjective language. I accomplish this by asking them to try framing feedback using phrases such as, “This works well because of W, and this does not because X, Y, and Z.” ¶ In popular culture, there’s a false assumption that artistic and designerly works are purely driven by subjectivity, or largely concerned with style. ¶ Sometimes, as a contrast to this subjectivity, I’ve wondered if “critiques” might more productively be labeled “constructives.” With this critical-versus-constructive argument aside, for those new to my courses, I often suggest that you try using “you may” statements. You may want to consider this, or you may want to check out this person’s work, that precedent, this book, or this research paper. You may want to try V, or W, X, or Y, or Z. ¶ In their 2025 book, Studio Properties, Derek Jones et al. provide a multi-page section on “Critique and the Crit.”¹⁴² The authors note that “Critique refers to both the act of giving formative and summative feedback and the word crit refers to specific activity types used to explicitly engage in critique.”¹⁴³ Formative feedback is typically provided during or throughout the creative process. In some schools of art, architecture, and design, this is sometimes called a “desk crit” or “studio crit.” Summative feedback is typically higher-stakes and usually delivered towards the end of the project or performance, or once it is close to completion. ¶ Being a constructive critic is far more challenging than being a critic who resorts to subjective or disconnected statements. Generally, it is this capacity for constructive thinking that fuels many creative leaders. These constructive critics at once strive to be clear, articulate, honest, reasoned, and informed. These constructive critics oftentimes come prepared and do any necessary legwork or research in advance. ¶ With these evaluative communicative concerns in mind, for the presenter of creative work, it is also essential to consider power dynamics. During a critique, or even a presentation to clients, creatives need to consider who in the “room” and who actually “holds the keys.” Those who “hold the keys” are often those with money, power, or decision-making authority within a hierarchical organization. ¶ Scott Berkun and Bryan Zug do an excellent job illustrating this essential point. In their 2024 book, Why Design is So Hard. Berkun and Zug state, “On the first day of design school, and in the first page of every design book, there should be a clarifying lesson about human nature. Decision making in the real world [emphasis added] is a social process, not a solitary one.”¹⁴⁴ Then, Berkun and Zug deftly walk readers through the pragmatic realities of relationship building, persuasion, influence, and more, sharply illustrating their point by noting that sometimes those “with low design talent but power” can sometimes “do terrible things,” and also the opposite, “whereas someone with great design talent but low power likely has no impact at all.”¹⁴⁵ ¶ To make Berkun and Zug’s point another way, we might imagine building upon the aforementioned notion of T-shaped people and instead use the letter H. This imaginary H-shaped person¹⁴⁶ (Fig. 1) can also leap and rotate 90 degrees. The resultant typographic form (depending on the typeface) is more of an “I” (Fig. 2). The “I” could thus represent Berkun and Zug’s notions of influence and “impact,” but might also unlock the potential for other “I’s”: intelligence or even innovation.¹⁴⁷ When two of these I’s are placed side by side, they form a Roman numeral II (Fig. 3), which might stand for “shared influence.” ¶ How one navigates or reacts to negative feedback is also a practiced skill. This practiced skill combines composure, timing, contemplation, rhetoric, countenance, and more.¹⁴⁸ Instead of reacting to negative feedback by starting with the phrase, ‘I disagree,’ a mentor of mine once suggested that one alternative is to first consider responding with the phrase, ‘I’ve never considered that before’ or even the more famous ‘yes and….’ Even if you disagree or plan to offer a constructive rebuttal, you thereby maintain productive collegiality and flow. This list maker, like many before him, has admittedly learned this skill the hard way. ¶ While critiques can be stressful, and of course, while creatives are passionate about their work, one should be careful not to let that passion undermine creative relationships. If there is one takeaway from this section, it may be this: avoid subjective statements, feedback, or arguments. Instead, try to surround your feedback and suggestions—and creative discourse in general—with ideas, precedents, evidence, scholarship, data, examples, samples, stories, studies, narrative, prototypes, demos, reference points, process, or contexts—anything other than I do or do not ‘like it.’ As such, context is one of the fundamental properties that informs and differentiates some creative works from purely scientific ones. So, next, let’s do some contextual research.
    
    
15. Context: In 1996, Bill Gates penned an essay titled Content is King. As legend has it, in his essay, Gates suggested that content was where “the real money” would be made on the internet.¹⁴⁹ While frequently attributed to Gates, the phrase “content is king” was used much earlier. In 1974, J.W. Click and Russel N. Baird appear to have used the phrase in the context of magazine editing and production.¹⁵⁰ ¶ In the 21st century, we might make an equally bold assertion—which is that when it comes to designerly, creative, and project-based work, context not content may be “king.” As Stephen Nachmanovich stated in his 2019 book The Art of Is, “Every expression is tied to person, place and time. Context is everything.”¹⁵¹ Without digressing into scholarly or philosophical debates over positivism versus relativism or the long and rich history that has shaped these discourses,¹⁵² it may be said that, in many spheres, “the role and significance of context-dependence“¹⁵³ still faces many uphill battles. ¶ Thus, let’s start with some basic context-oriented arguments. One might assert with some confidence that human beings are emotional, and thus our decisions are not always based on rational logic. Viewed broadly, human decision-making is often driven by a “fuzzy mix” of logic, emotion, and other complex factors. For example, the choice of a vehicle may be driven not only by factors such as safety and performance but also by the car’s color. ¶ While context has always been a factor in designing and design, most 21st-century designers and architects have increased aperature on contextual approaches and concerns. In a 2026 article for Time, Debbie Millman asserts that, “Good design relies on understanding context: how a building sits on its street, how a chair accommodates a body, how type works on the page and for the reader.”¹⁵⁴ Despite our understanding of the importance of context in design, Millman then points out “how often these considerations seem to disappear, as if the object itself matters more than the environment or community it belongs to.”¹⁵⁵ ¶ Alas, Millman’s context-minded cultural critique leads us to assert that despite our advances around all things contextual, we still have a long way to go. Alas, I am not alone in elevating this trajectory and these concerns. In his 2025 book, Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness, Wayne K. Li states, “Contextual awareness is one of the design behaviors that can be elusive for young designers.”¹⁵⁶ Being “contextually aware”¹⁵⁷ should not be an elusive afterthought. In creative work, examining context can be seen as a form of research. In fact, while studying at the Dynamic Media Institute, this list-maker was first introduced to notions of “contextual research.” ¶ Contextual research provides creatives with a vehicle for collecting, exploring, and examining historical, cultural, scientific, and even metaphorical references as one develops a project or composition or as one examines a problem. ¶ As a big tent c-word, context can serve as a frame to explore aesthetics, ethics, systems, evidence, costs, materials, and more.¹⁵⁸ In what might sound like a description of reading glasses, context can serve as a metaphorical lens or frame. These lenses and frames can help shape, define, or situate a work. Contextual research can be leveraged and considered when conceptualizing products, communication, places, initiatives, experiences, and more. ¶ Exploring context often involves asking broad “w” questions—the who, what, where, when, how, and why—which can help shape form, meaning, access, solutions, tone, and more. ¶ How one communicates context can also shape the meaning and understanding of a work. Designers, artists, musicians, and architects often strive for a work to “stand on its own two feet.” By this, I mean that they hope viewers will “get it” without it having to be explained. In this way, some artists and creatives intentionally opt not to explain, include, or share inspirations, precedents, or contexts. One common rationale for this line of reasoning is that the creative hopes that the viewer, reader, listener, or user will bring their own interpretation and contextual understanding(s) to the work. In contrast to this “pure” view, we know that in a museum setting, even the title or date of a work placed next to it can drastically shift its meaning. Thus, the “museum label” oftentimes provides crucial contextual clues. ¶ In 2024, the New York-based industrial designer Todd Bracher published Design in Context. In a section titled “The Context for Innovation,” Bracher states that the “traditional approach to design, focusing on the object or the ‘what,’ often misses the mark in fostering true innovation.”¹⁵⁹ Instead of focusing on the “what,” Bracher suggests focusing on the “why” or “the context within which design takes shape.”¹⁶⁰ Building on Bracher’s suggestions, we might see context as a way for creatives to triangulate a range of topics or to interrogate our instincts. Context can also help us parse problems through historical or particular perspectives. ¶ Further building upon the aforementioned notion of contextual research¹⁶¹—such practices can create pathways for understanding considering human,¹⁶²environmental, and more-than-human concerns. In some ways, all these concerns could be viewed as context at the micro- to macro-scale. ¶ Lastly, nearly any architect will attest that understanding contextual factors such as the “site” of a building or structure is crucial. Likewise, many designers now directly engage communities as they develop or co-develop solutions. These voices can meaningfully inform and shape the final design. ¶ In summary, contextual research affords creators the opportunity to examine and apply a whole host of issues, precedents, technologies, and concerns. Such information can be collected or documented in case studies, reports, white papers, films, or video essays. Distilling the context of a work can also help creators break down or explore complications and complexities. Complexities are oftentimes interdependent, dynamic, adaptive, or even “emergent.” Fortunately, artists and other creatives are trained to be comfortable in these emergent spaces. This is in part why I’m suggesting that students in this course also explore and posit complexity.
    
    
16. Complexity: In 2006, John Maeda published a timely and (in this list maker’s view) quite delightful 100-page book titled The Laws of Simplicity.¹⁶³ After reading Maeda’s book, I was so captivated that I asked the President of the architecture firm I worked for at the time if she would consider purchasing copies for all the firm’s employees (to my surprise, she said yes). I subsequently asked if we could invite Maeda in as a lunchtime guest speaker (which we did). The architecture firm I worked for at the time had its headquarters in Boston’s seaport, and around this time Meada was just “over the river” [the Charles] serving as a Professor in MIT’s Media Lab. ¶ Maeda’s book on simplicity was organized around ten “laws” and three “keys,” which, in the mid-2000s, as the worlds of design and tech seemed to be colliding in new and fascinating ways, The Laws of Simplicity seemed to embody this particular time in technology and design. For instance, in 2001, Apple launched the iPod, which was designed by the minimalist Dieter Rams-inspired British industrial designer Jony Ive. Years later, in 2012, Ive was even knighted for his pioneering work.¹⁶⁴ Compared to other music players available at the time, the iPod seemed like a time-warping leap into the future of aesthetics, technology, and usability. Under the watchful eye of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, Ive and his team devised an elegant touch-wheel interface for the digital music player, and it shipped with far more music storage capacity than its competitors. This tight integration, or “marriage,” of form, technology, and function (aka “simplicity”) was also evident in Maeda’s research lab at MIT. Maeda’s lab, founded in 1996, was titled the Aesthetics and Computing Group. Meada’s lab seemed to be pushing beyond 20th-century “form and content” or “form and function” vocabularies of design in light of three d’s—digitization, data, and dynamism. ¶ Then, in 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, another monumental leap which, like the iPod, radically leveraged a tightly integrated combination of aesthetics, technology, and usability. Aside from its physical design, the iPhone, like a digital multipurpose tool, effectively cannibalized dozens of standalone gadgets, from in-car GPS units to compasses, calculators to MP3 players, and over time, anything that could be reimagined as an “app.” As of this writing, Apple has sold over three billion iPhones.¹⁶⁵ ¶ Given this wildly successful record of success around simplicity in the 21st century, why would this list-maker call for students to also posit complexity? Going further, have you ever met anyone who craves more complexity in their lives? We know the answer is likely no. ¶ In the 21st century, many humans now live in an age of abundance—but, in some ways, connected to this is the fact that we also live in a time of unprecedented complexity. As a “big tent” term, there are innumerable ways one could approach, define, or explore complexity. We could easily branch into systems thinking, political theory, aesthetics, physics, theology, and more. So, when it comes to complexity and creativity, where might one start and why? ¶ One answer, or at least a place to start, may be found in Dennis Frenchman et al.’s 2025 book Designing the X. Frenchman et al. claim that, “traditional analytic approaches to problem-solving fall short when faced with unmeasurable and multifaceted challenges.”¹⁶⁶ The authors then launch into a section aptly titled “Flow With Complexity,”¹⁶⁷ which explores ways for designers and other creatives to better understand complexity or even embrace or attempt to understand its flow. ¶ Frenchman et al. are most certainly not the first to posit the intersection of complexity and design. In 2010, Katerina Alexiou et al. published Embracing Complexity in Design,¹⁶⁸ a 232-page interdisciplinary anthology featuring wide-ranging scholarly perspectives on everything from art to architecture to management, and more. One section titled “Embracing design in complexity” (authored by the architect and educator Jeffrey Johnson) effectively flips the complexity-design script by advocating design methods and mindsets for those interested in complex systems science. In his section, Johnson notes that “few scientists today know anything about design as a process for understanding, creating, and managing complex systems.”¹⁶⁹ But interestingly, Johnson suggests that this dynamic could change within a decade. How this might change remains unclear, but this list maker senses that the study of subjects such as design, aesthetics, and complexity may become valuable literacies beyond traditional designers and the design field, and, in turn, may bring a broader pool of interest to systems-level thinking. ¶ The following year (in 2011), Donald Norman,¹⁷⁰ a pioneer in the field of user experience design (UX) and interaction design (IxD), published Living with Complexity. While Norman’s book was chock-full of both practical design considerations and memorable examples, for this list-maker, a short note on the last page was the most poignant. To tame the complexity of technology, Norman suggested a partnership “between the designers and those of us who use it.”¹⁷¹ The sentiment of this last statement reflects increasingly common notions of designing with versus designing for. ¶ Paradoxically, notions of complexity and the discourse it unearths have led some critiques of the “design thinking” process itself. For example, in 2024, Anne-Laure Fayard and Sarah Fathallah authored an article titled “Design Thinking Misses the Mark ” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.¹⁷² In their paper, Fayard and Fathallah note that “The social sector is inherently complex [emphasis added] because it consists of a multitude of actors across different contexts, timelines, and political realities. Any approach that purports to easily solve for such complexity is more likely than not to be reductive and therefore ineffective.”¹⁷³ ¶ Fayard and Fathallah’s perspective lends credence to our interest and exploration at the intersection of creativity, context, and complexity. In this list-maker’s somewhat limited literature review on complexity, it was suggested that I explore Edgar Morin’s complexity-oriented writings. Morin¹⁷⁴ is a French philosopher and sociologist who is widely regarded as the “Father of Complexity.” Fortunately, I obtained an English translation of Edgar Morin’s 2008 book On Complexity. The first chapter of Morin’s book is titled “Blind Intelligence,” in which Morin first notes that “We have acquired extraordinary knowledge about the physical, biological, psychological, and sociological world.”¹⁷⁵ But as we posit problem solving and creative work, Morin’s next suggestion is less obvious but perhaps more fruitful. Morin writes that “The deep cause of error is not error of fact (false perception), or error of logic (incoherence), but rather the way we organize [emphasis added] our knowledge into a system of ideas….”¹⁷⁶ ¶ Moreover, as we ponder Morin’s point, and think more broadly about how knowledge, artifacts and ideas are interwoven, it may add additional substance to our notion of the “H-shaped person.” Firstly, our shift from a T-shaped person to an H-shaped one (Fig. 1) metaphorically “lowers the bar” for creative collaboration, which, in turn, invites more people to the problem-solving table. Then, unlike the T-shaped person, the H-shaped one was more explicitly engaged in theory and practice. To illustrate this idea, we effectively “split” traditional notions of “expertise” (the stem of the core common T-shaped person) right down the middle. This results in two verticals (the left and right verticals of the H). Then the top crossbar of the T (which has frequently stood for breath or collaboration) gets lowered to the midpoint of the two stems. This makes an H shape. With this formulation in mind, we encounter an H-shaped “creative” character. ¶ Furthermore, as we posit an H-shaped creative character, one of the split vertical stems—let’s say the one on the left represents the creative character’s competencies (and/or “skills”). The other could represent literacies, sensitivities (or even “knowledge”).¹⁷⁷ But there’s something even more magical that happens when these H’s are combined. When the H’s are stacked vertically, we get a shape that looks exactly like a ladder (Fig. 5), which is the perfect metaphor for “teams” or “reading new heights.” In contrast to horizontally-linked T-shaped individuals, H-shaped individuals could “stack” to create ladders that combine skills, knowledge, and expertise. For those interested in marketing, these ladders, placed side by side, could, as Al Ries and Jack Trout once described, represent various notions of positioning¹⁷⁸ (Fig. 8). ¶ But let’s back up and ask what we mean when we use the term “literacies”? Historically, and even today, the term “literacy” is associated with one’s ability to read and write, but since the 1940s, conceptions of literacy have broadened significantly. For better or worse, it would seem that “literacy” can now signify understanding, skill, aptitude, knowledge, and ability across a range of media and fields.¹⁷⁹ Issues around literacy have become even more pressing with the introduction of new technologies such as AI. Some scholars even argue that “literacy in the time of AI requires a new way to speak about itself, a revised “grammar” of sorts.”¹⁸⁰ This is, of course, in response to technologies that can “write text as conventionally understood, but also to ‘read’ images by matching textual labels and to ‘write’ images from textual prompts.”¹⁸¹ Thus it is all the more pressing that we as humans, as part of our general education and understandings, emphasize literacy in reading and writing texts and images alike. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when some educators fear that literacy is in decline. ¶ In art, design, and media education, we have long attempted to teach “visual literacy.” Visual literacy as a general literacy is no longer the singular purview of artists, critics, art historians, and designers—nor should it be. Anyone with an Instagram account, for instance, is immersed in visual culture—so we are well served to study it. In support of this view, in the third edition of Visual Culture (first published in 2019), Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros state, “If we live in a visual world, learning to be visually literate is not a luxury but a necessity.”¹⁸² As we ponder expanding conceptions of such literacies, we simultaneously need to expand our conception of what a “text” is. We’ve already touched upon the notion of context, but now we must parse texts as well. Texts and contexts are at once distinct and interconnected ideas. To explore this idea further, I propose that we revisit a somewhat old-fashioned word: a codex.
    
    
17. Codex: In Howells and Negreiros’ aforementioned book, the first section explores various facets of visual theory. Wisely, to make this more concrete, Howells and Negreiros use John Constable’s well-known 1821 painting The Hay Wain¹⁸³ as a reference point. The painting then helps frame a conversation around texts and contexts. In summary, the authors aim to instill in the reader a basic understanding of how we “read” images. Then, as we explored in the previous section, we might better understand the context and thus become more visually literate. ¶ With no slight to Constable or his painting, the work is, in many ways, “what-you-see-is-what-you-get.”¹⁸⁴ By that, we might agree that the imagery in The Hay Wain is highly accessible and understandable — thus it is relatively easy for a general audience to analyze, parse, and “read.” ¶ At first, this notion of “reading visuals” as texts may sound strange to some students in this class. This is likely why Howells and Negreiros chose The Hay Wain, as “reading” the work requires very little context—thereby lowering the barrier for students to plainly discuss and analyze what they “see” in the work. As we further posit the term “context,” we recognize that understanding some works requires “prior knowledge of the subject”¹⁸⁵ to fully grasp their meaning or significance. In much simpler terms, some might describe this as “knowing the codes.”¹⁸⁶ ¶ To help us visualize interlinked notions of texts, contexts, and codes, let’s imagine a series of footnotes within footnotes. In footnote A, there may be a reference to footnote B, and within footnote B, there may be a reference to footnotes C and D, and so on. As our footnotes within footnotes expand, the varied references and contexts branch out like a tree. While the word codex was the historical term for a text or book, we’ll also use it here to posit footnote-like notions of interlinked ideas. ¶ Curiously, the word codex comes from the Latin word caudex, which also translates to mean the “trunk of a tree” or a “block of wood.”¹⁸⁷ So just as the word model can be used to describe something physical or conceptual, the word “codex”, as posited here, could be either physical (a book) or conceptual (interwoven ideas) as well. We might thus imagine that every creative project might be supported by a codex of interconnected ideas that informs it. ¶ To understand codex as it is posited here, let’s return to the word context once more. Within the word context, not surprisingly, we find the word “text”—and interestingly, the origins of the word “text” also suggested connections to our physical world. In fact, “text” originates from the Latin word texere, which means “to weave.”^188[ Going one step further, this text-oriented etymology also brings us closer to the contemporary wonderful word “texture”. ¶ Etymology aside, the whole point here is for students in this creative course to start to see and posit texts, contexts, and textures as interconnected through language. ¶ Now that we have a grasp of how “texts” are woven and interwoven, we can more easily posit the productive weaving of texts (or ideas). Much like “weaving,” creative work is often a process of inventing and combining concepts and material(s). ¶ As we posit the productive gathering of concepts and material(s), those who have already taken my course know I am generally not a fan of “brainstorming.” In fact, for most projects, I’d advise students to largely avoid it. The reason I suggest we avoid brainstorming is that it often lacks rigorous framing or context, which, if you’ve been following along, we might agree are essential components of creative work. ¶ Instead of “brainstorming,” we might be better served by an activity more akin to the aforementioned charrette. Half-jokingly, I often ask students to start a project by visiting an archive or library, or by collecting “footnotes.” The term “footnotes” is used broadly in this creative course. Ideas, images, research, and more can be “footnoted” as part of your contextual research. ¶ By avoiding activities such as brainstorming, we can save time and simultaneously debunk some widely held myths around creative work. Mostly, this helps us avoid the “light bulb” trap—the idea that creativity or innovation occurs in a flip of a switch, sudden, random, “aha!” way. ¶ Along these lines, in his 1997 paper, the design scholar and educator Nigel Cross stated that, “In creative design […] a creative leap does not necessarily require a radical shift in viewpoint.”¹⁸⁹ Notably, Cross also stated, “This is what characterizes creative design as exploration rather than a search.”¹⁹⁰ To conclude this section, this list-maker suggests that one great way to explore and collect footnotes is to read. ¶ If you want to be a meaningful creative explorer and contributor, I also suggest getting into the habit of reading. Reading is like exercise for the brain. Reading can spark new ways of thinking, doing, understanding, or seeing. Reading (just as we noted for writing) is like fuel for creative thought, for, as it is often said, it is a portal to another place or another person’s mind.¹⁹¹ So pick up a book (physical or digital) and read. ¶ Lastly, as we ponder codex, I must also advocate for the role of the library and the librarian. Librarians are like master codexian catalysts in all the ways we’ve posited here. The library has been, and will continue to be, a special, if not sacred, space and place.¹⁹² But there is sad news for the library lover and text toter. Reading seems to be in decline.¹⁹³ In response, some, including this list-maker, are issuing a calculated call to consider (or reconsider) the codex. In her excellent 2018 book titled Reader Come Home, Maryanne Wolf gently reminds us that the “acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens.”¹⁹⁴ With some echoes of Aristotle’s notion of the “good society,” Wolf then makes a compelling case for reading as a source of contemplation, entertainment, the exploration of ideas, and more. ¶ Very much like reading, another timeless way to explore ideas is through dialogue and conversation. Unfortunately, like reading, traditional conversation may also be on the decline. But what if, akin to reading and writing, conversation itself became a highly desired and learnable 21st-century literacy? This may be wishful thinking, but, at the very least, let’s have a conversation about conversation.
    
    
18. Conversation: Donald Schön (1930–1997)¹⁹⁵ once described designing as a reflective “conversation with the materials of the situation.”¹⁹⁶ In this way we might describe aspects of designing as rhetorical.. For over 2,000 years, rhetoric was viewed as an essential pillar of Western education. From Ancient Greece, as early as the 5th century BCE, through the late 19th century, rhetoric wasn’t just a subject—it was the subject. Today, in popular culture (perhaps for good reasons), the term “rhetoric” oftentimes carries negative connotations. When describing a viewpoint that lacks backing, research, or substance, it is common to hear someone say, “Well, that’s just rhetoric!” ¶ But as we explore the big-tent c-word conversation, we might begin to see conversation as a practice. As a practice, conversation is at once subtly connected to but also distinct from rhetoric. Along these lines, it is no surprise that many view or describe conversation as an art.¹⁹⁷ ¶ Our ability to engage in conversation is one of our most valuable human capacities. As was noted earlier, conversation’s argument-oriented cousin, rhetoric, was once viewed as an essential subject—one meant to train and prepare students for engagement in scholarly, public, civic, or professional life. Alongside grammar and logic, rhetoric formed what was often called the trivium.¹⁹⁸ Interestingly, the Latin word trivium translates to “the place where three roads meet.”¹⁹⁹ ¶ This notion of an intersection or meeting place is key, as we posit conversation as an elevated 21st-century creative concern. For creatives in this course, conversation might be viewed as a dynamic “space” where thoughts, narratives, voices, and ideas can be exchanged. While we sometimes take conversation for granted and some see it as a waste of time, conversation is a superpower of human intelligence. ¶ If conversation is an “art,” then like any art, it’s one that may take practice. Some conversation is like really good jazz. While I am not an expert in jazz or even in music, I’m sure we can agree that jazz often exhibits exchange, rhythm, and progression, which are generally the hallmarks of a good conversation as well. ¶ Conversation as a space, medium, or format (as compared to a lecture, for instance) might be viewed as digressive, discursive, or inefficient—and that may be a good thing. Despite these drawbacks, some advocate for a renewed focus. One such scholar is Sherry Turkle.²⁰⁰ In 2015 Turkle published Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle is an American sociologist and is currently the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research explores psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. Within a section titled “A Love Letter to Collaboration,” Turkle makes note of a biography composed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, written to pay tribute to his late colleague Amos Tversky.²⁰¹ In describing Kahneman’s letter, and thus his close professional relationship with Tversky, she notes, “Here we see conversation [emphasis added] as not only an intellectual engine but the means by which colleagues were able to cross boundaries that are usually only dissolved by love.”²⁰² Then, in a poetic line that follows, Turkle states, “Conversation led to intellectual communion.”²⁰³ ¶ Another conversation and creativity-minded scholar is Michael Arnold Mages. In 2024, Mages published Conversational Design: Improving Participation and Decision-Making in Public Organizations, which offers readers, especially designers, leaders and planners, a more applied approach to conversation. Mages’ perspectives are especially salient for those interested in collaborative, co-designed, community-engaged practices. As Mages details in his book, a “design”—be it an environment, a product, an experience, or otherwise can be “shaped” by conversation. But as anyone who has attended a community meeting can attest, managing these conversations can be tricky. Thus, to strengthen our conversational abilities, one must engage in it as a practice. Thankfully, there are learnable techniques that make this process more effective. Mages’ book, for instance, offers techniques and case studies for conversation leaders and participants alike. In the introduction, Mages states, “When designers design a thing, beyond designing form, function, and meaning, they create a set of potentials for conversations to be had with, through, or facilitated by that thing.”²⁰⁴ Mages then states, “conversations are fundamental to human experience.”²⁰⁵ I hope you agree. ¶ In summary, conversation is a powerful and dynamic exchange facilitated through language. But while conversation can be productive, it is also somewhat unpredictable. In this way, conversations might be described as more like clouds rather than clocks. As broad metaphors, clocks and clouds are thus the next two c-words explored in this incomplete list.
    
    
19. Clocks: In 1965, Karl Popper delivered the Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture at Washington University. Popper, an Austrian–British philosopher, academic, and social commentator, is regarded as one of the 20th-century’s most influential philosophers of science.²⁰⁶ Popper’s lecture was titled Of Clouds and Clocks: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man. It was subsequently published as a standalone essay in his 1972 book Objective Knowledge.²⁰⁷ In his lecture and essay, Popper employs clouds and clocks as symbolic labels to describe a spectrum of possibilities between determinism and indeterminism. On the left, Popper describes clouds as “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.”²⁰⁸ On the right side, Popper describes a precision clock which is “intended to represent physical systems which are regular, orderly, and highly predictable in their behavior.”²⁰⁹ Popper later describes his clocks and clouds as “two prototypes or paradigms…in which we can arrange many kinds of things, and many kinds of systems, between them.”²¹⁰ ¶ Students in this creative course might ask why we would spend time exploring and discussing Popper-inspired rational and orderly notions of clocks? Alas, shouldn’t we be spending the bulk of our time with our heads in the creative clouds? This is an excellent question, and it’s one for which Popper’s handy clock-clock metaphor might help us briefly explore. But first, (with apologies to Popper), we will need to extend Popper’s deterministic use of clocks to encompass an even wider set of principles and considerations. ¶ For the purposes of this conversation, we will use “clocks” as a big-tent catch for that which is rational, orderly, predictable, or even data-driven. On the side of clocks, we’ll also “glob on” things that are generally structured, evidence-based, or even metric-based, or that which is driven by efficiency, performance, or cost. ¶ So now, let’s go back to the question of “why clocks?” By exploring and gathering clocks, cloud-minded creatives can sometimes apply their cloud-based superpowers more intuitively, enabling them to thoughtfully synthesize, imagine, and “connect the dots.” With this clock-based evidence in mind, creatives can sometimes navigate patterns, challenges, and constraints more tacitly and precisely. ¶ Step into the design studio and you may observe designers and design teams dialogically weighing and exploring clock-and-cloud-based factors—the emotional versus the rational, the costs versus the benefits, the tried and true versus the unknowns. Contrary to popular myths, many high-performing creatives seem to “toggle” between clock-based concerns and cloud-based ones. This weighing of clock and cloud-based concerns oftentimes creates healthy tension. Fortunately, as we’ve explored in previous sections, artists, scientists, engineers, and other creatives have developed tools, methods, and techniques to manage, facilitate, and resolve these tensions. ¶ This notion of clocks can also serve as a springboard for us to further consider notions of form and aesthetics. Across the arts and in related fields, the term aesthetics generally refers to the quality of or perception of form. For instance, in my own field of two-dimensional design, there is a well-established “clock-like” aesthetic or approach that we informally call “the grid.” Grid systems (or “the grid”) were first championed by 20th-century designers such as Josef Müller-Brockmann.²¹¹ Grid systems inform everything from web pages to printed books to building facades. For designers, the grid provides just enough rules and structure to keep things cogent. Grids are often “invisible” to the viewer but provide orderly, modular, and systematic options for the designer. It’s likely no surprise that these clock-like aesthetics and approaches were further popularized following the cloudy chaos of World War II. The grid, along with modernist principles such as “form follows function,”²¹² seemed to dominate 19th- and early- to mid-20th-century aesthetics. These design aesthetics became essential components of the aesthetic movement that came to be known as modernism.²¹³ ¶ In the world of business, these clock-oriented, logic-leaning, Aristotelian set of principles seem to support Theodore Levitt’s paper “Creativity is Not Enough.”²¹⁴ But in business, as is the case in many other fields, we might likewise assume that clocks alone are not enough. Let’s consider this lofty position by looking right at the clouds.
    
    
20. Clouds: In what Popper called a “commonsense view of things,” he noted that “some natural phenomena…are hard to predict.”²¹⁵ As we make our way across Popper’s spectrum from left to right, we begin to encounter phenomena that are unorderly, random, sporadic, hard to predict, or simply new. Just as we did with Popper’s clocks, we will likewise expand Popper’s use of clouds to serve as our big tent c-word that broadly encapsulates that which is chaotic or unpredictable. This broad formulation of clouds might generally include the subjective, the random, the emotional, and the relational. ¶ Within this cluster of clouds, we might also encounter identity, taste, style, movements, intuition, conflict, trust, understanding, culture, expression, imagination, and more. In a nod to our c-word section on complexity, we may likewise encounter probability over certainty and intuition over facts. ¶ Here in the clouds, we might ponder notions of beauty, use, and value. Using one classic example, we might ask if the Mona Lisa is “useful”? Does Leonardo da Vinci’s work possess value, and if so, why? Is the Mona Lisa beautiful? How are such notions of beauty determined and by whom? What do you [individually] find beautiful, useful, and worthwhile?²¹⁶ ¶ As I have noted elsewhere, designers often engage in a mix of clock and cloud-based thinking—designers may “make things to know things” and/or “know things to make things.”²¹⁷ From prototyping to improvisation, creatives sometimes start in the “messiness” of the clouds. ¶ To make this cloud-based scenario more concrete, let’s consider an audible artifact embedded in a Miles Davis track from 1958. At the outset of Davis’ rendition of “If I Were a Bell,”²¹⁸ listeners are greeted by a short voiceover clip featuring Davis. In his signature raspy voice, very likely captured in the recording studio, we hear Miles state, “I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.”²¹⁹ By making this statement, Davis provides listeners with an intellectual clue. In this course, as we grasp tat that clue, we begin to grapple with the (like Davis) finding comfort and confidence in the clouds. This is easier said than done. As a seasoned jazz musician, Davis is, in some ways, stating the obvious—that in jazz, the result is not known until they play. By making this statement, Davis, as a creative leader, also helps foster the group’s openness to discovery.²²⁰ But also, for the audience or listener, the line adds intrigue, curiosity, and suspense. ¶ Just as we explored clocks as a big-tent mode of thought, big-tent notions of clouds provide a parallel partner to clocks, one that equally offers a path to “newness.”²²¹ This notion of newness, oftentimes associated with technology, innovation, or change, is explored in a 2007 paper by Debabrata Chattopadhyay and B.N. Srivastava.²²² In their paper, the authors describe newness as a concept “applicable in a wide variety of phenomena – strategic, administrative, technical and technological innovations, organisational learning, organisation development and change.”²²³ But they also note that “Unfortunately, there is inadequate exposition of the very concept of newness in the literature.”²²⁴ Despite these views, we might agree that newness usually involves or indicates substantial changes or shifts. In creative work, we oftentimes evaluate notions of newness versus novelty. Like newsness, notions of novelty can indicate the new, but also the unusual. ¶ On another newness-oriented note, in 1953, Alex F. Osborn likewise explored newness-oriented themes when he published Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving.²²⁵ Looking back on Osborn’s work many years later, it would seem he hoped to make cloud-oriented thinking accessible. In the Forward to his book, Osborn makes several references to J.P. Guilford, who in 1950 became President of the American Psychological Association. Years before Sir Ken Robinson and other creative education advocates, Osborn noted Guilford’s attempts to bring attention to “education’s appalling neglect of creativity.”²²⁶ Furthering Guilford’s argument, Osborn likewise stated, “By and large we have failed to recognize the fact that everybody possesses creative imagination, at least potentially.”²²⁷ Osborn also stated, “We have failed to find wide-scale ways to develop this gift of our people.”²²⁸ In this latter statement, in part, we encounter at least one raison dêtre for considering (or re-considering) cloud-based thought. ¶ One cloud-oriented concept worthy of creative consideration or even celebration is culture. It is often said that writing about culture is a bit like trying to photograph the wind—but this cloudiness should not prevent us from briefly pondering its potential.
    
    
21. Culture: As one of our big-tent c-words, culture encompasses everything from artifacts and language to behaviors and beliefs, courtesies to cuisine, and more. Unfortunately, looking at culture in the present might also be a bit like being a fish in a tank; it can be hard to see things in the moment, and it’s hard to know you’re in a moment when you’re in the moment. ¶ In 1959, C. P. Snow²²⁹ (1905–1980) delivered the Rede Lecture²³⁰ at the University of Cambridge. The first part of his lecture was titled “The Two Cultures,” and was later published in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. “Cultures,” in this case, referred to two intellectual “camps”—the humanities and the sciences. In summary, Snow argued that a deep divide existed between these two cultures. Moreover, Snow viewed this divide as a major barrier to solving complex problems. Just over four years after delivering his lecture, and in response to some of the feedback and criticism he had received, in 1963 Snow published The Two Cultures and A Second Look. The reason for mentioning Snow’s revised text here is twofold. ¶ The first for mentioning Snow here directly concerns his use of the term culture(s). It would seem Snow received a mixed response to his use of the term. As Snow notes, “From the beginning, the phrase ‘the two cultures’ evoked some protests.”²³¹ Interestingly, it was not just cultures that were the target of these objections but also his choice of the number two. To defend his use of culture, Snow pointed readers to two relevant meanings in an attempt to substantiate his position: 1) “intellectual development, development of the mind”²³² and 2) “a group of persons living in the same environment, linked by common habits, common assumptions, a common way of life.”²³³ In the present day, culture might likewise mean many different things, and thus, Snow’s clarifications, as they did then, still now serve to narrow our present meaning and focus. ¶ The second reason for citing The Two Cultures and A Second Look here concerns the aforementioned criticisms Snow received over his choice of two. Here we must give Snow some credit, as on this latter point he seems to have yielded—and in fact it was likely one of the core reasons he revisited the original lecture. In addition to science and the humanities, Snow seems to have yielded to a third group of “intellectual persons in a variety of fields.” While Snow’s description of the fields is a bit dated, it included architecture and “the social arts.”²³⁴ As is described further along in this literature review, in the 21st century, the architecture and associated “social arts” increasingly fall under the umbrella of design. ¶ In our limited time, this brief lecture on culture will focus on three highly intertwined “sub-tents” of this big-tent term: artifacts, media, and memory. To start, let’s look at a recent (2026) article written by Nils Gilman. Published in Noema, Gilman’s article grapples with emerging technologies such as AI and posits what he describes as “the judgment economy.”²³⁵ While we should always take any broad prescriptions or predictions around technology or the economy with a grain of salt—we might also posit Gilman’s “judgment economy” provocation and use it as a springboard for timely discourses around Snow’s previously mentioned definitions of culture(s). Akin to what we’ve explored in our c-word sections on currency, complexity, and craft, Gilman suggests that “value will accrue to those who can exercise sound judgment under stress and conditions of uncertainty.”²³⁶ Going further, Gilman states, “The currency [emphasis added] is trust, influence and the reliability of a decision [emphasis added].”²³⁷ ¶ As creators, we understand that the decisions we make can be shaped and informed by a whole countenance-evaluation-minded set of clock and cloud-oriented factors. When we consider Gilman’s arguments around a judgment-based economy—those with a mix of c-word skills may be uniquely positioned to participate and lead. In support of this, Gilman also seems to advocate for a renewed exposure to history, culture, and the liberal arts. ¶ With Gilman’s framing in mind, and for the purposes of this course, I might suggest that we briefly look back to ancient Roman mythology as we seek to understand culture-oriented ideas. To do so, we might posit Janus, the two-faced Roman deity. In ancient mythology, Janus was known as the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, gates, and endings.²³⁸ Janus was typically depicted with two faces, one looking toward the past and one toward the future. Thus, as we posit culture, Janus serves to remind us of our unique human ability not only to look towards the past, but perhaps even more powerfully, to imagine the future. This ability to simultaneously ponder the past and prefigure the future is one of our core creative and designerly superpowers. ¶ In his 2019 book The Janus Face of Ideas, the American philosopher and academic Burton Porter grapples with our cultural, philosophical, and intellectual histories in a nuanced tug-of-war style. While some might find Porter’s occasional lack of a clear stance on various issues frustrating, as we consider notions of culture, the “Janus Face” might likewise help us see both (or many) sides of a story. In describing Janus as a symbolic reference point for the book, Porter notes that, “Janus is two-faced, not from hypocrisy or insincerity but because of reflection. He looks at both sides of the question.”²³⁹ ¶ But what does all of this have to do with culture? In his book, Porter, while not explicitly pointing to culture, seems to be advocating for contemplation. Porter states, “This is not a book for specialists but for those interested in ideas, [emphasis added] in the life of the mind.”²⁴⁰ If students in this course agree, I might reason that if one is interested in ideas, one is a priori interested in culture, and if one is interested in culture, one is likely interested in ideas. Artifacts, when viewed in this context, are just different formulations of cultural ideas. ¶ In the 21st century, we are surrounded by, if not inundated with, media, messages, culture, and ideas. Thus, there is tremendous value in exploring and understanding the life of ideas. Beyond art and design, notions of culture can inform everything from media, politics, entertainment, technology, marketing, branding,^241|242 and more. ¶ While one could point to countless examples of culture as a creative catalyst, a recent book co-authored by a pair of designerly and musical minds seems timely and fitting. In 2021, Panos A. Panay and R. Michael Hendrix’s 2021 authored Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation. The book provides an apt reference point because it attempts to directly correlate a culturally informed “musical mind” to one concerned with newness, culture and innovation. In their book, and somewhat akin to this list, Panay and Hendrix provide a musically informed mix of creative course skills and traits. These include but are not limited to listening, remixing, reinvention, and improvisation. To do so, the authors provide “an ongoing dialogue” that attempts to share and instill a “musical mindset.”²⁴³ ¶ Paney and Hendrix note in their Prelude—that “this isn’t a how-to manual.”²⁴⁴ Likewise, An Incomplete List of C-Words for the Creative Course sacrifices the technical or prescriptive for broad-brush creative properties and mindsets. In this way, creatives in this course may likewise ponder a “framework of seeing and responding to a dynamic world.”²⁴⁵
    
    
22. Change: This list-maker has noted a somewhat strange occurrence over the past twenty-five or so years. Architects, designers, and other creative types are increasingly viewed as or turned to as stewards of change. Thus, in this creative course, change may be another relevant big-tent c-word worthy of brief exploration and consideration. Change has various meanings and applications that have evolved over many millennia. But if contemporary creatives are increasingly asked to explore and lead change, we might briefly ask how and why? ¶ In 2014, Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland published Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design. “DEO” in this case stands for “Design Executive Officer.” Early in the book, Giudice and Ireland address the most obvious question. Why are designers well-suited to lead change? As the authors themselves acknowledge, “Proposing design-inspired leadership as the answer may sound delusional to some, like a zealous art teacher attacking poverty with a new color palette.”²⁴⁶ But the authors then assert that “design leaders usually possess characteristics, behaviors, and mindsets that enable them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving, and value-charged conditions.”²⁴⁷ In other words, contemporary designers are adept at managing and, when appropriate, facilitating change. The first chapter is, in fact, titled “Change Agent.” The authors follow through with countless statistics, methods, and examples. ¶ As it turns out, some of the most oft-cited scholarly definitions of design are, in fact, inextricably connected to notions of change. Perhaps the most frequently cited of these change-oriented definitions comes from Herbert Simon (1916–2001), a Nobel laureate and polymath. In his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon famously stated, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”²⁴⁸ With Simon’s definition in mind, the notion of a designer, and those who design, becomes both extremely expansive and subjective. This, in part, lies in Simon’s subjective use of preferred. Oddly enough, the expansiveness of design is a less subjective truth than any notion of what is preferred. As we will see in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains, we explore this expansive quality of design in the 21st century and, more importantly, reveal how design has become a way of thinking, doing, and knowing. We will grapple with design as a competency and literacy for all, and a professional “leveled-up” version of design for architects and other design professionals. ¶ Some designers and scholars seemed to have foreseen some of the shifts approaching the design profession. This is evidenced by a whole host of recent activity, scholarship, and practice at the intersection of leadership, facilitation, collaboration, design, and change. For instance, in 2004, designer Bruce Mau launched a traveling exhibition and book titled Massive Change. Seeing that most humans are now surrounded by the artificial, or that which is designed, Mau noted that “Design is evolving from its position of relative insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all.”²⁴⁹ A few years later, Tim Brown of the design consultancy IDEO published Change by Design, which, in part, interrogated myth-like notions of creative “innovation” by providing concrete design-based strategies, processes, and approaches as more productive alternatives. As Brown stated in his book, “Individuals, teams, and organizations that have mastered the mental matrix of design thinking share a basic attitude of experimentation.”²⁵⁰ Lastly, and more recently (in 2025), Sara Gry Striegler and Julie Hjort published Navigating Societal Change Through Design. Much like our brief journey across clock and cloud-based mindsets, Gry and Hjort demonstrate an openness to grappling with the multifaceted tension(s) that surface at the intersection of design and change. The authors seem to embrace this dialogic position. In one example, they state, “Another mindset tension we personally try to balance throughout the book is the tension between a speculative and a rational mindset.”²⁵¹ ¶ As our many footnotes suggest, creativity and design are not only ways of making but also pathways for discovery, newness, exploration, and change. One additional, if not obvious, area that seems to reside at the intersection of creativity and change is education. One recent book that explores this intersection directly is José Antonio Bowen’s 2021 book, Teaching Change. For students in this course, Bowen’s argument may seem obvious: as the world changes, we cannot continue to teach and learn in the same exact way(s). But this, of course, overly simplifies the issue. Bowen does not prescribe specific changes to education as much as he advocates for those charged with teaching and learning to explore notions of change itself. In support of this, Bowen states, “As students, technology, and the economy have changed, the ability to adapt, change, and self-direct future learning has only become more important.”²⁵² Much like our earlier c-word explorations of context versus content, part of what Bowen is attempting to explore is how we might, over time, consider educational approaches that shift away from “content” (what to think) towards “process” how to think. ¶ From design to education and more, big-tent notions of change can productively foster creative and analytical perspectives alike. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus²⁵³ (c. 535 – 475 BCE) believed that the universe was in a state of constant motion and change, while Parmenides of Elea²⁵⁴ (c. 515 – 450 BCE) believed the opposite, that change is impossible. Plato, Aristotle, and many philosophers who followed, in part, attempted to bridge the gap between the “everything changes” and “nothing changes” debate. Likewise, whatever your views on change may be, I encourage you, as part of this creative course, to simultaneously explore both the traditions you uphold and the changes you embrace. Like the ancient philosophers before you, this exploration will most certainly inform and shape your creative practice.

With utmost gratitude to the many voices cited and referenced. First published 18 Apr 2026. Last updated 1 Oct 2026. Please send edits, corrections, and suggestions to this address.

Footnotes

1. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, 2002, p. ix. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Han, Shoen. “Wait, Go Back,” Wired, November–December 2024, p. 16. ↩︎
5. Han, Shoen. “About,” Shoen Han, accessed 2024, https://sheonhan.net/about/. ↩︎
6. In 1987, for instance, David Bohm and F. David Peat published Science, Order, and Creativity: A Dramatic New Look at the Creative Roots of Science and Life. Bohm and Peat believed that science has become fragmentary and that dialogue and creativity could unlock new ways of seeing the world. As the authors stated, “It is important to extend creativity beyond the spheres in which it is traditionally supposed to lie” (p. 266). See: Bohm, David and F. David Peat. Science, Order, and Creativity. Bantam Books, 1987. ↩︎
7. Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. Creative Schools. Viking, 2015, pp. 128-157. ↩︎
8. Thornhill-Miller et al. “Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration: Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills for the Future of Work and Education.” Journal of Intelligence, 11(3), 54 (2023). ↩︎
9. See: Bishop, Wendy and David Starkey. Keywords in Creative Writing. Utah State University Press, 2006, p. vii. ↩︎
10. “Capabilities for life framework.” The RSA, https://www.thersa.org/design-for-life/capabilities-for-life/capabilities-for-life-framework/. ↩︎
11. Loc. cit., p. 1. ↩︎
12. See: Cagan, Jonathan, and Craig M. Vogel. Creating Breakthrough Products. Prentice Hall, 2002, p. 144. ↩︎
13. See also the c-word section on Convergence. ↩︎
14. Shea, Danny. “Oprah Gives Stanford Grads Books, Calls Class To Service,” Huffpost, last modified Dec 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oprah-gives-stanford-grad_n_107282. ↩︎
15. See: Martin, Colette, and Kristi Hedges. “Creativity Is The New Black,” Forbes, last modified Aug 9, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2010/07/16/creativity-is-the-new-black/. ↩︎
16. “20th CEO Survey,” PWC, accessed August 6, 2024, https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/2017/deep-dives/ceo-survey-global-talent.pdf. ↩︎
17. Storey, Veda C. et al. “The design of human-artificial intelligence systems in decision sciences: A look back and directions forward,” Decision Support Systems 182 (July 2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2024.114230. ↩︎
18. Ibid., p. 1. ↩︎
19. Ibid., pp. 5–6. ↩︎
20. This “taxonomy of eight C’s” was originally published in 2023. They include composition, complexity, creativity, confidence, controls, conscience, certification, and contribution.” See: Alan Hevner and Veda Storey, “Research Challenges for the Design of Human-Artificial Intelligence Systems (HAIS),” ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems 14, no. 1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3549547. ↩︎
21. The phrase “combinatory play” is attributed to Albert Einstein and appears in his book Ideas and Opinions, first published in 1954. See: Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishing, [1954] 1995), 24. ↩︎
22. “Terrain” seems like a fitting word choice here, but “properties” could also be used. In regard to the latter term, Derek Jones et al., incorporate and thus elevate “properties” in the title of their 2025 open-access volume. See: Studio Properties: A field guide to design education. See: Jones, Derek et al. Studio Properties. Bloomsbury, 2025. ↩︎
23. Imrie, Rob, and Kim Kullman. “Designing with Care and Caring with Design.” in Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, edited by Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, pp. 1–17. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119053484.ch1
    . ↩︎
24. See: “Front Matter.” in Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, edited by Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. xiii. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119053484.ch1. ↩︎
25. Ibid. ↩︎
26. As but one example of this, Seth Johnson, who, at the time of this c-word list, serves as Design Director at IBM’s Chief Data Office, traces his corporate design leadership back to his time as an AIGA chapter volunteer and treats his design team members at IBM more like volunteers. In 2026, Johnson recounted these perspectives and experiences on the AIGA Design Podcast. See: “Seth Johnson on Earning the Right to Change Things.” AIGA Design Podcast, June 2, 2026, Available at: https://www.aiga.org/aiga-design-podcast. , ↩︎
27. Care in education might be the opposite of what Paolo Freire famously described as the “banking model” of education—an approach that treats students as containers or receptacles of knowledge. Freire criticized the banking model of education for how it (among other reasons) stifles creativity. See: Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1968. ↩︎
28. Along these lines, a more recent figure who emerged as an advocate for creativity in education was Ken Robinson. Robinson’s 2006 Ted Talk on creativity and education has been viewed over 78 million times. [Sir] Robinson was knighted in 2003 by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts. ↩︎
29. See, for instance, Luis Rico-Gutierrez’s (Dean of Design at Iowa State) 2023 lecture on design and care. Available at: Rico-Gutierrez, Luis. “I+E Day Culture of Care Presentation.” YouTube, uploaded by Iowa State College of Design, 7 Mar 2023, https://youtu.be/P5wyuS9CKf4. ↩︎
30. The first five Cs: Competence, Connection, Character, Confidence, and Caring (or compassion) seem to have been first published in 2000. See: Lerner, Richard M., et. al. “Toward a Science for and of the People: Promoting Civil Society Through the Application of Developmental Science.” Child Development, vol. 71, no. 1, 2000, pp. 11-20, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1132212. ↩︎
31. The sixth C, “Contribution,” appears to have been added by 2005. “Lerner and colleagues have contended that such exemplary positive youth development (PYD) results in the emergence in an adolescent’s life of a sixth C, contribution to self, family, community, and ultimately, civil society” (p. 96). From: King, Pamela E., et. al. “Thriving in Adolescence: The Voices of Youth-Serving Practitioners, Parents, and Early and Late Adolescents.” Journal of Early Adolescence, vol. 25, no. 1, 2005, pp. 94-112, https://doi.org/10.1177/02724316042724. ↩︎
32. See: James, Ian. “Tekhne.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 25 February 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.121. ↩︎
33. Barney, Rachel. “Tanner Lectures on Human Values with Rachel Barney: Lecture I – The End of Craft.” YouTube, uploaded by UC Berkeley Events, 4 May 2024, https://youtu.be/chDcuJmqBjc. ↩︎
34. Research is also considered a craft. As a poorly performing undergraduate design student, one of my professors suggested that I pick up a copy of Wayne C. Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research. Now in its fifth edition, this book has helped scores of students of all ages discern the art of choosing research topics, building sound arguments, and more. The book has sold over a million copies. ↩︎
35. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008, p. 289. ↩︎
36. Loc. cit. ↩︎
37. Ibid., p. 290. ↩︎
38. This lineage of craft and design is briefly explored in my 2025 motion graphics film Towards a Dynamic Discipline of Design, which uses the hand-axe as an ancient reference point. See: Vlahos, Dan, and Steven Cotroneo. “Towards a Dynamic Discipline of Design” in Edited Conference Proceedings of the 2025 Motion Design Education Summit, June 19-21, 2025: edited by Jessica Barness et al., MODE Society, 2025, pp. 169-186. ↩︎
39. Students who wish to delve deeper into such questions may consider Matthew Niermann’s 2021 book The Humble Creative. See: Niermann, Matthew. The Humble Creative. Wipf & Stock, 2021. ↩︎
40. Shales, Ezra. The Shape of Craft. Reaktion Books, 2017, p. 30. ↩︎
41. Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, [1973] 1998, p. 55.
    ↩︎
42. Loc. cit. ↩︎
43. Koren, Leonard. Arranging Things. Stone Bridge Press, 2003, p. 13. ↩︎
44. Ibid., 109. ↩︎
45. Levine, Caroline. Forms. Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 2. ↩︎
46. Ibid., p. 3. ↩︎
47. See: “Affordance.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance. ↩︎
48. In the visual arts, this is often referred to as the “picture plane.” See: “Picture plane.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Feb 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_plane. ↩︎
49. In 2025, Patrik Hübner published The Generative Mind, a timely and cogent exploration of all things generative. In the foreword, written by the pioneering generative artist Frieder Nake, Nake states, “What made generative aesthetics unique was its shift of focus from the finished product to the process of creation itself” (p. ii). Beyond generative thinking and making, Hübner explores notions of adaptability, meaning, collaboration, systems thinking, and more. See: Hübner, Patrik, The Generative Mind: A New Approach to Creative Thinking, Niggli, 2025. ↩︎
50. For more on systematic structure, grids, and composition in visual design, see Shaping Visual Structures by Carla Viviana Cordova. See: Cordova, Carla Viviana. Shaping Visual Structures: The Art of Composition, Movement and Space in Graphic Design. BIS, 2025, p. 59–71. ↩︎
51. “Marcel Duchamp.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Aug 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp. ↩︎
52. See for instance: deWaard, Andrew. Derivative Media. University of California Press, 2025. ↩︎
53. Huber, Sarah, editor. Creative Formats Across Media and Disciplines: Assignments Beyond the Essay. Set Margins, 2026, pp. 60–95. ↩︎
54. Nez, Alyssa A. “Indigenous Knowledge: Learning to Tell Stories from Native Americans and First Nations Peoples” Creative Formats Across Media and Disciplines: Assignments Beyond the Essay, edited by Editor Sarah Huber, Set Margins, 2026, pp. 78–87. ↩︎
55. Ibid., 78. ↩︎
56. Ibid. ↩︎
57. In particular, Nez highlights and cites Gustav Freytag. ↩︎
58. Veglahn, Sara. “Making Poems: Exploring Ekphrasis and Text/Image Poetics.” Creative Formats Across Media and Disciplines: Assignments Beyond the Essay, edited by Editor Sarah Huber, Set Margins, 2026, pp. 90–94. ↩︎
59. See: “Ekphrasis.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Aug 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis. ↩︎
60. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Ways of Curating. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, p. 1. ↩︎
61. Ibid., p. 1. ↩︎
62. Ibid., p. 10. ↩︎
63. “The psychological research on curiosity starts in the second half of the 20th century. A pervasive topic in the psychology literature has been the motivational nature of curiosity.” From: Subaşı, Ahmet. “A Dynamic Systems Theory of epistemic curiosity.” New Ideas in Psychology, vol. 54, 2019, p. 9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.12.003. ↩︎
64. Powell, Christopher et al. “Deconstructing intellectual curiosity.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 95, 2016, pp. 147-151, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.02.037. ↩︎
65. Ibid, p. 147. ↩︎
66. Hagtvedt, Lydia Paine et al. “Curiosity made the cat more creative: Specific curiosity as a driver of
    creativity.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 150, 2019, pp. 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2018.10.007. ↩︎
67. Ibid., p. 1. ↩︎
68. The term “wicked problem” was coined by the design and planning theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973. They introduced the concept in their paper, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” to describe complex social and planning problems that cannot be solved in a traditional, linear way. See: Rittel, H.W.J., and M.M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Policy Sci. vol. 4, 1973, 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730. ↩︎
69. Loc. cit., p. 2. ↩︎
70. Loc. cit., p. 3. ↩︎
71. This reflexive perspective is often referred to as reflective practice and is most commonly associated with Donald Schön and his 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner. Notions of reflective practice are also described or alluded to in the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the American philosopher John Dewey, and others. ↩︎
72. In 2025, Lefteris Heretakis penned a brief memo on commitment as it relates to design and creative work. See: Heretakis, Lefteris. “The Discipline of Commitment in Design Education.” The New Art School, 2025, https://newartschool.education/2025/10/08/the-discipline-of-commitment-in-design-education/. ↩︎
73. Calvino’s lecture notes were first published [in English] in 1988. See: “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Nov 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Memos_for_the_Next_Millennium. ↩︎
74. In my introductory design classes, I explore aesthetic notions of consistency by assigning students a pattern-making exercise. The project asks students to compose three complementary patterns using two colors. The students are challenged to imagine their three compositions plotted along a spectrum, with consistency (or “unity” and/or “constants”) on one end and variety (and/or “variables”) on the other. When students bring in the completed assignment, I ask them to note their intended spectrum position on the back of their work, and then exchange their three solutions with another student. Students then visually “plot” where they think the other student’s solution falls across the spectrum. On a large wall, I place the word “consistency” on the far left and “variety” on the far right. This assignment was substantially inspired by the “Unity and Variety” section of the late Majorie Elliot Bevlin’s out-of-print book Design Through Discovery. See: Bevlin, Marjorie Elliot. Design Through Discovery. 6th ed., Harcourt Brace, 1993, pp. 123–139. ↩︎
75. See “Dialogic” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains. ↩︎
76. See “Discursivity” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains. ↩︎
77. There are countless books on habits, productivity, and creativity. One of the most prominent might be Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Upon Covey’s death in 2012, the book had sold more than 20 million copies. See: “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Oct 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People. ↩︎
78. Calvino, Italo. Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985. Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 179-180. ↩︎
79. The term flow, coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, was used to describe the phenomenon of losing one’s sense of time and experiencing increased focus during deep creative work. The term first appeared in Csikszentmihalyi’s 1975 book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. It’s no surprise that Csikszentmihalyi is often called the “father of flow.” ↩︎
80. Dong, Andy. “The enactment of design through language.” Design Studies, 28 (2007), p. 5. ↩︎
81. Ibid., p. 6. ↩︎
82. Ibid., p. 15. ↩︎
83. See “Dynamic” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains, https://danvlahos.com/work/an-incomplete-list-of-d-words-for-designerly-domains/#dynamic. ↩︎
84. Patton, M.Q. “Video Review of Measuring Education: Memoir.” Education Review, vol. 31, Sept. 2024, https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v31.3871. ↩︎
85. “Robert E. Stake.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Jul 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Stake. ↩︎
86. Mathison, Sandra. “Countenance Model of Evaluation.” Encyclopedia of Evaluation, SAGE Publications, 2004. ↩︎
87. Ibid. ↩︎
88. Stake, Robert. (1967) “The countenance of educational evaluation.” Teachers College Record, 68(7), pp. 523-530. ↩︎
89. Ibid. ↩︎
90. Zelenko, Darcy, et al. “Design Quality Housing Assessment Methodology: Supporting Heuristics with Evidence-Based Decision-Making.” CAAD Futures 2025 – Catalytic Interfaces: Conference Proceedings, edited by Kristof Crolla, et al., University of Hong Kong, 2025, pp. 538. ↩︎
91. Lissack, Michael. “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective. Part 1.” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, vol. 5, no. 3, 2019, p. 233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.07.002. ↩︎
92. Ibid. ↩︎
93. Zelenko, p. 538. ↩︎
94. Ibid. ↩︎
95. “Understanding by Design.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 May 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_by_Design. ↩︎
96. Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. 2nd ed., Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005, Back cover. ↩︎
97. See: “Dynamism” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains, https://danvlahos.com/work/an-incomplete-list-of-d-words-for-designerly-domains/#dynamism. ↩︎
98. See “Discovery” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains, https://danvlahos.com/work/an-incomplete-list-of-d-words-for-designerly-domains/#discovery ↩︎
99. Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House. Horizon Press, 1954, p. 135. ↩︎
100. Oech, Roger von. A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, Harper, 1986, p. 91. ↩︎
101. Ibid., p. 110. ↩︎
102. Wedge, Carole. “Leading Change: An Exploratory Process.” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 6, Nov.–Dec. 2006, pp. 10–11. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2006/12/leading-change-an-exploratory-process. ↩︎
103. Ibid. ↩︎
104. See: Resnick, Elizabeth. Design for Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics. Wiley, 2004, p. 121. ↩︎
105. I’ll note that every semester, I have my students watch Milton Glaser Draws & Lectures, a five-minute film from 2009. The film (directed by Chris Coy) is a single-take overhead shot of Glaser drawing Shakespeare while talking about drawing. The film starts with Glaser saying, “For me, drawing has always been the most fundamental way of engaging with the world.” See: Coy, Chris. “Milton Glaser Draws & Lectures.” Vimeo, uploaded by C Coy, 9 Oct 2009, https://vimeo.com/6986303. ↩︎
106. See also “Drawing” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains. ↩︎
107. See: “Visible Thinking.” Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education: https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking. ↩︎
108. Levitt, Theodore. “Creativity Is Not Enough,” Harvard Business Review, August (2022) [1963]. ↩︎
109. Ibid., p. 3. ↩︎
110. Kolko, Jon. “Novelty ≠ Creativity: The Problem of Psychological Measurement in Design Practice and Education.” Design Issues, vol. 42, no. 2, Spring 2026, p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.727. ↩︎
111. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, 2002, pp. 267–282. ↩︎
112. Unfortunately, the outcomes of, or critical response to, some creative works are not always evident immediately or even within short time periods. Also, outcomes, reactions, and critical perspectives can unexpectedly shift in a positive or negative direction over long periods of time. Thus, evaluations of some environments, creative works, and experiences may require flexibility and sustained effort. See also: c-word sections on clocks, complexity, and clouds. ↩︎
113. See: Sheridan, Kimberly M. et al. Studio Thinking 3, Teachers College Press, 2022, p. 4. ↩︎
114. This assumption is shared by Michael Craig-Martin in his 2015 book On Being an Artist. Craig-Martin notes that while many of the non-art major classmates he met in Josef Albers’ rigorous color course at Yale may not have become artists, he “always assumed that their direct experience with art-making led them years later to become the best of America’s new committed and sophisticated collectors of contemporary art.” See: Craig-Martin, Michael. On Being an Artist. Art/Books, 2015, p. 37. ↩︎
115. See: Kleon, Austin. Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, Workman Publishing, 2014. ↩︎
116. Serig, Dan. “Research Review.” Teaching Artist Journal, 10(2), 2012, p. 121, https://doi.org/10.1080/15411796.2012.658320. ↩︎
117. In his highly influential 1993 paper, “Research in Art and Design,” Sir Christopher Frayling provided a framework to understand how research interacts with the creative process in academic and professional contexts, categorizing such research into three distinct types. See: Frayling, Christopher. “Research in Art and Design.” Royal College of Art Research Papers. 1(1), (1993/4), pp. 1-5. ↩︎
118. Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory was pioneered by the American cognitive psychologist and author Howard Gardner. Gardner’s MI theory was first presented in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. His ideas were further developed, extended, and refined in subsequent publications over many years: See Gordon, Lynn Melby. “Howard Gardner.” Britannica, 09 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Howard-Gardner. ↩︎
119. “Multihyphenate,” Harvard Design Magazine, accessed December 19, 2024, https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/multihyphenate/. ↩︎
120. Canty, Sean, Zeina Koreitem, and John May, “Editors’ Letter: Multihyphenation,” Harvard Design Magazine 51, (F/W 2023): p. 15. ↩︎
121. See: “T-shaped skills,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Jan 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills. ↩︎
122. One must credit Richard Saul Wurman, Harry Marks, and Frank Stanton for having the vision to connect interlinked notions of technology, entertainment, and design. As early as 1984, they founded the now-familiar TED conference. See: “TED (conference).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Nov 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference). ↩︎
123. Ottino, Julio Mario, and Bruce Mau. The Nexus. MIT Press, 2022. ↩︎
124. Edwards, David. Artscience. Harvard University Press, 2010. ↩︎
125. Much of this integrative interest began after reading Roger Martin’s 2009 book The Opposable Mind. See: Martin, Roger. The Opposable Mind. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2009. ↩︎
126. Phillip A. Sharp et al., The Third Revolution: The Convergence of the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011). ↩︎
127. Ibid. ↩︎
128. See, for instance, the emergence of the “Artist Corporation,” a new type of company designed for creative people. More at: https://www.artistcorporations.com. ↩︎
129. Cagan, Jonathan, and Craig M. Vogel. Creating Breakthrough Products. Prentice Hall, 2002, p. 140. ↩︎
130. Ibid., p. 142. ↩︎
131. Loc. cit. ↩︎
132. Ibid., p. 138. ↩︎
133. Ibid., p. 143. ↩︎
134. Here, I might propose extending Nigel Cross’ notion of “Designerly ways of knowing,” to something akin to “designerly ways of leading,” which may require figures with a mix of design, research, change management, transformation, vision alignment, communication strategy, and more. See: Cross, Nigel. “Designerly ways of knowing.” Design Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, Oct 1982, pp. 221-227. https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(82)90040-0. ↩︎
135. Students further interested in designful organizations and concerns might check out Marty Neumeier’s 2009 book The Designful Company. See: Neumeier, Marty. The Designful Company. New Riders, 2009. ↩︎
136. See: “Divergence” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains. ↩︎
137. This is also chronicled in Gowan’s 2012 book Shared Vision: The Second American Bauhaus. Gowan studied at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and was present when Fuller gave his first lecture as a research professor in 1959. See: Gowan, Al. Shared Vision: The Second American Bauhaus. Merrimack Media, 2012, p. x. ↩︎
138. Fuller, Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1969, p. 10. ↩︎
139. Ibid., p. 12. ↩︎
140. Loc. cit. ↩︎
141. See: “Building information modeling.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Nov 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_information_modeling. ↩︎
142. Jones, Derek, et al. Studio Properties. Bloomsbury, 2025, p. 79. OA: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350407480. ↩︎
143. Loc. cit. ↩︎
144. Berkun, Scott, and Bryan Zug. Why Design is So Hard. Berkun Media, 2024, p. 20. ↩︎
145. Ibid., p. 21. ↩︎
146. Part of my H-oriented interest stems from my research into H. H. Richardson, one of the early designerly giants of American architecture. Richardson seems to have set a sort of standard for how one could live a life in design. In Living Architecture, James F. O’Gorman writes that by 1885, Richardson “owned a national reputation as the single most admired and emulated architect in America” (p. 21). O’Gorman also notes that Richardson, “produced buildings that are, ultimately, ahistorically superb” (p.189). See: O’Gorman, James. Living Architecture: A Biography of H. H. Richardson. Simon & Schuster Editions, 1997. ↩︎
147. Coincidentally, this list maker designed the “Hi” icon for Harvard Innovation Labs, which could also represent “Human intelligence.” ↩︎
148. In one of this list-maker’s creative courses, he has students watch video footage of well-known creatives receiving critical feedback, and then we discuss how they respond. One example is a video of Steve Jobs at the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. See: “Steve Jobs Insult Response.” YouTube, uploaded by Jonathan Field, 1 Dec 2016, https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o. ↩︎
149. This essay appears to have been posted to Microsoft’s website as a memo from Gates on January 3, 1996. I was able to locate a screenshot, but I am currently unable to verify its authenticity. ↩︎
150. The phrase “content is king” appears in a 1978 issue (p. 103) of The 1978 Photographer’s Market published by Writer’s Digest Books. The entry cites Click and Baird’s book Magazine Editing and Production as the original source. ↩︎
151. Nachmanovich, Stephen. The Art of Is. New World Library, 2019, p. 101. ↩︎
152. Just as I was drafting this list, Alicia Juarrero published a 174-page volume titled Why Context Matters. Drawing on historical and philosophical analysis, Juarrero explores these themes in detail. See: Juarrero, Alicia. Why Context Matters. Imprint Academic (Ips), 2025. ↩︎
153. Context-dependence is referenced, examined, and discussed throughout Juarrero’s book. At the outset, the author notes that, “Context-dependence […] was dismissed from reality and epistemology because interdependence and interconnectedness had no purchase in philosophy or science” (p. 5). ↩︎
154. Millman, Debbie. “Is the World Getting Uglier?” Time, 18 Aug. 2026, time.com/article/2026/08/18/is-the-world-getting-uglier/. ↩︎
155. Loc. cit. ↩︎
156. Li, Wayne K. Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness. Laurence King, 2025, p. 176. ↩︎
157. Li defines being contextually aware as “having a sensitivity toward the connections between customer trends, the production landscape, culture, and technology” (p. 176). ↩︎
158. With some of these issues in mind, this list-maker is intrigued by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London’s recent proposal to reorganize the College into three somewhat contextual “Schools of Thought”—a C School (Culture), an S School (Systems) and an M School (Material). See: Ramanathan, Rathna. “Foundations, Not Hierarchies: Re:designing Creative Education for Future Resilience.” C+S+M, CSM Papers, Issue 1, Autumn, 2025, https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/about-us/schools-of-thought. ↩︎
159. Bracher, Todd. Design in Context. Compendium Editions, 2024, p. 45 ↩︎
160. Ibid. ↩︎
161. Here, I should note that I first encountered the term “contextual research” during my graduate studies at the Dynamic Media Institute (DMI) at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where it is tightly interwoven with project- and problem-based methodologies. A somewhat narrower use of the term has gained some popularity in fields such as Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design. “Contextual research” seems to have been more fully developed in the mid-1990s by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyerand. See: Duda, Sabrina et al. “Contextual Research.” In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Design and User Experience. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12181. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49059-1_3. ↩︎
162. As part of their creative and design studies, students should become familiar with the term “ethnography” and its basic aims and methods within anthropology. See: AIGA and Cheskin, “An Ethnography Primer.” 2007, https://www.scribd.com/doc/46873341/Ethnography-Primer. ↩︎
163. Maeda, John. The Laws of Simplicity. MIT Press, 2006. ↩︎
164. “Apple design chief Jonathan Ive is knighted.” BBC, 2012 May 23, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18171093. ↩︎
165. Silberling, Amanda. “Apple has now sold 3 billion iPhones.” TechCrunch, 2025 July 31, https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-billion-iphones/. ↩︎
166. Frenchman, Dennis et al. Designing the X. SA+P Press, 2025, p. 86. ↩︎
167. Ibid., 89–126. ↩︎
168. Alexiou, Katerina et al. eds. Embracing Complexity in Design. Routledge, 2010. ↩︎
169. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing design in complexity.” in Alexiou, Katerina et al. eds. Embracing Complexity in Design. Routledge, 2010, p. 193. ↩︎
170. “Don Norman.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman. ↩︎
171. Norman, Donald. Living with Complexity. MIT Press, 2016, p. 265 ↩︎
172. Fayard, Anne-Laure, and Sarah Fathallah. “Design Thinking Misses the Mark.” Stanford Social Innovation Review 22, no. 1 (2023): 28–35. https://doi.org/10.48558/G6HQ-RZ22. ↩︎
173. Ibid., p. 30. ↩︎
174. “Edgar Morin.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin. ↩︎
175. Morin, Edgar. On Complexity. Hampton Press, 2008, p. 2. ↩︎
176. Ibid. ↩︎
177. In another reference from Roger Martin’s 2009 book The Opposable Mind, the author states, “Experience enables us to hone our sensitivities and skills.” Martin goes on to define sensitivity as “the capacity to make distinctions between conditions that are similar but not exactly the same, ” while describing skill as “the capacity to carry out an activity so as to consistently produce the desired result.” See: Martin, Roger. The Opposable Mind. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2009, p. 100. ↩︎
178. In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Reis and Jack Trout use ladders as a metaphor to describe product categories and brands in the audience’s mind. See: Reis, Al and Jack Trout. Positioning. McGraw-Hill, 2001. ↩︎
179. The Wikipedia entry on “Literacy” lists 15 variants, from financial literacy to musical literacy. See: “Literacy.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Nov 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy. ↩︎
180. See: Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (2025), Literacy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Reading Research Quarterly, 60: e591. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.591. ↩︎
181. Ibid. ↩︎
182. Howells, Richard, and Joaquim Negreiros. Visual Culture. 3rd ed., Polity, 2019, p. 8. ↩︎
183. See: “The Hay Wain.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Sep 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hay_Wain. ↩︎
184. Howells and Negreiros, p. 17. ↩︎
185. Loc. cit. ↩︎
186. Loc. cit. ↩︎
187. See: “Codex.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Sep 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex.
     ↩︎
188. See: “The Weaving of Words.” Chetham’s Library, 19 Dec. 2025. https://library.chethams.com/blog/a-weaving-of-words/. ↩︎
189. Cross, Nigel. “Creativity in Design: Analyzing and Modeling the Creative Leap.” Leonardo, vol. 30, no. 4, 1997, p. 311. ↩︎
190. Loc. cit. ↩︎
191. In Steve Jobs’ talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Jobs notes that with books and reading, he did not have “an intermediary in the way” and that books get “right to the destination without anything in the middle.” See: Jobs, Steve. “Steve Jobs talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen.” YouTube, uploaded by David Krasniy, 17 July 2024, https://youtu.be/yHB_5WmRbho. ↩︎
192. My former colleague, Geoffrey T. Freeman, FAIA, penned the still-frequently-referenced landmark paper, “The Library as Place: Changes in Learning Patterns, Collections, Technology, and Use.” In his paper, Freeman noted that “Upon entering the library, the student becomes part of a larger community—a community that endows one with a greater sense of self and higher purpose. Students inform us that they want their library to ‘feel bigger than they are.’” (p. 6). See: Freeman, Geoffrey T. “The Library as Place,” in Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space, Council on Library and Information Resources, 2005. ↩︎
193. Bone, Jessica K., et. al. “The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey.” iScience, vol. 28, no. 9, 2025, 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288. ↩︎
194. Wolf, Maryanne. Reader Come Home. Harper, 2018. ↩︎
195. Donald Schön.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Mar 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Schön. ↩︎
196. Schön, Donald A. The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Basic Books, 1983. ↩︎
197. A quick search for books titled “The Art of Conversation” yields over a dozen titles. ↩︎
198. See: “Trivium.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Dec 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium. ↩︎
199. “Trivium.” Oxford Reference, 12 Dec. 2025, https://www.oxfordreference.com. ↩︎
200. “Sherry Turkle” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Jul 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Turkle. ↩︎
201. Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation. Penguin Press, 2015, pp. 244–247. ↩︎
202. Ibid., p. 246. ↩︎
203. Loc. cit. ↩︎
204. Mages, Michael Arnold. Conversational Design. BIS Publishers, 2024: p. 2. ↩︎
205. Ibid., p. 3. ↩︎
206. See: “Karl Popper.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Mar 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper. ↩︎
207. Popper, Karl L. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford, 1972. ↩︎
208. Ibid., p. 207. ↩︎
209. Loc. cit. ↩︎
210. Ibid., p. 210. ↩︎
211. Müller-Brockmann popularized the grid in this seminal book, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, first published in 1981. Müller-Brockmann’s book remains one of the most popular and influential design books in history. It is still used by designers today to achieve structure, modularity, responsiveness, and visual harmony. See: Müller-Brockmann, Josef. Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers. Arthur Niggli, 1981. ↩︎
212. While the phrase “form follows function” became a mid-20th-century battle cry of the Bauhaus and the International Style, a variant of the phrase was used as early as 1896 by the American architect Louis H. Sullivan. In an article titled “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Sullivan used the phrase “form ever follows function” to describe the “modern office building.” See: Sullivan, Louis H., “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (March 1896), pp. 403-409. ↩︎
213. See: “Modernism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Mar 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism. ↩︎
214. Levitt, Theodore. “Creativity Is Not Enough.” Harvard Business Review, vol. 41, no. 3, 1963, pp. 72–83. ↩︎
215. Popper, p. 226. ↩︎
216. For many years, I have used this as the basis for a short essay prompt that asks students to pick one thing they find useful, one thing they find beautiful, and one thing they believe is both useful and beautiful. If comfortable doing so, students are then asked to share what they picked in a group conversation. ↩︎
217. See: Vlahos, Dan and Steven Cotroneo. “Towards a Dynamic Discipline of Design” in Edited Conference Proceedings of the 2025 Motion Design Education Summit, June 19-21, 2025: edited by Jessica Barness et al., MODE Society, 2025, pp. 169-186. ↩︎
218. The Miles Davis Quintet, “If I Were A Bell,” released March 1958, track 1 on Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, Prestige Records, vinyl LP. ↩︎
219. Loc. cit. ↩︎
220. See “Discovery” in An Incomplete List of D-Words for Designerly Domains. ↩︎
221. In the entry for “newness,” the Cambridge Dictionary provides three definitions that vary based on intent: the first definition places emphasis on “recent creation” or time, the second suggests “difference” versus similarity, and the third emphasizes “unfamiliarity.” See: Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “Newness,” accessed November 17, 2024, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/newness. ↩︎
222. Chattopadhyay, Debabrata and B.N. Srivastava, “The concept of newness,” Int. J. Management Concepts and Philosophy 2, no. 3 (2007). ↩︎
223. Ibid., 244. ↩︎
224. Loc. cit. ↩︎
225. Osborn, Alex F. Applied Imagination. Scribners, [1953] 1997). ↩︎
226. Ibid., ix. ↩︎
227. Ibid., 397. ↩︎
228. Loc. cit. ↩︎
229. “C. P. Snow.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow. ↩︎
230. “Rede Lecture.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 April 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rede_Lecture. ↩︎
231. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and A Second Look. Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 61. ↩︎
232. Ibid., 62. ↩︎
233. Ibid., 64. ↩︎
234. Ibid., 70. ↩︎
235. Gilman, Nils. “How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI,” Noema, April 9, 2026. https://www.noemamag.com/why-a-liberal-arts-education-will-soon-be-more-valuable-than-ever/. ↩︎
236. Ibid. ↩︎
237. Ibid. ↩︎
238. See: “Janus.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus. ↩︎
239. Porter, Burton. The Janus Face of Ideas. Academica Press, 2019: ix. ↩︎
240. Ibid. ↩︎
241. Just as this list was being drafted, Robin Landa released Branding as a Cultural Force: Purpose, Responsibility, & Resonance, which provides “a roadmap for identifying and refining branding strategies and creative solutions that create positive cultural impact.” (p. 3) See: Landa, Robin. Branding as a Cultural Force. Columbia Business School, 2026. ↩︎
242. This list-maker also wishes to note Thomas Frank’s 1997 book The Conquest of Cool. Frank’s book offered a sharp critique of 1960s culture (or counter-culture) oriented marketing. Ultimately, the book asserts that the “cool” culture of the 1960s became the ultimate tool of consumerism, turning rebellion into a way to sell more products. See: Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. University of Chicago Press, 1997. ↩︎
243. Paney, Panos A. and R. Michael Hendrix, Two Beats Ahead. PublicAffairs, 2021, p. 4. ↩︎
244. Ibid. ↩︎
245. Ibid. ↩︎
246. Giudice, Maria, and Christopher Ireland. Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, New Riders, 2014, p. 16. ↩︎
247. Ibid. ↩︎
248. Simon, H. A. The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.). MIT Press, 1996. p. 111. ↩︎
249. Mau, Bruce, and The Institute with Boundaries. Massive Change. Phaidon, 2004. p. 16. ↩︎
250. Brown, Tim. Change by Design (2nd ed.). Harper Business, 2019 [2009], p. 77. ↩︎
251. Striegler, Sara Gry, and Julie Hjort, Navigating Societal Change Through Design. Policy Press, 2025, p. 60. ↩︎
252. Bowen, José Antonio. Teaching Change. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. p. 46. ↩︎
253. See: “Heraclitus.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus. ↩︎
254. See: “Parmenides.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides. ↩︎

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