Designed to Feel (with Ivy Ross): The Science of How Creative Experiences Shape Us

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I entered the building below ground through a long, narrow corridor lined with glossy white panels.
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Even the seams, the tiny joins between the panels, had been carefully considered.
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They grew progressively closer as I walked, creating a subtle sense of compression.
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I could feel my heart rate quickening.
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And then I stepped into a glass lift.
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As it rose out of the ground, sunlight flooded in, the building dissolving into glass and reflections, revealing an extraordinary panorama.
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Sky, fields, a lake.
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And below us a great arc of brightly colored racing cars.
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That same immaculate precision extended into the working spaces.
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A geometric grid of workstations, uninterrupted sightlines stretching from one end of the floor to the other.
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A head appeared above a partition, cast a furtive glance across the floor, then disappeared.
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Someone darted between desks and slipped into a chair.
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Another perched awkwardly on the edge of a colleague's desk.
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Nobody met my eye.
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I became conscious of our footsteps, of matching the stride of the person beside me, of my shoulders drawing back.
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Without quite realizing it, I was beginning to move with the same precision as everything around me.
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In this vast, meticulously engineered environment, I think I may even have stood to attention.
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We've been optimizing, I think, for productivity and efficiency since the Industrial Revolution, almost behaving like machines, and now the machines are here.
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And so I think this is a big test of okay, humans, do you remember what it is to be human?
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This is Spatial Attraction.
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I'm Kirsty Groves.
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In this episode, we explore how the environments around us shape how we think, feel, and respond.
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What that means for the way we learn, create, connect, and work, and why that matters now more than ever before.
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Ivy Ross has spent decades designing, building, and leading inside some of the most powerful companies in the world.
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Most recently as Chief Design Officer for Consumer Devices at Google.
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What makes her unusual is the breadth of what she brings to that work, a deeply creative way of seeing, an instinct to think about the whole experience rather than simply the product being designed.
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And a belief that technology and humanity, logic and feeling don't have to compete.
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So my dad was a industrial designer in the 50s.
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He worked for Raymond Lowy, the famous industrial designer.
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He designed the Studebaker cars, he designed the Marlborough cigarette package.
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He was the quintessential industrial designer that considered the whole, from branding to the designing of the actual product.
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And he would say, Ivy, look up at that lamp, the way it is uh constructed, the way it sits in the wall.
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What else can be constructed that way?
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What can you apply that to?
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So I realized he taught me how to look at everything and then extrapolate information and apply it to other things.
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So the world became this incredibly um, I became incredibly curious.
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And I love that he infused that in me, this idea of curiosity.
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And so I started um as a craftsperson making things, jewelry design and making things with my hands.
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And my work got in 10 museums in my 20s because I was very curious.
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I was always asking myself different questions and experimenting.
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And through that, I invented these new techniques and ended up in museums.
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And I realized early on that life is a journey, it's not an end result.
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The ego trip lasted two weeks and then life was back to normal.
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And I thought, wow, it's not about this if only, if only I was a president, if only my work was in the museum.
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It's about a journey.
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And that was probably the greatest gift I got from having my work in museums so early, because I went on this journey and I was an art major and psychology minor because I was also very interested in humans.
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And so I decided I never wanted to do the same thing twice.
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I mean, that was a literal decision.
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I really paid attention to what got my attention.
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So I started out in design because my dad also taught me an artist puts a piece of their soul on a pedestal, stands back, and hopes that someone resonates with it.
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A commercial designer designs within boundaries, but when they solve those challenges within boundaries, millions of people can experience or reap the benefits.
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So I got very excited by that aspect and started designing product.
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I designed, you know, Swatch Watch, Coach Handbags, Mattel toys, Calvin Klein.
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I realized the thread that I'm a builder at heart.
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I have a builder mindset in that it doesn't matter building something on small scale, building a product, a team, a brand, or even houses.
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I love building houses because I think it's a way, it's a thought process.
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And so I really took that builder mentality and realized that my whole life has been playing with that in different arenas.
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I was even a CMO because when I was head of design for Old Navy, I couldn't help myself, but my team and I would present the context in which what we designed, the context we felt it should be seen and experienced in.
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I I think when you baton pass and hand off to other departments, something gets lost in the translation from the idea to the consumer.
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So the president of Gap had seen it and go, Oh my God, you should be a chief marketing officer.
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I said, Me?
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I said, you can't help yourself, but you're always seeing it.
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Like, how should this be delivered to the consumer?
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And so I realized I I love taking myself with me and applying myself and seeing, can I take what I learned?
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And life is a learning journey.
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I see it that way.
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So everything, each of these experiences or roles I've had, I learn something new and then I watch myself apply it.
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I'm very curious.
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I look at life as a learning journey, and the common thread is a builder.
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What had started with looking closely at objects had become a much wider way of seeing.
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Ivy was interested in the whole experience, what the things we make ultimately do to us and to the world around us.
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I think tech for tech's sake is no longer good enough.
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I'm into technology that amplifies our humanity, doesn't take us out of it.
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That appetite for learning has followed Ivy throughout her career.
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Even when people began asking her to write about what she knew, she was much more interested in what she didn't.
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The funny thing is, when I would win design awards early in my career when I was designing myself, I had publishers coming out of the woodworks going, Oh, you should write a book on creativity or innovation.
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And I said, No, that's what I do every day, and I don't need it for my ego.
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I said, I'll know when there's a book worth writing, and it must be a learning journey for me, meaning it can't be just what I know so well, i.e., innovation, creativity.
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That's what I do every day.
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It wouldn't excite me to write a book about that.
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And I said, if there is a book in me, I will know it.
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And then neuroscientist Susan McSammond popped up on Ivy's LinkedIn feed.
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I get like 300 LinkedIns a day, and I go, no, no, no, swipe left.
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And then this one was the Arts and Mind Lab.
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And I'm like, what?
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My two favorite thing?
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The arts and your mind?
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And I was like, yes.
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And then we we um arranged a 30-minute call, and she started out by saying, you know, my lab has now proven what I think you've known all along, because I've been following your career for 25 years, and I said, that's called stalking.
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She said, you know, um art and aesthetics change our brains and our bodies.
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I said, Yeah, of course, I know that.
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That's why I do what I do.
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And I was like, wait a minute, but the masses don't know that.
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Are you kidding me?
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Now we have the science to prove it.
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So it started out where she flew in from Baltimore, and we had in my living room an afternoon of conversation between her neuroscientists, and then we curated like Noah's Ark, two dancers, two painters, two designers, two animators, and watched this conversation about the arts and science and what we know.
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At the end of the day, we're cleaning up.
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She said, I've always wanted to write a book about this.
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Do you want to do it with me?
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I said, This is the book I've been waiting for.
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Because I knew I would have something to contribute, but also I'd be learning even more than I ever understood about the brains.
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The book is Your Brain on Art.
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So yeah, we interviewed a hundred people, artists, scientists, David Byrne, you know, and the key was to find a way to make the science understandable and to weave the science with emotional stories.
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And it has been so rewarding.
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I mean, the personal notes that we get, like you've given me permission to make art again, you validated what I do for a living.
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Um, but a lot of organizations are using the book to raise money, you know, to prove that the arts matter.
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Millions of people had started baking.
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Home ovens running all day, sourdough starters named and tended like pets.
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And it wasn't only baking.
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People joined online choirs, drew together on Zoom, streamed concerts from spare rooms, picked up instruments, knitted, painted, and danced in kitchens.
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When the ordinary scaffolding of life came down, a great many people reached almost without instruction.
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For rhythm, repetition, craft, beauty, and shared participation.
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There's a kind of value in those experiences that's difficult to put a number on.
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And yet we certainly know how to value creativity when it becomes economically visible.
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In the UK, the creative industries contributed £145.8 billion in 2024, around 5.5% of the economy, and grew more than four times faster than the economy as a whole.
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Film, television, music, advertising, architecture, design, fashion, software, and games, we sell them around the world.
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Cities build identities around them.
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Governments talk about creative industries as sources of jobs, exports, innovation and growth.
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But if you follow that value back towards the places where people first encounter and develop their creative lives, the picture becomes more complicated.
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In England, universities used to get extra government funding for creative arts subjects because they're expensive to teach.
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In 2021, that funding was halved.
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And in 2026, it was cut altogether.
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At school level, entries in some creative GCSE subjects have been falling for years.
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Since 2010, entries in design and technology have fallen by more than 70%.
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Drama by around 40%, and music by around a quarter.
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In the United States, more than two million public school students have no access to any arts education at all, with that lack of access disproportionately concentrated in poorer communities.
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And in Australia, reforms explicitly designed to steer students toward job-ready study made humanities degrees substantially more expensive.
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Underneath all of this sits an assumption most of us absorbed long before we could question it.
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That the smart money goes into business, law, medicine, science, the paths where the value is measurable, and the arts, well, they're what's left for everyone else.
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The clever ones solve problems, the rest can paint.
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And yet, look at what employers say they need now.
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The World Economic Forum asked employers which skills they expect to become more important between now and 2030.
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Creative thinking is near the top of that list.
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So are curiosity and lifelong learning.
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And researchers at the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Center recently looked at more than 168 million UK job adverts spanning the years before and after ChatGPT arrived.
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They found something interesting.
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As employers asked for more AI skills, they were increasingly asking for creativity alongside them.
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The relationship was strongest in highly skilled jobs and in creative clusters.
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Their evidence points towards AI and creativity becoming complementary capabilities in the labor market.
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So here we are at a technological shift that is forcing us to think again about what humans bring to work.
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And some of the things rising in value are the very things we have spent decades treating as secondary.
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We have a deeply ingrained idea of what serious work looks like.
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Rational, ordered, productive, efficient.
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Creativity has always sat a little less comfortably alongside it.
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Harder to measure, harder to predict, easier to dismiss as something extra.
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And over time, that has shaped more than the work itself.
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It has shaped which parts of ourselves we have learned to value while we're doing it.
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We prize our ability to reason, analyze, solve problems, make decisions.
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We build environments and systems around those abilities.
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But perhaps we become so focused on those abilities that we've overlooked something fundamental about how we think.
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We are sensory beings.
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We think we're thinking beings that have learned how to feel, and we're actually feeling beings that have learned how to think.
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And when you think about that, no pun intended, your whole world changes because we do walk around thinking that we're thinking beings that once in a while feel, or we give ourselves permission to feel.
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But when you really realize that we're designed as sensory beings, everything is being taken in through our senses.
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The world around us is constantly engaging our senses.
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There's a field of science exploring how we experience and respond to the aesthetic qualities of the world around us.
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It's called neuroaesthetics.
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Much of its early work focused on art and beauty, what happens in the brain when we look at a painting, listen to music, or find something beautiful.
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But the field has widened.
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Researchers are now looking at aesthetic experience much more broadly, including the spaces and environments we move through every day.
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Susan Magsammon has been one of the people pushing that inquiry further through a related field called neuroarts, looking at how arts and aesthetic experiences can measurably change the brain, body, and behavior, and what we might do with that knowledge.
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In 2019, Susan and Ivy had the opportunity to explore some of those ideas in an installation for Milan Design Week.
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It was called a Space for Being.
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It was the first time we demonstrated to the public what neuroaesthetics, which is really how art and aesthetics help our brain and body for well-being.
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And then we did this in cooperation with Google.
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We worked with an architect.
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Together, Susan and I and Suchi Reddy, the architect developed three different rooms that were very different in the scent, the color, the music that was being played, the textures, the shapes, the lighting, just very different experiences.
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It was called a space for being to just be in the room.
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And we had people spend five minutes in each room, no talking, no devices.
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We gave them a band that had sensors that were reading skin temperature, heart rate, et cetera.
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And at the end of the experience, they would come out and take off the band, and the band tender would say to them, which room did you like the best?
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And people would say, Oh, I like the second room because I love the color blue and there was a lot of blue.
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And then we would show them the data, and it would show that their bodies liked the first room better.
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And they were like, wait a minute, how could that be?
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And then we would explain that, well, your body is feeling all the time.
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We don't realize it.
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It's just what we're thinking.
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But in 58%, it was a disconnect between what people thought and what their bodies felt the most relaxed or most comfortable and liked it the best.
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There was one woman who grew up in, I think, Latin America without a lot of money.
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And as she's walking through the rooms, she's thinking, I don't deserve any of these.
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They're so beautiful.
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She just mentally couldn't relate to it.
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But when we looked at her data, there was one room where her body was totally off the charts, excited.
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And it was the room that was the most playful.
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It was bright colors.
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And she just started crying when we told her that.
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And she realized that's because, as a child without a lot of money, her happiest moments was when she was playing.
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And so her body was remembering that space had triggered in her body those happy memories of when she was a child just playing.
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And so it was quite moving.
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And so that was a huge awakening for most people that we're feeling all the time.
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And we have to pay attention to that.
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And that's why things like color, lighting, shape, we don't realize how much they matter to us.
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Even if we're not consciously aware, it does make sense.
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What is actually happening here?
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How does something outside us, a colour, a sound, the texture of a surface, the shape of a room, become something we experience inside us?
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And why can exactly the same experience affect two people so differently?
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In 2020, researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London were investigating something called entrainment.
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The way separate systems can fall into sync with one another.
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They wanted to explore what happens when people coordinate their actions.
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They chose singing.
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They recruited 20 people, none of them expert singers, and put them into pairs, sitting about a meter apart.
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Electrodes attached to their chests recorded their heart activity, while respiration belts measured their breathing.
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Then they gave each pair a series of tasks.
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First, the singers had to synchronize their breathing without agreeing beforehand how they would do it.
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Then, they made short sounds together.
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Next, they held long notes.
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This time they could choose their own pitch and volume, but they had to begin and end each note together.
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If one person ran out of breath, the other had to stop too.
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Finally, they were asked to make short sounds while deliberately avoiding singing at the same time.
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When the researchers examined the data, they found the strongest coordination happened during those long, sustained notes.
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The singers' breathing had become more synchronized, and something else was happening.
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Some of this was down to their shared breathing, but there were coordinating patterns in their HRV, their heart rate variability, the tiny changes in timing between one heartbeat and the next.
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They couldn't fully explain why.
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And that's what's interesting.
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It suggests that when we do something together, our bodies may be responding to one another in ways that go beyond what we're consciously coordinating.
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But what we see, hear, touch, and smell doesn't only affect what happens in our bodies.
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There's something else happening as we take in the world around us.
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What we sense carries meaning.
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The face in front of us may begin as light reaching the retina, but we don't experience it as light.
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We recognize someone.
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We know them.
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We remember them.
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We feel something.
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But what difference does that recognition make?
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In 2006, psychologist James Cohen and his colleagues put 16 married women through an fMRI scanner and told them they might receive a mild electric shock.
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Sometimes they faced the threat alone.
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Sometimes they held the hand of a male stranger.
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And sometimes they held their husband's hand as they waited for the possibility of a shock.
00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:28.000
The researchers measured what was happening in their brains.
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When the women held their husband's hand, activities in parts of the brain involved in responding to threat was reduced.
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Holding a stranger's hand helped too, but not as much.
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And the effect wasn't the same for everyone.
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The women who described their marriages as happier and more supportive showed greater reductions in their brain's response to the threat when holding their husband's hand.
00:21:50.880 --> 00:21:56.640
So the relationship they had with the person beside them appeared to influence how their brains responded.
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Each of us brings our own history to what we encounter.
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Memories, associations, relationships, things we've learned, and meanings we've built up over time.
00:22:06.160 --> 00:22:10.720
All of these become part of how we experience what reaches us through our senses.
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Two people can walk into exactly the same room, see the same colours, hear the same sounds, feel the same temperature, and have quite different experiences of it.
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Neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee offers a useful way of understanding this.
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His model of ascetic experience, known as the ascetic triad, brings together three interacting aspects of our experience: what we sense, what we feel about it, and what it means to us.
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All of this contributes to the condition we find ourselves in at any given moment, both physiologically and psychologically.
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We can call that our state.
00:22:45.440 --> 00:22:48.160
Our state is continually shifting.
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We can be alert or tired, settled or agitated, absorbed or distracted, connected or withdrawn.
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But we may not always be conscious of what's shaping it.
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Susan and Ivy draw together a huge body of research from neuroscience and the emerging field of neuroarts, alongside the stories and experiences of around a hundred people: scientists, artists, musicians, dancers, doctors, therapists, educators, designers, and people whose lives have been profoundly affected by the arts.
00:23:25.440 --> 00:23:28.160
But Susan and Ivy faced an interesting question.
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How do you organize all of that knowledge in a way that speaks to everyone?
00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:39.599
Two false attempts, trying it organized slightly different by discipline, you know, by painting, dancing.
00:23:39.599 --> 00:23:45.279
And then we realize, you know, people will pick it up and go, oh, I'm not a painter, I'm not a dancer.
00:23:45.279 --> 00:23:48.799
But then we organized it by end result, right?
00:23:48.799 --> 00:23:53.519
Mental health, physical health, thriving, and everyone wants all of those things.
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Perhaps that's part of what makes the book so relatable.
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Again and again, Susan and Ivy take us into the science through stories that begin with surprisingly familiar experiences.
00:24:04.880 --> 00:24:08.559
You know what it's like when you hear a song you haven't heard for years.
00:24:08.559 --> 00:24:15.039
You might be standing in a supermarket, barely paying attention to the music, and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely.
00:24:15.039 --> 00:24:19.440
A person, a place, perhaps a whole period of your life comes rushing back.
00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:31.839
Connie Tomano discovered just how powerful that connection could be when, as a young graduate student in the late 70s, she arrived with her guitar on a ward for people with end stage dementia.
00:24:31.839 --> 00:24:34.240
Many of the patients were heavily medicated.
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Some were asleep, others were screaming.
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The nurses told Connie that the patients wouldn't know what was going on, but she could play for the staff if she wanted.
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So she played an old Bing Crosby song she thought they might like.
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And almost immediately the screaming stopped.
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People who had been asleep woke up, and around half the ward began singing along, word for word, to a song they hadn't heard in years.
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Music and movement come together in another example, this time with people living with Parkinson's disease.
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Parkinson's disrupts the brain's ability to control movements that would normally happen automatically.
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Walking can become hesitant and effortful, the body rigid and shaky.
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But something changes when people dance.
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Music gives them a rhythm to move to.
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Dance brings pattern and sequence, shifting weight, balancing, stepping, turning, coordinating the body in time and space.
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Some people who struggle to walk across a room can find themselves moving with remarkable fluidity when they dance.
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David Leventhal, one of the founding instructors of Dance for PD, describes how dancing helps people become more conscious of the quality of their movement.
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Through rehearsal, some of those movements become automatic again.
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Research following people who danced regularly found that their balance improved and they experienced less shaking and stiffness.
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Another interesting study in the book comes from art therapist and researcher Garija Kaimal, who brought together 39 adults, gave them a selection of art materials, and asked them to spend 45 minutes making whatever they liked.
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Before and after, she took saliva samples to measure cortisol, a hormone associated with stress.
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And when she compared the samples, she found that cortisol levels had fallen significantly in around three-quarters of the participants.
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What was particularly interesting is that it didn't seem to matter how much experience they had at making art.
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Everyone has the ability to creatively express, and it's imperative that we do so, but we've been so shut down by you'll never make a living at it.
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You're not talented.
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Because kids come in, I mean, and their little souls are expressing all the time with no judgment.
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And then life happens, and a teacher says that's not the way you draw a house, and your parents say you'll never make a living in it.
00:26:58.319 --> 00:27:02.319
One of the most amazing things that's happened is I'll give you an example.
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A gentleman who's the CEO of a drug company called us to give a talk, and I said, A drug company, why do you want us to talk about how the arts affect our brain?
00:27:10.079 --> 00:27:15.440
He says, Well, I never told my entire team this, and it's a very successful pharmaceutical company.
00:27:15.440 --> 00:27:18.240
He said, I was a painter when I was a kid.
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I secretly keep painting in my garage, not paint the garage, but make paintings.
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I don't even show them to anyone.
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And he said, I attribute my breakthrough in drug development to the fact that I have been a painter all my life.
00:27:32.079 --> 00:27:40.000
And there's something about that creative process that I believe tapped into my mind and showed me possibilities.
00:27:41.759 --> 00:27:49.920
In 2008, researchers at the University of Michigan brought a group of students into the lab and gave them a series of demanding cognitive tasks.
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One involved hearing a string of numbers and repeating them in reverse order.
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It tested their ability to hold information in mind and work with it.
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Then they went for a walk.
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The researchers had mapped out two routes.
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One took the students through the university's arboretum along tree-lined paths away from traffic and crowds.
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The other took them into downtown Ann Arbor along busy streets lined with university buildings and offices.
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When the students returned, they repeated the tasks.
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After the downtown walk, their scores had barely changed.
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But after the arboretum walk, their performance on the numbers test had improved by almost 20%.
00:28:26.880 --> 00:28:33.359
A week later, the students returned and repeated the experiment, this time walking the other route.
00:28:33.359 --> 00:28:38.160
And again, it was the walk through the arboretum that produced the higher scores.
00:28:38.160 --> 00:28:43.759
The researchers also measured mood, and that improved more after the nature walk too.
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Which perhaps doesn't sound terribly surprising.
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You spend the best part of an hour walking through some woods rather than alongside a busy road, and you feel better afterwards.
00:28:52.400 --> 00:28:55.519
And perhaps, feeling better, you perform better too.
00:28:55.519 --> 00:28:58.079
Except the researchers weren't finished.
00:28:58.079 --> 00:28:59.920
They ran another experiment.
00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:03.039
This time, the participants stayed in the lab.
00:29:03.039 --> 00:29:05.839
For about 10 minutes, they looked at photographs.
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Some showed natural landscapes, others showed urban scenes.
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Then the researchers tested them again.
00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:22.400
Alongside the numbers test, they used another task designed to measure something quite specific: how well people could control their attention when faced with competing information.
00:29:22.400 --> 00:29:26.240
An arrow appeared on a screen, surrounded by other arrows.
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Sometimes they all pointed the same way.
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Sometimes the surrounding arrows pointed in the opposite direction.
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The participants had to respond to the central arrow, ignoring the conflicting information around it.
00:29:38.400 --> 00:29:41.839
And once again, nature, it seems, made a difference.
00:29:41.839 --> 00:29:47.359
After looking at photographs of nature, the participants performed better at controlling their attention.
00:29:47.359 --> 00:29:49.839
Their working memory improved too.
00:29:49.839 --> 00:29:56.079
But unlike the walk through the arboretum, looking at the photographs hadn't reliably improved their mood.
00:29:56.079 --> 00:29:57.920
So what was going on?
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Perhaps the benefit wasn't simply about how the students felt.
00:30:01.680 --> 00:30:13.519
Psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, also at the University of Michigan, had spent years investigating another possibility that different experiences place different demands on our attention.
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Some attention has to be directed.
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It's what we use when we're concentrating on something difficult or trying to stay focused while other things are competing with our attention.
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Think about following a complicated conversation in a noisy room.
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You're trying to listen to what someone is telling you, but there are conversations going on around you.
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Someone laughs loudly at the next table, a phone rings.
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You have to keep bringing your attention back to the person speaking.
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And doing that takes effort.
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The longer we have to keep directing our attention, the harder it can become.
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The Kaplan's argued that this capacity can become fatigued.
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But not all attention works like that.
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Sometimes things simply grab our attention, a sudden noise, a flashing notification, an image appearing as we scroll through our phones.
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We don't have to make ourselves notice them.
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They draw us in.
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But being constantly interrupted or pulled towards something new can make its own demands on our attention.
00:31:07.440 --> 00:31:11.200
The Kaplan's were interested in a gentler kind of attraction.
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Watching leaves moving in the wind, water flowing over stones, clouds drifting across the sky.
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Things that hold our interest without constantly demanding a response.
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They called this soft fascination.
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And they proposed that experiences like these could give our capacity for directed attention an opportunity to recover.
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This became known as attention restoration theory.
00:31:34.799 --> 00:31:38.960
And it offers a possible explanation for the results of those two experiments.
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The students hadn't simply enjoyed the walk through the arboretum, afterwards they could concentrate better and hold more information in mind.
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And remarkably, even looking at photographs of nature appeared to make a difference.
00:31:50.640 --> 00:32:01.920
So if the sensory aesthetic experiences we have can shape how we feel and even how well we concentrate and remember, what happens to the way we think when we're actively creating something?
00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:09.759
That same year in another laboratory, researchers were investigating a rather different kind of experience.
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This time, instead of looking at pictures of nature, the participants were going to play jazz inside an MRI scanner.
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Researchers, Charles Lim and Alan Braun, recruited six professional jazz pianists.
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They wanted to understand what happens in the brain when musicians improvise.
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So they used a specially designed keyboard that could rest on the musicians' laps while they lay on their backs.
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Then the musicians played.
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Sometimes they performed music they'd already learned and practiced.
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At other times, they improvised.
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Now, jazz improvisation draws on years of knowledge and physical skill.
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The musicians know how harmony works, the fingers know the instrument, but the next phrase hasn't been decided in advance.
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They're creating as they go.
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And inside the scanner, the researchers could see the difference.
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During improvisation, activity decreased in parts of the brain associated with conscious self-monitoring and control.
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And at the same time, activity increased in a region associated with internally motivated, self-generated behavior.
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The musicians were drawing on everything they'd learned while creating something new in the moment.
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But what interested another pair of researchers was what might happen afterwards.
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Could improvising influence how someone approached a completely different task?
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Psychologists Charles Lewis and Tim Lovat set out to investigate.
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They brought university students into the lab and gave them an everyday object.
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Their task was to come up with as many possible uses for it as they could.
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Then one group spent about 20 minutes doing improvisational exercises.
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They had to respond in the moment, accept what another person offered, and keep building on it.
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A comparison group took part in a similarly social, verbal activity, but without the same requirement to improvise.
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Then everyone returned to the object task.
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And something interesting happened.
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After improvising, the students produced more ideas.
00:34:07.839 --> 00:34:15.599
Their ideas were also more original, and they moved more readily between different kinds of answers rather than staying with variations on the same idea.
00:34:15.599 --> 00:34:21.519
So an experience of improvisation appeared to influence how people approach a completely different problem.
00:34:21.519 --> 00:34:37.679
Ivy was given the opportunity to shape the environment inside it.
00:34:46.559 --> 00:35:03.039
Usually Google Campuses, there's a set of architects and they design them and he said, I'll let you work with the architect because you've created such a specific aesthetic that I feel like you should create the environment under which creativity and he's heard me say that, that environments change the way we think.
00:35:03.039 --> 00:35:08.719
And there were some principles that it was based on, which was this both and.
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So it's a statement of both of these things can exist.
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We don't have to make choices.
00:36:06.960 --> 00:36:11.440
Right at the heart of the design center is a huge skylit atrium.
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The furniture can be moved and completely rearranged, so when the team is preparing for Milan Design Week, for example, they can lay out an entire exhibition here at full scale.
00:36:21.199 --> 00:36:25.760
Walk through and you'll see the CMF, the colour, materials, and finish lab.
00:36:25.760 --> 00:36:30.159
Shelves line the walls with objects the designers have brought back from their travels.
00:36:30.159 --> 00:36:37.119
Stuff that's caught their eye, trinkets, curiosities, interesting shapes, textures, the way something fits together.
00:36:37.119 --> 00:36:43.920
One designer even brought back a translucent green bar of soap from a hotel room because they found it so interesting.
00:36:43.920 --> 00:36:47.119
Ivy calls this a kind of library of stimuli.
00:36:47.760 --> 00:36:51.920
I worked with architects but designed it before I wrote the book.
00:36:51.920 --> 00:36:57.199
But intuitively, I didn't know until I met Susan this word neuroaesthetics.
00:36:57.199 --> 00:37:07.679
But because of the materials and colors and environment I grew up with and the dad I grew up with, and because he told me to notice everything, and I do pay attention to what gets my attention.
00:37:07.679 --> 00:37:14.239
I think I was living in that understanding, even before learning through Susan the science of it.
00:37:14.239 --> 00:37:21.840
In doing our consumer electronics, we would just start naturally talking about not just how it looks, but how does it feel?
00:37:21.840 --> 00:37:24.159
How does it feel to pick up the phone?
00:37:24.159 --> 00:37:25.920
How does that texture feel?
00:37:25.920 --> 00:37:30.400
What frequency or vibration is that color transmitting?
00:37:30.400 --> 00:37:34.480
What does a black phone transmit versus a light blue phone?
00:37:34.480 --> 00:37:41.119
And so we really kind of changed some of the studio dynamics to not just design thinking, but design feeling.
00:37:41.119 --> 00:37:48.239
So the book just validated what we all intuitively, and it wasn't just me, I have designers from all over the world.
00:37:48.239 --> 00:37:52.960
I think I might open up the dialogue, but they don't have to agree.
00:37:52.960 --> 00:38:00.320
And then you see them starting to contribute, and we realize, no, this is what we're craving as humans, is and we're wired biologically.
00:38:00.320 --> 00:38:03.840
Curves, I think from ancient times, right?
00:38:03.840 --> 00:38:09.119
Curves signaled safety, caves versus something sharp was animals' horns.
00:38:09.119 --> 00:38:13.679
And so these things we're subconsciously attracted to.
00:38:13.679 --> 00:38:18.159
So the book just made it almost a little more formalized.
00:38:18.159 --> 00:38:23.920
But I would say the design center here was definitely intuitive.
00:38:23.920 --> 00:38:27.519
The materials are warm, wood.
00:38:27.519 --> 00:38:37.119
We also, I think, being creatives, understood that we needed different places to do different kinds of thinking and work.
00:38:37.119 --> 00:38:43.760
So there were many different spaces you could go to that felt differently depending on how you needed to feel.
00:38:44.079 --> 00:38:47.119
I recognize this from working with creative teams.
00:38:47.119 --> 00:38:52.880
When changing how you think is part of the job, you become pretty conscious of the conditions that help you do it.
00:38:52.880 --> 00:38:56.719
Sometimes you need to spread things out, make things, move things around.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:39:00.880
Sometimes you need stimulus, objects, images, materials, other people.
00:39:00.880 --> 00:39:05.280
And sometimes you need to get away from all of it so you can think without interruption.
00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:10.320
From the outside, those differences can look like preferences, even privileges.
00:39:10.320 --> 00:39:14.000
A bigger table, more space, somewhere to retreat.
00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:16.719
But they're often much more practical than that.
00:39:16.719 --> 00:39:20.320
Different kinds of work ask different things of us.
00:39:20.320 --> 00:39:24.239
And increasingly, that's not just true of people we call creatives.
00:39:24.239 --> 00:39:31.519
More of us are being asked to solve problems, make connections, come up with possibilities, move between different kinds of thinking.
00:39:31.519 --> 00:39:36.559
So perhaps the question isn't which kind of environment or which kind of thinking is the right one.
00:39:36.559 --> 00:39:39.360
It's whether we have access to enough of them.
00:39:40.159 --> 00:39:41.760
I don't think it's either or.
00:39:41.760 --> 00:39:47.360
I mean, we just have to the pendulum was one way, it's swinging, you know, another way.
00:39:47.360 --> 00:39:52.719
It needs to end up, we both need all the tools in the toolbox.
00:39:52.719 --> 00:39:59.039
You know, if you're born a woman, I think we we need the tools of the masculine.
00:39:59.039 --> 00:40:02.480
If we're born a man, we need the tools of the feminine.
00:40:02.480 --> 00:40:07.039
Just to solve the problems of the future, we have to have all the tools.
00:40:07.039 --> 00:40:10.719
The tension of opposites, it's a it's a good thing sometimes.
00:40:10.719 --> 00:40:24.320
So I think it's well, especially as AI and more uh, you know, we've been optimizing, I think, for productivity and efficiency since the Industrial Revolution, almost behaving like machines, and now the machines are here.
00:40:24.320 --> 00:40:29.199
And so I think this is a big test of, okay, humans, do you remember what it is to be human?
00:40:29.199 --> 00:40:32.000
And how can you amplify that part of yourself?
00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:43.440
And so, in some ways, I think if we can hand off some of the rational things to our machines, then you know, we can be much more irrational and creative and expressive.
00:40:43.440 --> 00:40:45.440
But we have to use our imaginations.
00:40:45.440 --> 00:40:49.280
I think we're being pushed to really, you know, use the imagination.
00:40:49.840 --> 00:41:00.880
Perhaps we've become very practiced at a particular way of working, being diligent, working hard, getting things done, finding the answer, and preferably finding it quickly.
00:41:00.880 --> 00:41:08.880
There's real satisfaction in that, in applying yourself, making progress, getting better at something because you've put the effort in.
00:41:08.880 --> 00:41:11.840
But not all useful work looks like that.
00:41:11.840 --> 00:41:15.760
Sometimes you need to explore without knowing where you're going.
00:41:15.760 --> 00:41:23.119
Try things, make a mess, follow your curiosity, sit with something that isn't working, start again.
00:41:23.119 --> 00:41:29.920
Sometimes it might not look much like work at all, and sometimes, heaven forbid, it might actually be fun.
00:41:29.920 --> 00:41:33.199
I think that can make us surprisingly uncomfortable.
00:41:33.199 --> 00:41:36.880
We've got very good at the work that looks and feels serious.
00:41:36.880 --> 00:41:43.119
The other stuff asks us to spend time in the unknown without being able to say exactly where it will lead.
00:41:43.519 --> 00:41:50.719
I think people are people are searching for um answers of what's life really about?
00:41:50.719 --> 00:41:52.159
What am I supposed to be doing?
00:41:52.159 --> 00:42:11.119
You know, we because I think we've we have been optimizing for productivity and efficiency, and we've put the arts aside, you know, this idea of creative expression, and everyone has the ability to creatively express, and it's imperative that we do so, but we've been so shut down by you'll never make a living at it.
00:42:11.119 --> 00:42:13.280
You know, you're not talented.
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Aesthetic experiences can affect our attention, what we remember, the connections we make, the possibilities we see.
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And making, experimenting, improvising can exercise some of those capacities too.
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But there's a problem.
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It can be very difficult to link those effects directly to what contributed to them.
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You can't always trace the idea you have on a Thursday back to the music you listened to on Monday, or the connection you suddenly make to something you noticed weeks ago.
00:42:41.280 --> 00:42:47.519
And when we're used to valuing things that are easy to measure, that makes these experiences very easy to undervalue.
00:42:47.519 --> 00:42:50.639
And yet, these are becoming more important, not less.
00:42:50.639 --> 00:43:02.960
As technology takes on more of the work that can be specified, repeated, and handed over, our ability to imagine, interpret, make connections, create, and work with what isn't already known matters more.
00:43:03.280 --> 00:43:04.639
I know it's interesting to see that.
00:43:04.639 --> 00:43:08.480
It's like, wow, so now we now we're putting it at the center, right?
00:43:08.480 --> 00:43:11.039
What have we been doing all of this for?
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You know, I think, I mean, tech for tech's sake is no longer good enough.
00:43:15.440 --> 00:43:21.519
It's what a, you know, I'm into technology that amplifies our humanity, doesn't take us out of it.
00:43:21.519 --> 00:43:28.880
And I think there are amazing things that will happen with technology in terms of you know education, health.
00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:32.079
I mean, incredible things with some of the new AI.
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I think in some ways the universe is testing us right now.
00:43:34.800 --> 00:43:46.639
Are you going to get sucked into this or are you going to use it as a time to go inside yourself and be creative, be expressive, think of all the possible futures?
00:43:51.360 --> 00:43:57.039
Some of the things that shape how we think, feel, and work are barely recognized as part of work at all.
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We have inherited a fairly narrow idea of what.
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Supports performance at work, one that has tended to privilege what we can see, count, and measure.
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Output, productivity, efficiency.
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But producing good work has always depended on much more than that.
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Our ability to pay attention, to learn, to make sense of things, to imagine, create, judge, relate, adapt, experiment, to stay with something when the answer isn't obvious.
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And right now, those capacities are becoming more important, not less.
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Technology is removing effort and friction from more of what we do, and much of what that makes possible is extraordinary.
00:44:36.400 --> 00:44:43.760
But there are also more things we no longer have to work out, make, remember, navigate, or discover for ourselves.
00:44:43.760 --> 00:44:47.599
And doing those things was never only about getting to the answer.
00:44:47.599 --> 00:44:52.159
When we work something out for ourselves, we're also practicing working things out.
00:44:52.159 --> 00:44:57.119
When we make something, we're using imagination, judgment, attention, our senses.
00:44:57.119 --> 00:45:00.239
When we find our way, we notice where we are.
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When we're with other people, we have to read them, respond to them, adjust.
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We develop these capacities by using them.
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And that makes the experiences we have while we work rather more consequential.
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The environments we spend time in are continually doing something to us.
00:45:17.920 --> 00:45:24.719
The light, the sound, the temperature, colour, texture, movement, what we can see, what we can hear.
00:45:24.719 --> 00:45:33.119
These conditions can influence how we feel and function in the moment, and how readily we can draw on the capacities we bring to our work.
00:45:33.119 --> 00:45:39.360
But we're not only affected by what surrounds us, what we take part in matters too.
00:45:39.360 --> 00:45:44.880
Shared aesthetic and creative experiences give us different ways of being together.
00:45:44.880 --> 00:45:53.280
We might be moving, making, exploring, noticing, creating something, or simply experiencing something alongside other people.
00:45:53.280 --> 00:46:05.440
And in doing that, we interact differently, we respond to one another, encounter things we hadn't entirely planned, and sometimes understand one another in ways that conversation alone doesn't quite reach.
00:46:05.440 --> 00:46:10.159
Shared experience can change the quality of what happens between us.
00:46:10.159 --> 00:46:12.559
And then there's what we practice.
00:46:12.559 --> 00:46:22.480
If we want to be imaginative, curious, adaptable, able to experiment or stay with a problem when the answer isn't obvious, we need to practice those capacities.
00:46:22.480 --> 00:46:28.960
Creative practice gives us those opportunities, but it also gives us more ways to work with what's in front of us.
00:46:28.960 --> 00:46:36.079
To make something tangible, to see it differently, to try something out, explore rather than immediately resolve.
00:46:36.079 --> 00:46:42.400
And over time, those ways of thinking and making become part of the repertoire we can draw upon.
00:46:42.400 --> 00:46:50.400
I've come to think about this through three things: place, participation, and practice.
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What surrounds us, what we experience with other people, and what we practice, develop, and learn to do.
00:46:56.239 --> 00:47:00.559
Because human performance isn't simply a question of how much we can produce.
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We've heard how attention can be depleted and restored, how creative experiences can exercise capacities we need for thinking, learning, imagining, and relating.
00:47:10.400 --> 00:47:13.840
So perhaps we need a broader idea of performance.
00:47:13.840 --> 00:47:21.039
One that includes our capacity to produce, certainly, but also our capacity to create and our capacity to recover.
00:47:21.039 --> 00:47:27.519
If that's true, then some of the things we've treated as peripheral to work might not be peripheral at all.
00:47:27.519 --> 00:47:35.840
The sensory richness of the places we work in, opportunities to make, move, listen, explore, and experience things together.
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Creative practices that give us different ways to think, learn, and work things out.
00:47:40.960 --> 00:47:48.480
They may be part of what enables us to do our best work and to remain fully human while we do it.
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If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show so the next one lands in your feed.
00:48:11.360 --> 00:48:15.920
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Links to guest info and research are in the show notes.
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00:48:23.760 --> 00:48:26.719
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See you next time.