Creativity Design with the Creativity Canvas (2.0)

Or: A designer’s approach to propel the understanding, exploration and celebration of creativity.

15 min readApr 8, 2021

Intro — my starting point

What do you understand by CREATIVITY? How would you phrase and describe your version of creativity to others? How can you share your mental model on creativity in an understandable way?

In my experience, pondering, capturing and discussing what you mean by creativity are no easy tasks. One often ends up with some very narrow definition or misleading myths and stereotypes. Opting out of this exercise entirely happens regularly, too, as it might be just easier not to think or talk in-depth about creativity. This is surprising given how much we value creativity in our society on many levels, including everyday and professional life, education, the corporate world, and society.

One way to support reflection and discussion on creativity is to sketch or visualise your creativity understanding. As a designer, I know how valuable and powerful sketches as one form of externalization can be. Visualizing generally can help you with both: thinking something through as well as sharing and discussing it with someone. But, here comes the next challenge:

How can you visually represent your ideas on something as lofty as creativity?

These and similar questions formed my starting point to design early versions of the Creativity Canvas (here, here and here). My reflections on the challenges above led me to think of creativity as something to design for and call this kind of actions creativity design.

This blog post explores the notion of creativity design and (re-)introduces a tool I designed that supports your design practice: the (updated) Creativity Canvas. If you stop this blog post here, this is the gist of what follows and my personal insight that I’d like to share with you:

“Creativity can be designed for.”

On creativity design

You might wonder why I consider a design mindset a particularly fruitful lens through which to explore creativity.

The short answer

To capture creativity is — to use an expression from one of the Harry Potter movies — like catching smoke with your bare hands. Design thrives in these kinds of settings.

TL;DR (aka the long answer)

Usually, when we talk of design, it is associated with a designer in a professional context. Most of us think of architects, graphic designers or product designers when they think of design.

For creativity design, by design, I refer to the general practice that involves

to thoroughly understand a situation, and
to take insightful actions in order
to move towards a meaningful solution or improvement.

Designing for creativity involves those general design elements to actively shape your creative life rather than just leaving it to pure chance. I call this perspective “creativity design”.

Pursuing this practice and point of view increases your “design literacy”, that is, you learn to think and act in a design-minded fashion.

Everyone can reach design literacy to some extent.

Designing for creativity involves those general design elements with the goal to actively shape your creative life rather than just leaving it to pure chance. But as mentioned at the beginning of this post, creativity is quite hard to get a hold of.

Despite a massive surge in academic creativity research since the 1950s and an ever-increasing number of popular science books in the last decades, everyday understanding and practicability of creativity appear too narrow, too vague and/or too myth-driven. But why (still)? In my opinion, the reason can be summed up like this:

“Creativity is a giant, ever-evolving, elusive beast”.

From my readings, I concluded the following three characteristics (despite many others) that make creativity so hard to grasp:

Creativity is highly complex
Creativity is ever-changing
Creativity is hard to define

Just looking at the plethora of academic disciplines that touch creativity, it’s fair to say that the topic is a complex one. Psychology, cognitive science, sociology, neuroscience, anthropology, cultural studies… are just an excerpt of domains that feed into creativity research and, in turn, are influenced by it.

The most recent Encyclopedia of Creativity (M. Runco; S. Pritzker 2020) has not less than 232 topics ranging from “Artificial Intelligence” over “Play” to “Zeitgeist” that are all explored in 6–10 pages long scientific contributions by various academics.

Researching creativity, I believe, resambles exploring the complex ecosystem of a coral reef where everything is connected and in a delicate balance.

Besides this already complex matter, creativity is often framed as something rigid, given and unchanging. Indeed, the understanding of creativity varies across domains, cultures and times — it changes and can look different in different times and cultures.

For instance, the emphasis on the individual and novelty is telling, especially for today’s Western society. ”Far Eastern Cultures”, for instance, value other aspects such as tradition and authenticity rather than just pure novelty and usefulness. Also, few people consider that the word creativity as we use it today emerged not sooner than 1870. Even earlier periods held other virtues high or, like ancient Greeks, saw creativity in Muses' form as something divine-like. Creativity is a cultural phenomenon; the concept evolves, and what we value as a society changes. The focus in Western society (in which I happened to be brought up and live in) seems to lay on novelty, usefulness and value generation created mostly in individual fashion.

Lastly, if you deal with something complex and ever-changing, defining it becomes a real challenge almost per definition (pun intended). Despite the standard definition for creativity — work that is both original and useful — the academic debate on the concept’s definition is ongoing. Researchers frequently discuss other criteria (e.g. that of surprise or context), additional perspectives offered (e.g. authenticity) and also concerns with the standard view are raised (e.g. who defines what is useful). You also read occasionally to skip the definition altogether.

The whole discussion on the definition of creativity makes me wonder if there is any and if it really matters if there is. There seems to be no mathematical formula, nor a one fits all definition. What might be more fruitful is to help people to find their own interpretation — e.g. through design.

Facing such a complex, ever-evolving, and un-definable beast, design as a practice might be more promising to creativity development than relying on or passing down limiting, watered down and misleading narratives. The design mindset builds on various helpful views, which I believe serve the purpose of understanding creativity. Here are some universal design principles that most designers follow:

Embrace ambiguity
Encourage playfulness and curiosity
Re-frame your problem space to uncover various aspects
Acknowledge that there are many ways to reach a certain aspired state
Invest in a thorough exploration of your challenge
Form your insights from the point of deep understanding and empathy
Act upon insights in a meaningful way
Treat your creation as a starting point for further reflection
Grow and learn through discussion and interaction with others
Re-think and re-design continuously

As you see, design and how designers think and practice their craft appears to be pretty helpful to tackle something as lofty as creativity.

“Creativity, I, therefore, conclude, demands to be designed”.

At least, this is my working hypothesis to explore.

(Re-)Introducing Creativity Canvas 2.0

The Creativity Canvas is a modular, adaptable, and systemic framework that can be worked on in a self-paced learning journey and serves as an open platform to be added to. That’s quite a mouthful so let’s explore it step by step.

By modular I mean, the canvas is built using various elements that can be joined into categories and subdivided into subelements. I will explore what this means in detail in future blog posts. For now, think of elements of what you consider the building blocks of your creativity. You can group various elements under one heading to highlight and emphasize various categories or themes in your setup. Categories conceptually help to understand your mental model on creativity. Subelements will be explained in a post on its own.

Modularity affords adaptability. The adaptable character refers to the varying designs that are possible per individual or group. This aspect also addresses that your creativity design adapts (develops/grows) over time. You can lay out your ever-evolving understanding of (your) creativity as you see fit. You can update it as you learn something new. You can have one design for how you think of creativity in general or for a certain manifestation of it, e.g. for a creative hoppy, project, or profession.

The Creativity Canvas is built with a systemic nature in mind and represented in the “starting setup” of the canvas. This systemic design mirrors what creativity researcher Vlad Petre Glaveanu emphasizes in his 5A framework. Creativity for him is a phenomenon “… in which the person is embedded in/acts from within a system of social relations and the activity of creation produces meaning by integrating and transforming types of knowledge that, although individual in expression, are social in origin” (Glaveanu, 2013). I conclude and emphasize that your personal current context will inform and heavily influence any creativity design you do. In light of system thinking, modularity and adaptability enable you and other actors to discuss, understand, and even align your diverse view of creativity. This might be especially useful for teams, companies or educational settings (e.g. the classroom).

I aspire to create a self-paced learning journey that offers many ways to explore the canvas. While you might stick to the starting set up and easy exercises first, you can deviate more and more as you learn about your and others’ creativity. With time you can add and share your own points of view with others. From here on, you learn and grow through discussion, interaction and even teaching or evolving aspects of the canvas.

This brings me to the last point: the open platform character. All that has been said before should encourage people that use the Creativity Canvas to share their interpretations, additions and complementary tools and techniques. Think of the Creativity Canvas as a starting point. Imagine that through your very own way to interact with it and use it, and you come up with new methods or additions that might help others, too. You built on this platform and ideally share your inspiration back for others to use. I envision the Creativity Canvas as a platform, as mention in the book “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson, where he writes about platforms that can act as springboards for innovation (read a good Blinkist overview here).

In its starting setup, the Creativity Canvas 2.0 has 19 elements clustered in 5 categories. As a reminder, the 1.0 version had 16 elements in 5 categories. Again, this specific setup is simply the culmination of my current research exploration and my insight development. It is my current creativity design if you like and hopefully helps you do design yours.

I will deep dive into the details, the mechanics and the philosophy of the Creativity Canvas in future blog posts. There I will talk about the reasoning behind the starting set-up, my thinking behind categories and sub-elements, the general rationale of this framework and how I intend to build it.

In the scope of this introductory blog post, I leave you with a summary of the elements, two exercises to explore this tool and, of course, the link to download the canvas. The exercises are meant for you to experiment with the Creativity Canvas. You might have questions or info gaps concerning it. That’s fine; I encourage you to embrace this ambiguity. Instead of more details, I leave you with three tips for the exercises:

Be playful with it — there is literally no right or wrong way.
Make it your own — tweak and adapt it the way you need to.
Grow through it — reflect your design (and that of others) and learn.

The elements and categories

The Creativity Canvas 2.0, created by Stephan Kardos (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0CC)

Here is the high-level pitch of how I arranged the categories in the Creativity Canvas:

Creativity is about the way (how) you act, and hence actions are the pivotal point in the centre. Action requires an actor that acts in some shared context with others and its environment. Impulses can initiate actions that depend on the right impulse at the right time for the right person, amplified by the right context. Eventually, modulators can amplify or curb the tendency to act and the tendency to keep going.

These are the respective elements:

Actions

Action style — this element includes acts, practices, processes and mechanisms, for both thinking and doing that you undertake to start, develop, maintain or progress your creative endeavour. Action styles also include craft to master an action that (counterintuitively) builds on repetition and constant improvement. Eventually it’s also includes the ability of discretion, i.e. balancing craft and divergent (or even rebellious) action and knowing when to emphasize which.
Aspirations — refers to the goals, quality level and scope you set out to achieve through your actions; those most likely change over time and might initially be unclear. You might start by dabbling in an area, go pro over time, reach mastery and expert status, and ultimately change a domain.
Growth Mechanisms — growing refers to growing your creativity and that of others. Hence it’s a reflective element and also includes your ways to unlearn and update unhealthy on creatively.
Communication — this element deals with the story you tell yourself and others about why, how, and with what you are creative.
Collaboration — answers how you collaborate and interact with others given creativity’s (often overlooked) social nature.
Artefact Undergoing — this bulky expression builds on the idea that you (and others) constantly interact with what you create (e.g., feedback, assessment, consumption, …). Hence artefact undergoing is about how you perceive your creations and artefacts of others and how those affect you.
Authentic Meaning — this made-up term refers to the important aspect of or meaning in your creative action (e.g. self-expression, progress, joy, learning, …) and your values and beliefs behind those. This element might stay vague and unknown for a while and only reveal itself over time and in hindsight through reflection.

Actor

Creative Self-Belief — your mindset towards creativity, how you feel and think about the nature of creativity and if you value it as part of yourself.
Creative Superpowers — these are personality traits or characteristics that add to your creativity or are considered to do so in the future. Personality has a long history in creativity research (especially openness to experience ). I, however, encourage people to identify their own unique power (or even advantage) that is relevant to their creativity design.
Experience — this element contains your levels of knowledge in a domain, skills and areas of profound expertise, as well as assumptions you hold (that might turn out false). Experience can inform and enrich your creation or curb it through wrong assumptions and “stuck” expertise.

Context

Co-Actors — includes people we create for, collaborators, competition, gatekeepers in a domain (the field), family members or the general public. There are always “others” in some role and relationship.
Social Environment — Time, space, norms, processes, laws, and much more affect if and how we can engage in creative endeavours in a certain environment with others.
Culture & Systems — these are, on the one hand, the higher, human-made forces that define how we think about creativity, what society values, and how the system is set up that affects actors and is affected by it through artefacts. On the other hand, systems also involves natural systems. Hence this element reflects any creative endeavours of ours with natural aspects.

Impulses

Serendipity — this element combines surprise, co-incidence and fruitfully connecting the things you see and hear. Serendipity might also partly involve luck but emphasizes actively looking and shaping for those opportunities. As Louis Pasteur famously noted: “chance favours only the prepared mind”.
Hunches — those include early seeds for ideas that need more care, incubation, and more fleshed out ideas that can kick off creative endeavours. Hunches are like little plants. Steven Johnson refers to “slow hunches” as something that needs time and care in the aforementioned book. Also, they are fragile and can be easily destroyed what happens all too often.
Gaps & Problems — the urge to improve something or enable something and the natural tendency to avoid, solve or ease problems are all wonderful starting points for creative journeys of all sort.

Modulators

Drive — this element can be seen as all motivational factors that affect your creativity which can be influenced by yourself and your environment. As opposed to aspirations (the what), it sheds light on the why. However, the drive might not be as deeply rooted and universal as the authentic meaning element.
Energy — this is an umbrella term for everything that increases or decreases your energy level (boosters & blockers) on a mental, physical, emotional, even spiritual level. External environmental factors, too, can either boost or block your energy levels. There are many lists online of things that can increase or decrease your creativity. I also wrote about 8 creativity blockers in the past here.
Resources — these include all the things and objects you use for creation as well as those to which you (or co-actors) have access. Resources and resource constraints can change the course of your creativity.

Two Exercises as a starter

Iwill finish this post with these two exercises to showcase the adaptable, modular, systemic of the Creativity Canvas. You find a template for both exercises here.

While I want to provide a well-informed starting point, I want you to adapt it to your needs. You can work with it as is to explore and shape your understanding at your own pace (self-directed learning). With time, you will naturally experiment and tweak it — parts of it or entirely — towards your very own design. You might even start to build tools and techniques of your own based on the platform nature of the Creativity Canvas.

Regardless of your current design, you will have a great artefact of your mental model on creativity. It will help you share, discuss, and steadily adapt your creativity design and evolve your design practice.

Exercise 1

Easy-Medium, 10 -30 minutes

This exercise is straight forward. In my experience, it is best to print out the Creativity Canvas (find a copy here) or recreate it on a piece of paper or poster (A3-size upwards works best). There are certainly also digital tools that allow you to apply this technique (e.g. Miro).

However you approach it, the basic idea is that you react spontaneously to what you see. Write directly on the printout. Make notes of what comes to your mind right on the (digital) canvas, make visual additions or sketches. This could be comments, questions, examples, to-do’s, persons you think of, … anything. Don’t overthink it; it’s just a warm-up. There is no need to react to all of it. Only interact with what makes you curious.

There is literally no rule. Take a pen, timebox a session and off you go. You can easily do this with another person or even in a small group.

Exercise 2

Hard, 45+ minutes

You start on a blank page. Starting on a blank page can very difficult for some and others; it is incredibly liberating.

However you feel about it, the idea is that you print out an empty Creativity Canvas sheet with a particular dotted grid that allows you to draw hexagons quickly (find it here) or use a blank, bigger-sized sheet of paper. It can help to cut out hexagons or make them so that you can integrate new thoughts easily.

You start to add and arrange your elements. You highlight any categories and play with the distance between and arrangement of elements. Add any element that you want to see on YOUR Creativity Canvas. Of course, you can take elements of the starting set up as inspiration. The layout depends on what dynamic or inherent nature of your design you want to emphasise. Make some notes on why you arranged it that particular way.

Stop now and then, and reflect on your current version. Does it work for you? What’s missing? What’s tentative? Consider your designs as work in progress and come back to them after some time. Do you see things differently now?

That’s all on the practice of creativity design for now. I will share more insights soon.

Let me thank you for taking the time and go through this blog post. I truly believe in the collaborative aspect of creativity and encourage you to comment below. All feedback is welcome. Here are other ways to connect and stay in touch: Medium, LinkedIn, Instagram or via my Website (Newsletters).

If this post resonated with you, please hit the clap button a couple of times and, even more importantly, share it with others who might be interested or in your social network.

PS: for early-bird readers of this article: I updated three element namings and positionings so don’t be confused.