A prototype is worth a thousand pictures

The most valuable way a creative technologist can contribute to a product team. Plus: I'm starting to give talks about my work!

Join in with what I’m building and learning in creative AI ⚡ in this post:

• ⚗️ The most valuable way a creative technologist can contribute to a product team

• 🎤 Highlights from my talks at the MIT Media Lab & Hidden States

• 🎁 Need a holiday gift? It’s the final week to check out my book Feeling Great About My Butt. Grab a copy 💖

Here’s a pic from my recent talk at LA Tech Week, my first time publicly sharing my creative AI work at Google Labs 🎉.

🎁 Final week to check out my book!

First things first! My store is in its last week before closing, so if you’re thinking of a fun holiday gift consider this :) Over the last few weeks I’ve released a few collections of images from the book to get a feel for it:

• Drawings about tech & social media & scrolling and our wellbeing

• Drawings about healing, growth, and mindfulness

• Drawings about grief, heartbreak, and devastation

• Drawings about love, relationships, and connection

• Drawings about death and the void

You can grab a copy here, and learn more about the book and store closing sale in my last newsletter. I love seeing how people have been gifting it, so I added a few additional deals you can see on the site. Thanks to everyone who’s ordered copies, excited for you to read it!

⚗️ How I’m currently thinking about being a creative technologist

In the last six months, I've found a sweet spot in how I work as a creative technologist that I'm pretty excited about. Here I’ll share the insight that's helped me articulate what I do, set clearer expectations with collaborators, and create value.

For me, a creative technologist takes emerging tech and starts playing, exploring, and investigating through making. You develop a feel for the tech through practice, follow your intuition about what to build next, and end up with these wonderful creative works.

But here's the thing about working as a CT on a product team: I've realized there's a really specific time when bringing in a CT makes the most sense. It's all about where you are in the process and how formed the vision is:

• If you have a crystal-clear vision of what you want built → Bring in an engineer to make that vision real. They'll get you there faster and more efficiently.

• If you have a hunch that something interesting lives in a space, but it's mostly cloudy → That's where a CT shines. We thrive in that fuzzy space where there's room for wonder and play. When an idea is already strongly articulated, it's actually harder to have that creative freedom to explore.

A CT will dive into the tech and build out various ideas that help show what's possible. The prototypes let you actually experience the idea, you feel it, and this helps drive discussions for what’s next.

Creative Technologist is kind of a fuzzy title – similar to how "designer" can mean different things. We have product designers, graphic designers, industrial designers — each defined by their process, craft, or tools. Maybe that fuzziness is part of what makes the CT role special. It's expansive enough that you can carve your own path through it. Note that what I'm sharing here is what works in my context, but other CT roles might look totally different.

It'd be fascinating to catalog a bunch of folks working with art and code right now and look for patterns. What clusters emerge? Is there a natural taxonomy? This would help me understand my own practice better and maybe point to new directions. Someone's probably done this before – if you know of anything like this, let me know. And curious to hear your thoughts of this articulation. If you’ve worked as a CT in product orgs, how do you think about the role?

🎤 Recent talks! At the MIT Media Lab on creative tools

I’ve been giving more talks recently! They've been a great way to discover new threads in my work, seeing different angles through discussion and reflection. If you’re interested in having me as a speaker at your event, please get in touch!

I gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab, for the “Thinking with Sand” lunch lecture series organized by Char Stiles, a grad student in Zach Lieberman’s Future Sketches group:

A virtual talk series exploring new software interfaces and tools for augmented thinking and creative exploration.

My talk explored tools for thinking and creativity, beginning with my early experiences drawing as a child, and returning to drawing as an adult. You can articulate and feel and name thoughts and sensations through drawing. In a similar way, I later used creative coding and writing software to explore ideas and feelings. Through a range of projects I show how each interface reveals different ways of expressing ideas and possibilities and hopes. I hadn’t really considered this thread between my drawing works and my creative coding work, and to find it was immensely gratifying.

I also shared a lighting talk at at Hidden States:

A one-day unconference, gathering researchers, designers, prototypers and engineers interested in pushing the boundaries of AI interfaces, going below the API and working with the hidden states.

A theme emerging in the morning talks was one of maps for UIs, that allow you to explore abstractions of data and find patterns that would otherwise be hidden. I shared a few prototypes over the past year that apply this map metaphor to article text, zooming in further in an article or into different areas selectively, or applying the map metaphor to an entire website. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a prototype is worth a thousand pictures. In this lightning talk I focused on quickly demoing the prototypes one after another, allowing the audience to connect the dots. It was exhilarating! And I loved hearing what inspired attendees after.

Thanks for reading

🙌 Follow what I’m up to by subscribing here and see my AI projects here. If you know anyone that would find this post interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you forward it to them! And if you’d like to jam more on any of this, you can reply here or on twitter.

🤭 I made a book. It’s called “Feeling Great About My Butt,” and is a book of illustrations and words that find ways to make space for feelings of whimsy, devastation, and growth.

📞 Book an unoffice hours conversation: We could talk about something you’re working on, jam on possibilities for collaboration, share past experiences and stories, draw together / make a zine, or meditate.