Logitech’s Creative Landscape
Project Role: Concept Designer and Copywriter
The Creative Landscape project aims to improve the happiness, creativity, and productivity of professionals in cooperative environments. We began by asking ourselves: Can we learn how to nurture creativity in people, how to share it, and then harness it to help people come up with creative solutions to the world’s hardest challenges? These questions launched our effort to create an online experience that shared the insights gained by the largest ever study of human creativity. Funded by Logitech, I worked with the Liminal Group to architect the site’s conceptual framework and then write all of Creative Landscape’s content.
The website is currently only accessible to Logetech employees but soon will be launched to a public audience.
It began with the largest ever study of human creativity.
The seed of Creative Landscape was 2015’s Hacking Creativity, a research project into the ecology of human creativity, and the largest-ever study of creative habits. Led by human performance expert Andy Walshe, Hacking Creativity enlisted the expertise of creativity researcher Mark Runco, ethnographer Lizbet Simmons, community ecologist Eric Berlow, and computational ecologist Rich Williams, as well as David Gurman, Kaustuv DeBiswas, and Anna Christy. The study sought to understand the variety of ways in which creative people create, not just in one person, but in thousands.
Creative Landscape is how we begin to share this research with a wider audience. We believe that by better understanding your creative style, and the styles of others, you can better harness the transformative power of creativity in your life and work, and also better collaborate with those who have different creative styles.
We chose to express these insights through the metaphor of the natural world because, like all living things, creativity is also a type of dynamic ecosystem. Every species on earth is a unique creative solution to the universal problem of life — how to survive, grow, and reproduce. Every unique combination of strategies for solving this problem has its own advantages and weaknesses. Just as a Cactus won’t grow well in the rainforest, and a Water Lily won’t thrive in the desert, by understanding your own unique suite of creative strengths, you can cultivate the best strategy toward greater creativity.
Creative Landscape begins with a survey of the participant’s creative strengths, weaknesses, habits, and work style preferences. Throughout the survey, a seed germinates and grows with each answered question. At the end of the survey, an algorithm analyzes the participant’s answers and assigns them to one of seven “Creative Species” that represents both metaphorically, and literally, their creative tribe.
While answering questions, participants have watch the seed of their creativity germinate and grow.
Respondents are assigned one of seven “Creative Species,” along with a description of how to get the most out of their unique set of creative habits:
Each botanically-themed Creative Species is composed of individual elements that reflect one of the 54 creative habits that were defined by the research.
After the survey users can explore a 3D landscape that illustrates the environments where different creative species grow best.
Participants receive a PDF download of their creative type, along with descriptions of the other types.
As a companion to the site, we wrote a scientific paper that can be viewed here.