Digitally supported creativity

B.A. Gonczarek

I’m here with Adam Wiggins. Thrilled to discuss the future of pen and paper in the digital world. Adam is a perfect person to learn from, and he’s a director of a research lab that works on digital tools of the future. Welcome, Adam.

Adam Wiggins

Thanks for having me.

B.A. Gonczarek

For our listeners to understand from where you’re coming from – among other interests Adam co-founded Heroku, a platform for deploying and running apps, acquired by Salesforce in 2010, at some point after successful exit Adam relocated from San Francisco to Berlin. I must admit I read your essay about that decision and I‘m taken by the comparisons you describe between US and European startup communities. Adam, outside of his advising opportunities here in Europe, for over four years a part of research lab Ink&Switch.  That’s where we met as we’re both focused on innovative computer-mediated forms of teaching and working. Your vantage point, Adam, gives as great opportunity to discuss – what lies ahead in terms of interfaces and computer-supported creativity. Before we get there though, describe, if you will, your research lab focus and expand the story that I drafted on how you got where you are today.

Adam Wiggins

Yeah, happy to.  Ink&Switch is an independent research lab. And our theme or our area of focus is kind of what computer use will look like in 10 years, and particular creative or productive computer use. So by that, I mean, word processing, spreadsheets, Photoshop, or kind of the traditional kinds of things you would think of, or maybe more broadly thinking, creating productive tools. And that kind of standing in contrast to the, what I call consumptive uses of computers that have taken over a lot more of kind of, let’s say, this tech world’s focus in recent years, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, social media, etc. And so we’re kind of chartered with thinking about, you know, what does that what does that future look like? And how can we, how can we make it better for creators?

Yeah, and then in terms of how I got here, you know, I’m a serial entrepreneur. But I guess you’d say the theme of my career has always been that I love making tools that help other people make things just get a particular thrill out of out of guests, done everything from payment gateways to fabric, retail, and then developer tools. Probably the most successful of all of these was a cloud deployment company called Heroku. And there that was basically just a tool for taking a web app that you’ve written and getting it online with the push of a button. And that was quite successful. And actually, that gave me a lot of the both the sort of financial freedom but also the, the ability to kind of leave the Bay Area and go work on something a little, little weird, a little frengie, you know, not as sort of not as connected to Silicon Valley doesn’t pay as well. But for me, at least, had some more intrinsic interest and potential more benefit to humanity over the long term.

B.A. Gonczarek

And why Europe was the choice? 

Adam Wiggins

Yeah, it was a little bit of a process of elimination, which is I wanted to go somewhere place interesting after having spent most of my life in California, and seven years in San Francisco, and really ready for change of pace, I really wanted to be creatively refreshed,  much as I love the Bay Area, and a lot of what was emerging in the startup world at that time. I also felt like it’s hard to have new original ideas because there’s a kind of group think that naturally emerges when you get a bunch of the same kind of people together, and in the same place, working on the same kinds of problems. But I still wanted to do something connected to the startup world, there’s really not that many cities that are great for that. It’s kind of like San Francisco, New York, London and Berlin, then had kind of an up and coming scene. And of those four, Berlin seemed the most interesting. So I went there to do some short term gigs and advising and kind of fell in love with the place and still here five years later.

B.A. Gonczarek

You describe yourself as a digital toolmaker, and I understand your drive toward creative tools for those that want to be creatives. That’s also the focus of your research lab. What’s your routine for developing ideas? 

Adam Wiggins

Yeah, well, part of the way I’ve thought a lot about sort of how to help people develop ideas and introspect it on my own process, as well as that’s, that’s an area of study for our lab, we’ve done a lot of user studies, user research around, what does the creative process actually look like? So for myself, you know, I’ve realized in this I’m definitely a what I would call a deep work type. So I kind of identify a problem or an opportunity that needs deep thinking, usually, that comes in the form of suspicion or some weird knob in the brain kind of feels like a pebble in the shoe, and feels like it needs attention. And I’ll just set aside, usually in the morning, which is when I’m kind of most fresh and creative, anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, or longer, you know, however long it takes to tackle the problem. And there’s a process that involves lots of raw material, everything from web research and sketches, notes I’ve taken on my phone, and then bringing all that together in a place, I can kind of see it all together. And then using that to kind of riff on the idea, extend it, ask questions. And that brings us to something we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about, which is what we usually call externalize thinkers, which probably has some good overlap with visual thinkers. But it’s just basically if you’re the kind of person that tends to use a notebook, to kind of write down your ideas or sketch out your ideas, or for myself, for example, when I’m in a meeting, I feel more productive when there’s a whiteboard there, where you can kind of extend the conversation into this visual space, write things down scribble, and so on to supplement the group discussion so that folks who are drawn to that which is not everyone, but there’s a good chunk of creative people, we usually call externalize thinkers, and I’m, I’m definitely one of those I do these kind of deep work sessions where I use externalize thinking through pen and paper or my iPad to my computer, and, and so on, kind of make a big mess with lots of inputs, use that find patterns, get insights and ultimately hopefully make a decision or develop my idea in a way that allows me to move forward with it.

B.A. Gonczarek

Right, with what kind of software you’re currently supporting your process of ideation?

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, so I have used all kinds of things over the years everything from kind of Dropbox, like my main kind of archive, long term, personal corpus, many, many types of note taking apps, more recently with the tablet and stylist for impact factors, sketching stuff. Currently, one of our research tracks that we’ve pursued in the lab of the last few years is sort of this thing where you have a freeform canvas where you can move these media cards around kind of mix different media types and sketch at the same time. And actually, at the moment, we’re trying to take that line of research, which we’ve written a few long manuscripts about, and actually spin that out into a commercial product. So with any luck in the in the coming months, the project we’re currently trying to commercialize, which is called Muse might be available in the app store for the iPad. So I tend to use that a lot, because we’re trying to test out the viability of that as a real world product.

B.A. Gonczarek

I wonder what kind of category of software you think of when you think of Muse. From my observation this creative mode of thinking is very little supported by existing software categories. What are your thoughts on that? 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, that’s, that’s a remarkable thing. I’ve noted ideation, sometimes you call that that early stage, right? When you think of most digital tools, like a word processor, or a photo editor, or a diagram tool, we call those authoring tools. So you kind of already know what you need to say, and now you want to get it written down, or get it into a presentation or get it into some shareable format. But the part where you need to actually figure it out in the first place. It’s a place it’s never been, I think, super well supported by digital tools. And maybe it’s just that, you know, computers are fundamentally kind of structured and rigid. They’re good for databases and tables and things. But the the creative process, at least mine is just very messy and freeform and all over the place. And this is where analog tools, the pen and paper, the whiteboard, the printouts that you can kind of scattered around and reorder the pages post it’s on a wall. That stuff I think better maps to the the creative process. And I don’t think it’s infeasible that computers can do that. And in fact, that’s, you know, part of what we’re trying to pursue with muse. But I think not many tools have tried to do that, right? You either have very kind of visual and freeform, relatively visual and freeform things like a illustrator or Figma or something like that, they tend to be very focused on the visual side. Whereas I think realistically, most of your thinking, deep work kind of stuff tends to be lots and lots of text. Of course, you can do that in a text editor, a word processor, something like your note taking app. But then you also need the sketching, sketching and scribbling to somehow bringing both of those things together, I think it’s not something that’s ever been a great fit for digital tools. But it’s also part of the reason why at the lab, we’re excited about tablet form factors, we spent a lot of time evaluating the different platforms there, including iPad and Chrome OS and the Microsoft Surface and so forth. Because I think the different form factor and the different posture that you use a tablet and stylist maybe but it’s kind of our working hypothesis is that may be more suitable to that kind of freeform ideation. But fundamentally, computers tend to become from this more like rigid and structured kind of approach. 

B.A. Gonczarek

I fully agree with you there, because the  tools that we use today are descendants of those computer technologies that were created  to supporting processes where you don’t want to overstep boundaries, you just want to get the thing flowing nicely. For each input there’s a certain output. What you’re describing here, however,  is kind of this divergent thinking mode of operating where you explore possibilities and probably later arrive at conclusion that can be processed using those old fashion, rigid systems. You know, when we speak with people that make use of whiteboards they tell us that, for example in sales, they tell us that the single best thing that can happen during your sales conversation is having your customer reaching for a piece of paper or a whiteboard and star drawing with you, exchanging thoughts, because that illustrates engagement. And current multitouch devices, are good enough to support that but yet they are not seen as devices to support divergent thinking, rather they are seen as devices for content consumption. Do you see it in the similar way? 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, that’s a great point. I think, generally speaking in a conversation or sales meeting, someone going to their device is not seen as a good sign that things are going well. But then walking up to the whiteboard does indicate a kind of an opening up a, we’re going to think through a problem together, we’re going to think through something together, which is an interesting connection. And then yeah, the divergent versus convergent thing is is also like that phrasing or labeling the idea of divergent thinking being you’re kind of just everything’s open, you’re trying to widen up. Sometimes I talk about like Double Diamond. It’s kind of like that opening and then closing but some point you need to narrow down and select and so on. And you could say that perhaps the kind of the digital tools we have today tend towards being better for convergent thinking. And what we lack is the divergent thinking that’s not no one’s really quite cracked yet.

B.A. Gonczarek

Exactly. And also I think that we’re currently in a situation where creatives when they want to go visual are forced to use tools dedicated to processional designers. But in real live every message, every pitch is an invitation for expression, don’t you think? 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve even struggled with using the word creative creator creative professional, like finding the right terminology, because I think it is easy when you hear creative to think I don’t know about being a designer that’s doing paint in some kind of mysterious process. But I think of it like all of those wider array of knowledge worker creative professional things, including budgeting, sales process, making a presentation, software engineering, doing database schema or something these these are in the broader sense of the word creative activities in the sense that they create. And they do require, they do depend on ideas, and they do depend on divergent thinking, the best people at their jobs are the kind of people who can make those unusual leaps and have unusual insights. And it’s it’s not a it’s not a straight, it’s not a straight line from the problem to the best solution. Maybe.

B.A. Gonczarek

Absolutely, as everything starts with an idea in the end. When I hear what pioneers of visual communication, let say David Sibbet, have to say, he mentions often that visuals in business act as props on the stage on which management sells their visions. Also, the expression “I see” stands for understanding, so to me it demands visual expression. 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, the many of the most powerful ideas I’ve encountered in philosophy and life, as well as in business do have some kind of visual, visual expression I think of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is one example. There’s plenty examples of those in the business world. I don’t know Steve Jobs famously like boiling down the cluttered Apple product line when he came back to the sort of the two dimensional grid and essentially gives you four products. And that kind of very simple breakdown can be just be incredibly powerful. Of course, you can also lampoon that a little bit I think the HBO Silicon Valley show had this goofy CEO guy that had his convergent triangles of whatever that was just like a nonsense visual expression, sort of visual diagram sort of making fun of that trend. But but it’s sort of something that people are so aware of, because a truly great visualization can really help you more often can really help both express and help you grasp an idea that that words alone, for example, wouldn’t be able to.

B.A. Gonczarek

And I believe we are all well rooted for that. If you pull a quote from Aristotle – “without an image thinking is impossible”, that kind of explains it right? But I wonder what you think about what creatives and their environment could tell us about a digital environment for open-ended thinking? I saw a great article on your research lab page about physical workspaces that are stimulating for creatives, supporting tendencies for nesting things, availability of space and using messy free forms for expression that you mention that you use as well. 

Adam Wiggins 

That’s right. Yeah, we took a ton of inspiration from physical world sort of crafting spaces, work spaces, fluid free form a little informal, little personal little messy, which, which all of those things don’t tend to be what we get in our digital tools. Personally, you know, I love reading what I usually call maker biographies of people who create things that kind of the process of, you know, that heartbreak and challenge and struggle of how to make something, write a book, do science, invent something and entrepreneur, that sort of thing. And historic ones I find especially fun, because often their tools are maybe quaint by our standards, but they’re often quite interesting and beautiful, famous examples is something like Leonardo da Vinci with his notebooks or meet Marie Curie, his notebooks are still, you know, still reading radioactive to this day. And in that category for especially for stuff, it’s new enough, but we have photographs, you go look at, for example, the Thomas Edison’s invention workshop, or various sort of architects or artists studios. Now he’s got the feeling that kind of like a nest, their personal, they have some selection of tools, that’s exactly what they need for their craft. You know, if it’s an architect, maybe that’s drafting tables and straight edges with its artists, maybe it’s brushes, it’s someone more kind of word oriented, maybe it’s books, they’re often a little cluttered, they’re often little messy, they seem like it’s but place you can try things, you can experiment, you can you can mess around, basically, while you’re exploring an idea. And again, none of that it maybe you get a little hint of that. And so how some people treat their, you know, on a desktop operating system, like a Mac, Windows, Linux, the way that people kind of scatter files all over their desktop screen could be a little bit of that feeling. But I love looking at those kind of those. Yeah, there’s old school studios or what have you. Something about that is not necessarily being messy, but something about the nesting the personal the selection of tools and the space to experiment. I think that’s something we certainly been taking experiment, inspiration from, with Muse and our various previous incarnations of the ideation tools.

B.A. Gonczarek

 I’m sure you’ll agree that current tools don’t invite messiness to fuel that type of thinking. 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, what would you can see as a feature, I do see as a feature that, you know, they provide structure and, and, and uniformity and normalization, I think that’s great for certain things. You know, I don’t think I’d want a messy Trello board the point of Trello, is that it helps you get a little, you know, organized and structured. But if you’re, again, if you’re talking about that ideation, divergent phase, that’s where maybe that’s an impediment rather than a benefit.

B.A. Gonczarek

Absolutely, structre is great but later in the process, after you arrive at an idea. And you mentioned Leonardo, he famously suggested to look for inspiration in a splash of paint to start from. So when thinking about free flow of ideas, the way we work, is that we put things on a canvas of a whiteboard to draw connections similarly as you do with Muse so I see an ocean of similarities here. And also, when thinking about inspirations coming from pre-digital age I often think of Albrecht Durer. He encouraged students to express ideas visually using strokes, not in text, but with strokes. I wonder where those findings get us when thinking of computer interfaces of the future? 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, well, obviously, it’s, since I’ve said it’s part of our labs job to think about that something I’ve put a lot of thought into. You know, clearly mobile and touch screens have set a new standard, a new expectation in terms of always on internet, a great lot of battery life and screens you can interact with, and, and just an integration to the world, right that we take our phones with us and we pop them open for for a photo or a note or something like that. And that kind of trend continues with the voice assistance things. And you know, we’ll see how that actually works out. But we definitely see this inner leaving of digital and physical worlds. But my question there in thinking about the future of UI, okay, that’s all great for again, these common sort of more consumer uses, like sending message calling yourself a rideshare social media playing podcast. But when it comes to creators, it’s still all about the keyboard and mouse, or a keyboard and some kind of pointing device, Wacom tablet or something. And someone good with these on a desktop computer is so fast, so precise, so capable, touch screens, and turn mobile interfaces are just slow and comes clumsy by comparison. But then I go will keyboard a mouse still what will be using, say in the decade? And I think that’s questionable, because if nothing else, you’ve got a generation of people who grew up on touchscreens are not really comfortable with with keyboard and mouse.

B.A. Gonczarek

Do you think that we’re still in situation that we’re confined to the interfaces we started with? We began with character-based consoles of the computer terminals, as they were called, but gradually restrictions for other types of input were removed yet we’re still seem to stuck with paradigms of legacy UI.

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, well, I wouldn’t necessarily say stuck with it’s that they’re, they’re really, really good, right, they stood the test of time, and people are powerful with them. And software has been built, assuming them and that sort of thing. And I think we’re still collectively as an industry trying to grasp how we can use these new capabilities, or the new expectations that you younger generations will have. And I think, you know, there’s interesting experiments with, you know, I don’t know, Google jam board and Microsoft Surface Hub with sort of big touch screens that go on the wall that you can touch with several people together, and certainly the computer interaction community that are allowed a little bit of part of his has done a lot on that, but we kind of haven’t quite cracked it, we haven’t really found the thing that is truly going to unlock some new level of productivity that you don’t have a desktop computer with keyboard and mouse.

 I think the thing I would be excited about just kind of speculatively is is something that does draw from those Maker Studios, we talked about before those NES those workspaces, where it’s something that uses some of this kind of touchscreen, maybe even voice control capability, but it’s more of a room sized workspace. And something where you’ve got maybe multiple screens, which includes small ones you carry, or bigger ones that are, you know, a drafting table form factors, something on the wall, certainly being willing to embrace multi touch styles, to use two hands of once, right, like, that’s something we’ve written about a lot, which is, you know, phone apps tend to be designed for that one handed use, just do it with your thumb. But in this kind of work space, you know, we got 10 fingers, let’s use them all, right? And that, that, that if we cut free a little bit, both try to grasp the new kind of capabilities that we have from the hardware and the operating systems, but also kind of predicate free of that legacy of a small screen on go. Just do it with one hand, you bring in the fingers, the voice the stylus. You know, maybe in some Hollywood version of this is like you know, Tony Stark and his Iron Man blab talking to Jarvis and touching, touching screen. You know, that’s all obviously very Hollywood, but I think I see some version of that. And if you tie it in with the remote work trend a little bit what we have with video chat, group chat, share documents, real time collaboration, you put that together with some kind of room size workspace that uses these new interfaces, but also cuts free of that the old mobile assumptions and gives you more powerful gesture libraries, that starts to become a picture the least that I can get excited about for where where computers for creation might be in 10 years.

B.A. Gonczarek

Do you think we would not be intimidated by those capabilities? Using gestures and visual techniques? The way I see this is that kindergarten kids in schools they can explain everything with a simple drawing. But the process of communicating visually is kind of unlearned during later stages of education in which use of words is more emphasizes than use of images. 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, that’s interesting. We definitely when you look at the academic tradition, which includes everything from you know, how you write a master’s thesis or you know, papers you consume in the scientific world, and all the homework we do kind of in the earlier stages of kind of school life. Yeah, they tend to be very, very word oriented and words and symbolic representation more generally, that includes mathematics, for example, is incredibly powerful, and really good. But yeah, I probably agree with you that that maybe there’s a an overemphasis on that, and it depends on the idea being expressed. And it depends on the person that’s expressing it or trying to express it, too. But yeah, certainly trying to maybe recapture some of that childhood reach for the natural visual expression is something I can really get behind.

B.A. Gonczarek

 On the one hand we have limitations of current UI that kind of draw from the past and we kind of start to allow for free flow of thinking using interactive whiteboards or solutions like the one you’re working on currently. On the other hand we have users of those solutions that might not be fully ready to appreciate those solutions when they arrive because of visual skills being left behind in later phases of person’s education. This reminds me a situation back again with Durer, the painter and the theorist of the German Renessaince. He was known for working around constrains of the technology of his time. The printing press was kind of brand new during his days. So he worked to add graphical doodles and free hand movement to the more rigid, printed materials. Those are now understood by scholars as expression of his creativity and desire for free expression of his ideas. Don’t you think we’re both in similar situation with digital technologies of our times? 

Adam Wiggins 

That’s an interesting comparison, obviously, the printing press and type set, you know, these these literal rigid rows that you’d sort of plug pre pre stamped out, made of metal into is the definition of being very structured and takes you away from that freeform doodling and notably what came before. I love these texts that were kind of hand made from the 13th 14th century, where you have the handwritten text, but then there’s always the what they call the illumination, which is the essentially they’re just doodles in the margin, but they’re, they’re gorgeously beautiful, they illustrate sometimes, there’s something to do with the text, or they just illustrate something about the time and again, something like we lose some of that free foreignness and some of that visualness when we do go to the structured the structure to the printing press, and obviously with the benefits outweighs the losses that we could mass mass produce this stuff. But yeah, it’d be great to see we can find find the technologies to bring that back a little bit.

B.A. Gonczarek

I’m surely on your side hoping for that! Fast forward 20 years, let me know  what you think of the division of labor between humans and machines. As we see steady progress in AI technologies and I wonder what do you think, when thinking about computer technologies, how progress with AI affects our choices when preparing for the future. 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, well, you can call me probably a little bit more skeptical of the the impact of AI in the maybe in the near term, at the very least. Although I think it’s definitely interesting to think about, I mean, you know, one observation is that machines are often better at what we might call brain work than physical work. So like, I don’t know, auto correction or detecting credit card fraud, or even something like self checkout in the grocery store those those work a lot better than actually sort of grasping and manipulating the physical object. And I certainly hope that we’re I think it’s, it will be good in the long term, even though it hurts some folks jobless in the short term that more and more machines will do those, let’s call them wrote kind of thinking jobs. 

But yeah, when it comes to creative activities, I’m very skeptical machines matching humans anytime soon, maybe ever, and probably reflects at least a somewhat irrational faith in the uniqueness of the human spirits are just something I want to believe rather than something I have a good rational basis for. But I do feel like computers do well with well defined inputs and outputs and repeating patterns of the past. But creativity is fundamentally about inspiration about walking off the beaten path about surprising insights, doesn’t have clean poets, it doesn’t have clean outputs. And maybe also, it’s just that an inspired creation is something that wakes something in another human. And for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to imagine that will be done by something other than other humans. But of course, machines have a huge role. There’s the tools, the digital equivalent of pen and paper, they’ll also be in a way, I think, collaborators for us just like a grammar checker in or an auto summarization algorithm helps out and author. And you see that the design world, the architectural world with kind of algorithmic design, it doesn’t seem to reduce the role of the human, but it does change it maybe a little bit. And you can talk about having like a collaboration between the unique capabilities of computers, particularly as they get able to do more higher level thinking tasks, we might call it and the human which can guide them to the things and guide the computer to the things that matter for humans and bring that kind of weird spire spark, that that fundamental, different creativity thing that is, again, I think, unique to humans.

B.A. Gonczarek

 Supporting creativity makes as able to stay human in the future. Even what we think of as creative outputs might be considered a glitch in logic from a perspective of AI, but it’s on the other hand a valuable asset that we have. Don’t you feel it that way? 

Adam Wiggins 

Yeah, well, again, I feel it, I don’t know if that’s, you know, intellectually defensible. But, yeah, well, yeah, for sure. I mean, maybe it’s partially at least that just I love both the creative process for myself, but also, again, you know, I got a whole lab that’s huge track research is dedicated to understanding and intersecting that seeing it at work in people. And it does really feel like there’s something special there to me not say it’s something that can’t be replicated by machines. But I think it would just be a different thing if it is done by a machine because I work in fundamentally different ways. And therefore, you know, that’s a reason to be positive about a future where there is a role for what machines can bring to the table like generative or algorithmic design, and a role for the unique things humans do, perhaps with less of the road work and then maybe together we can create something better than either of us could individually.

B.A. Gonczarek

Absolutely, although I still fear we might arrive in entirely deterministic world where no splash of paint is possible to open new possibilities. Adam thank you for being with us today and sharing your perspective. 

Adam Wiggins 

Really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.