Julia Kaganskiy

“I think there’s a new kind of creative class that’s emerging with the digital age.  They are developing new ideas that have commercial potential, but maybe that isn’t their first and foremost objective,” said Julia Kaganskiy, director of the New Museum’s new incubator for designers, artists and technologists.  She made this statement during an interview with the Wall Street Journal.  She further stated, that these projects “don’t necessarily have a clear market proposition.  They are driven from some sort of creative inquiry rather than from a desire to scale up.”  These comments seem to summarize the cohorts and activities I have observed during the course of my fieldwork at Yale, and in particular at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”).

The modern Yale institutionally is fostering a world-class environment that enables the emergence of a new creative class.  At Yale, people are linked through an ethos that can be characterized as “creative confidence.”  The term “creative confidence” was coined by Tom and David Kelley[1] in Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.  They wrote “At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.  It is the conviction that you can achieve what you set out to do.  We think this self-assurance, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation.”  I believe at Yale creative confidence is embodied in the enactments of intellectual curiosity, imagination, creative ability, inventiveness, and other qualities that empower Elis to discover, unlock, and reach their full creative potential.  This concept is given great force in the social context of Yale, because it captures, in part, how Yale serves to link people to the thought world of this institution; creative confidence is a part of the university’s cultural system.

A recent article in the New York Times “Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design,” about the d. school at Stanford University gave me a deeper understanding of the comment by a senior CEID staff member that a part of his job is “to get students comfortable with being uncomfortable.”   (The official name of the d. School is the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University.)  This article highlighted that creative confidence is an important element of the d. School’s approach to teaching real-world problem solving.  Although I have not heard the senior CEID staff member use the term creative confidence, he is nonetheless a proponent of teaching students how to develop human-centered solutions to real-world challenges.  He is an adherent of the pedagogy of the design thinking process.

In Creative Confidence the authors wrote, “Design thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practioners.”  For the Kelleys, “design thinking approach means more than aesthetics or developing physical products.  Design thinking is a methodology.”  On the d. School’s website it is stated that the goal of the design thinking process is to make the lives of the people they’re designing for better.  Furthermore, the d. School focuses on the design process because they seek to equip their students with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.  And the real focus is on “creating innovators rather than any particular innovation.”   

Design thinking is a way to connect engineering and science to society.   A sample of examples of design thinking that I am aware of at Yale include, the 109 Design team’s design of a bio-medical device to increase compliance by wearers of braces to correct scoliosis; a team designed a device to run electric appliances on human sourced power; a team is studying the New Haven school system in order to design school reforms.  I would not be surprised to learn in the future that once InnovateHealth at Yale is up and running that design thinking process is incorporated into every aspects of how they conceptualize and implement solutions to global health challenges.

Creative confidence is like a muscle that is strengthened through rigorous exercise and use.  Yale institutionally is fostering a world-class environment that enables a steady stream of innovators to be produced in any field, and perhaps many great innovations also.