The Creative Influence: Michael Bierut

The Creative Influence is a documentary series that gives a cinematic look into the lives and work of creative professionals and how they find inspiration from the world they live in. In this episode Michael Bierut is showcased. 

Tony Schwartz: To Solve Big Problems, Change Your Process

In this 99U talk, bestselling author Tony Schwartz issues a challenge: The world is full of intractable problems like climate change that require new and creative thinking. So how can we use the creative process to take on some of the more serious obstacles of our lives and world? First, we need to be at the top of our collective creative games — and that means fully understanding the creative process.

Schwartz shares the five often counter-intuitive steps of the creative process. Most important, says Schwartz, is that we manage our energy and take time apart from our day-to-day to solve tough problems. As he says, “The place where you get your best ideas is not when you are trying to get the best ideas."

Joi Ito: Want to innovate? Deploy or die.

"Remember before the internet?" asks Joi Ito. "Remember when people used to try to predict the future?" In this engaging talk, the head of the MIT Media Lab skips the future predictions and instead shares a new approach to creating in the moment: building quickly and improving constantly, without waiting for permission or for proof that you have the right idea. This kind of bottom-up innovation is seen in the most fascinating, futuristic projects emerging today, and it starts, he says, with being open and alert to what's going on around you right now. Don't be a futurist, he suggests: be a now-ist.

Being Digital: Nicholas Negroponte: A 30-year history of the future

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years. If you haven't yet, you should read (or re-read) his classic "Being Digital."

Krista Donaldson: Designing Products That Change the World

Krista Donaldson uses design to fight jaundice, create prosthetic limbs, and solve some of the developing world’s most vexing problems. This is why we was selcted as the 2014 ALVA Award winner, a special prize presented by Behance in partnership with GE to recognize remarkable serial inventors.

In this 99U talk, she offers a peek into her team’s design process for getting complicated medical treatments to all corners of the world for a price anyone can afford. Chief among her advice? Talk to your customers. Then talk to them again. And use all that feedback to iterate and, when needed, drastically shift your design process. “We want closure on our projects…but people and society and technologies change. You want to be okay with the ambiguity.”