What Makes Creativity a Worldly Process?

Creativity is a worldly process because it is a quality of reality, with newness emerging everywhere: the evolution of species, plants growing, plate tectonics, and the political shifts of today. Humans are one participant among many, joining ongoing processes and experimenting within them. In the West, creativity was placed inside the head as a thing some people possess, which divorced it from the world, from collaboration, and from attunement, and made it a subjective possession. Jason adds that imagination itself can lure us toward the myth of the lone genius, and Iain notes that an imagination sealed off from the world can only reproduce the known. Going into a desert, changing your environment, and letting it shape you lets new ways of sensing and imagining emerge.

How Do Surrender and Blocking Open Creative Practice?

Surrender opens creative practice by deliberately letting go of what you believe should happen and who you believe you are. Yulia describes naturalist Jon Young's practice of going out and surrendering seven times when you do not know where to go. We build this into a method: look at the underlying logics of a context, block some of them, follow the unintended possibilities, and repeat. Seven is a good start, and it can take twelve, thirteen, or forty rounds. Reactions like "that's weird" or "that makes no sense" are often cues that something new is emerging. In our lab, students hear that they have to make something 40 times, and that the first one is only the beginning, because making is thinking.

What Does Creating With the World Look Like in Practice?

Creating with the world often works best as an indirect project that pulls people, places, and practices together and lets things emerge. Iain's partner Petia, frustrated by thin civic engagement in their New Jersey town, started Montclair Design Week. Design weeks usually showcase products, and this one tilted every event toward how we design our world, such as asking what could be made from Montclair's own clay. The goal was a richly connected, hospitable ecosystem with no fixed outcome, and many unplanned things bubbled up from it. Jason describes this as creating the conditions and propensities for things to emerge together, using our favorite question: where is flight? Cut open a wing and you will not find it, because flight emerges from feathers, bones, winds, thermals, and much more.

How Do Tools Like the Chair Shape Us?

Tools like the chair shape us through feedback loops we rarely notice. Supporting a body could take countless forms, from leaning on a rock to hanging from a tree. The chair makes you an individual in control of a small spot, supports the skeleton so that only the hands and head move, puts everyone at the same height, and lifts you off the ground. Over time the floor starts to feel dirty, clothes make it hard to sit cross-legged, and squatting becomes uncomfortable. Individualism and disembodiment are continuously produced by our environments, so changing how you think without changing practices and environments changes little. Jason extends this to screens, which disembody a conversation and also make a call between New Jersey and Berlin possible, and notes that everything was once a technology, including the chair, the knife, and the alphabet. Iain cites Alfred North Whitehead: "how the past perishes is how the future becomes." The task is to ask what screens and AI can do and to co-shape them collectively.

What Daily Practices Help Us Engage With Creativity?

The simplest daily practice is blocking something small that you do all the time and following what emerges. Iain suggests cooking: how would you make pasta without heat? You could also block your usual route to work. Treat the result as neither good nor bad, add another blockage when something interesting appears, and notice when you are pulled back into the old pattern. Jason warns against blocks like giving up your phone at night, since those already have a known outcome, and suggests exercise instead: how could you train your abs without lying flat? Iain frames the practice as an adventure, after Antonio Machado's poem about the path made by walking, where you have no goal and do not know what waits on the other side. We close with WorldMakers, our community of practice across five continents, where Yulia once led a live event on breathing with trees.

Listen to the Full Episode

Hear the full conversation on The Breath of Life with Yulia Bogdanova.