🎟 You can get tickets for his upcoming CreativeMornings talk here. 🎟

CreativeMornings [CM]: How do you define creativity and apply it in your career?  

Felix Hiebeck [FH]: I still have a hard time defining creativity. I remember when I was younger, I thought it meant having a lot of great ideas. While there can be beautiful serendipity in creative work, one of the things I learned in my career so far is that only a small portion of what people call creativity is really having these eureka-type moments. Most of it is about doing the footwork of understanding the landscape of the given situation, formulating many solutions, and refining them based on feedback; all while resisting the urge to just go with that one idea you really like.

[CM]: Where do you find your best creative inspiration?

[FH]: I don’t really have that one place that I get inspiration from. However, I will say that a good portion of my project ideas came while using public transportation. There is something about the time on a train or bus where my mind can just wander without real distractions.

[CM]: What’s the one creative advice or tip you wish you’d known as a young person?

[FH]: “Better done than perfect”. Especially as a student when working on projects I would get hung up on technical details that did not matter at the end. Since then I found that moving fast, realizing a quick prototype, and then iterating based on your own learnings and user feedback is much more fruitful than obsessing over small details, especially early in the process.

[CM]: Who would you like to hear speak at Creative Mornings?  

[FH]: Chef Chris Young of ChefSteps. I have never met him, but I admire his and ChefSteps’ work. I also just love listening to people talk about cooking, especially in a scientific way.

[CM]: What’s your one guilty creative indulgence?

[FH]: I have a thing for all kinds of buttons and knobs. There is a box in my drawer with an ever-growing collection of things that click and spin. I rarely get to use them in a project, but it makes me happy to fiddle with them from time to time.

[CM]: If you could interview anyone living or dead, but not a celebrity, who would it be and why?

[FH]: Not an interview, but I would love to see a panel with some of the earliest human-computer interaction pioneers. Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay,Muriel Cooper, Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Papert, and Marvin Minsky; these people are the architects of the way we currently interact with computers. Seeing them discuss Twitter, Snapchat, and Candy Crush would be fascinating to me.