AI Won't Save Your Creativity. Your Taste Will.
AI can churn out options at record speed. It can spot patterns across mountains of data and spit back the average answer. That's useful-until you notice "average" is where ideas go to die.
Mike Peng, CEO of IDEO, put it plainly: creativity lives on the edge. AI can iterate, but you decide what's worth iterating. That call comes from taste, curation, and discernment-not a model.
What AI Is Great At-and Where It Falls Flat
- Pattern recognition: fast synthesis across references, styles, and formats.
- Iteration: countless variations in minutes.
- Execution: turning a clear brief into workable drafts, code, or visuals.
- Where it falters: direction, taste, and the spark that breaks an average pattern.
- AI trends to the mean. Your job is to break from the mean on purpose.
Your Job: Direction, Taste, Empathy
AI can get you from point A to point B. It can't pick the right destination or why it matters. That choice relies on taste and empathy with the people you serve.
Creatives define the edges. We curate what to keep, what to cut, and what to push further. That's the work only humans do well.
Play Beats Polish
Peng's stance is simple: "There is no play without friction." Play means you're facing something hard and making progress anyway. Companies keep trying to make things easier; creatives should chase interesting.
If you want work that stands out, experiment. Curiosity plus repetition, guided by taste, is how you avoid mediocrity.
A Simple Creative Workflow With AI
- Frame the edge: Write a one-sentence constraint that forces novelty. Example: "Design a landing page hero with no headline-only motion and contrast."
- Seed with taste: Provide 3-5 reference pieces you love and say why. Label the qualities you want repeated.
- Generate wide: Ask for 20-50 rough options. Speed over polish.
- Cull hard: Keep the 5% that feels fresh. Scrap anything that reads as average.
- Iterate narrow: Push your top picks through focused changes: layout, contrast, narrative, hierarchy, pacing.
- Add human texture: Inject metaphor, timing, humor, and story beats AI tends to flatten.
- Test with reality: Put versions in front of actual users or a small audience. Watch behavior, not opinions.
Taste-Building Rituals
- Reference stack: Keep a living library of 50-100 examples that move you. Tag by qualities: tension, restraint, contrast, negative space, voice.
- Call your shots: Before generating, write what "great" looks like in 3 bullet points. Grade outputs against that, not your mood.
- Anti-avg prompt: Add a "break the pattern" line: "Avoid the most common solutions. Prefer asymmetry, negative space, and tension."
Team Habits That Compound
- Weekly Play Lab: 60 minutes to try a wild constraint with AI. No client, no polish-just reps.
- Friction Sprints: Choose one hard skill (e.g., narrative structure, data viz choices) and run 10-20 micro-iterations.
- Crit by Principle: Review work against 3 named principles (e.g., clarity, tension, memorability). Keep it objective.
Guardrails That Keep Your Work Original
- Do not let AI write the brief. You set the bar. The model drafts below it.
- Never ship first-pass outputs. Use them as clay, not the sculpture.
- Keep a "ban list" of clichés for each project. Make the model avoid them.
- Inject constraints that force choice: time limits, color bans, layout rules.
Human-Centered Design Still Wins
Tools come and go. People don't. Ground your experiments in real human needs and real contexts. That's how creative work earns attention and trust.
If you want a primer, this overview on human-centered design is a solid baseline.
Why Listen to Peng
IDEO has shipped iconic work for decades by pairing curiosity with practice. Peng, now CEO, previously led Moon Creative Lab, a venture studio tied to Mitsui in Japan. His message: AI can help you move faster, but only you can decide where to go.
Try This 30-Minute Creative Sprint
- 5 min: Write a one-sentence edge constraint.
- 5 min: Gather three references and name the qualities you want.
- 10 min: Generate 20 options. Cull to 2.
- 10 min: Add human texture-story beats, contrast, and a bold choice you'd defend in a client room.
Skill Up, Then Ship
If you're building AI fluency for creative work, start here:
- AI courses by job for structured practice that fits creative roles.
- Prompt engineering techniques to improve iteration quality.
The takeaway: AI can scale average. Your taste makes it original. Play with friction, choose the edge on purpose, and let the model keep up with you.
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