Creative States is a design research studio exploring how our sense perceptions and living interconnections can shape a future that is not merely mechanized and self-serving, but embodied and life-giving. The Flourishing Project examines creative practice through this lens, curating conversations and collaborations with practitioners who cultivate a life-giving mindset.
Our Modern Mindset is Self-ServingThe world we have created is a reflection of what we value. Its current iteration is shaped by Rationalism, a worldview that views reason and deduction as superior to sense perceptions in the search for truth. The mindset that we have honed through the Enlightenment, Industrial and Technological Revolution has enabled us to quantify, objectify and commodify everything around us to enrich ourselves and fundamentally transform our planet. As a result, we have built a culture focused on self-serving materialism.
It is an approach that has enabled incredible progress, but at great cost. We need only look to our biggest challenges—social, health and environmental— to see its core consequence: disconnection.
Life is More Than a MachineOur outsized faith in reason creates a mechanistic conception of the world, where nature works according to mechanical laws, and everything in the material world can be explained by the assembly and movement of parts. Focusing our perception on the mind’s logical capacities elevates the rational over the relational. We ignore our ability to attune to the varied intelligence of other life forms and lose sight of our fundamental interconnection to our feeling bodies, our fellow humans and our fuller ecosystems.
We cannot simply reprogram a more sustainable version of the world from our current mindset.
Moving Beyond Sustaining to Life-GivingTo truly flourish, we must shift into a more relational mindset. When we begin to see the world as a living organism full of life-giving systems that are interdependent, sensing and alive, we can create more embodied approaches of belonging to and enlivening it.
Creative States offers a framework to help creative practitioners seed this mindset shift by designing for embodied perception. Increasing scientific evidence points to the vital importance of our body’s sensory intelligence. We are now able to measure our cells’ abilities to tune to our environment, and are discovering the vagus nerve’s capacities to translate our body’s emotional signals to the brain. Our bodies are fundamental channels for sensing and integrating with life flows around us.
The way in which our body physically senses our environment is as old as our species. Originally developed as a means of survival, our Felt Sense processes cues alerting us to proximity, danger and symbiosis in our surroundings.
When we design ways to ground people in Felt Sense perception, we pull them out of their heads and soften their self-centric, mechanistic understanding of the world. They begin to see themselves not as separate and sovereign in an inanimate world, but co-creators of a living one.
Promoting Enlivening Feeling StatesRecent studies show that the more we focus on our own selves and personal well-being, the less satisfied we feel. Enlivening Feeling States are expansive emotions known to release neurochemicals in our bodies that foster compassion, connection and integration with the world around us.
When we design for enlivening Feeling States, we orient people away from how much they can get and towards what they can give to the world. We invite them into imaginative spaces across disciplines, perspectives, belief systems and species to create collective new possibilities.
All Flourishing is MutualBy creating in ways that attune people to our Felt Sense and promote enlivening Feeling States, we reintegrate our rational and relational intelligence. We encourage embodied perception and interconnection. We shift into a life-giving mindset that inspires balanced, abundant, co-creative and reciprocal spaces of mutual flourishing.
Maren Maier is a creative strategist, educator and writer. She serves as the Human Insight Lead at CoCreative Consulting and professor in the Design Management and Arts and Cultural Management programs at Pratt Institute School of Art. She has supported systems change initiatives and cultural development workshops for the UN, the G20, Gates Foundation, The California Endowment, Ashoka and Skoll Foundation among others. Her work is featured in Smarter NYC: How City Agencies Innovate, and in Leading as if Life Matters: An Invitation to Attend a Future of Our Own Making. She is a graduate of Columbia University and Pratt Institute and lives in Germany.
Kimberlie Birks is an art and design writer. Her work has been featured on CNN.com and in publications such as Dwell, Domus, and Metropolis. Her book, “Design for Children”, is a century-wide survey of beautiful design for children, published by Phaidon. As chair of the advisory board for the Museum of 21st Century Design, she leads the development of institutional fellowships and publications. She is a graduate of Brown University and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has a certificate in Art Galleries, Museums and Curating from the Sotheby’s Institute in London. She lives in New York.