Journalist of dreams; animation artist; author; designer of buildings, bowls and benches; Kyna Leski has dedicated her lifework to the creative process.

As a young girl she witnessed her father design projects from his drawings and sketches through to their realization and reception by the public to which they still belong. It was an education in process, the workings of intuition-to design-to building, the difficult relationship of stated intention to experience and the transubjectivity between. These early ponderings underpinned her work as a student at The Cooper Union and Harvard’s GSD; her work as a designer and principal (with Chris Bardt) of 3six0 Architecture. It has been fed and nourished by over three decades of teaching design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she is Professor in Architecture. She has served as Department Head and Head of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. Kyna has given talks from the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach California to Pop!tech in Camden Maine. She is the author of The Storm of Creativity, published by The MIT Press (2015) and translated into Turkish, Russian, Chinese and Korean.

Statement by Kyna Leski:

“I explore, witness, and practice the creative process through my work and my teaching. As a child, I was reprimanded for “getting bored easily,” and now I see that weakness, like all “weaknesses,” as a strength. (Getting bored keeps me moving ahead.) I live in a city whose name, (“pro-videre”) signifies what creativity is: a process of “seeing ahead.” We “see ahead” when we make designs that are materialized in the future, when we write problems that anticipate solutions, when we link one step to another in navigating our lives and the way through anything, especially the empty page, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, needs, and questions. The creative process is the story of this passage and speaks for the author, to the user, the reader, inhabitant, audience or viewer.

I have listened and observed these workings as a teacher, a student, a maker, a writer and an architect myself. As an educator I am dedicated to embodied learning, to the precision of mind that comes from measured making and to the clarity of abstraction. As a student, an aspiring/practicing actor and witness I seek to learn something, to be surprised by the author’s soul voice and to find coherence where there wasn’t any. As a maker of things, designer, and writer, I dwell in uncertainty, follow poetry as a process, reason with material, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct—conceptual clarity appearing as a guide. I watch the sunrise almost everyday from a rowing shell, am moved to tears by honesty, and take dreams very seriously.”

Contact: kyna.leski@gmail.com

Published by MIT Press

Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In this book, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process.

Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm; it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us—if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion; it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.

NOW IN PAPERBACK !

Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions; only when we realize what we don’t know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence—with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects—propelling the process. We perceive and conceive; we look ahead without knowing where we are going; we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia.
Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.

Chinese version by Beijing United Publishing, Summer 2020

Turkish publication October 2017: http://www.mediacatonline.com/yaraticilik-firtinasi-kyna-leski/

Korean Translation. Epiphany Press, July 2017

Russian Translation. EKSMO Publishing House, September 2017.

Endorsements

“A definitive guide to swimming through creative chaos, The Storm of Creativity shows us how to flow effortlessly through the process of birthing new, original ideas into the world.”
—Joe Gebbia, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb

“We spiral through our lives trying to do our work, and Kyna Leski understands the elusive complexity of it all. I love the air and light in the book. Thank God she has written a how-not-to book that helps us understand how to do it. And not do it.”
—Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty

“This is a book about the thoughtful journey of creativity. Life is about going from not knowing to knowing. This blank, this zero from which I start every project is understood by Kyna Leski. Going from not knowing to knowing is my time of peace, and it is the time of creativity. This theme, threaded throughout the book, is a source of confidence and terror all at once. It is how we give up comfort and preconception to discover the essence of design. You will enjoy reading Kyna Leski’s illuminating account of the creative process.”
—Richard Saul Wurman

“I have always believed that a true creative process begins with a state of ambiguity because true creativity happens when it deviates, and your judgment can rely only on your level of impulse. In The Storm of Creativity, Kyna Leski vividly describes with precision and in a few words how such initial ambiguous emotion and imagination can become, from beginning to finish, a form of clarity.”
—Wang Shu, Dean, School of Architecture, China Academy of Art; 2012 Pritzker Prize winner

“There is perhaps no intellectual who is as in tune with the vulnerability of the creative process and the uncertainty from which innovation emerges as Kyna Leski. On the one hand, her focus on ‘unlearning’ takes us back to our most elemental moments of learning as a child, but also, on the other hand, to our most corrupted ideological predispositions. In her thinking, she develops critical mechanisms that braid the arts, sciences, and humanities to bring the various disciplines into conversation as part of the process of discovering. In this book, Leski brings the best of Cooper culture, as a school of thought, to a broader audience.”
—Nader Tehrani, Dean, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union

find more information at mitpress.mit.edu/9780262029940

Basis of my teaching

By Kyna Leski

How do we decide to make a mark? When to fold? Check, call or raise? What to erase, edit or eliminate? To change paths? With what, on what, for whom and where? Do we make decisions based upon our actions or the actions of others? What rules? Choose what we like or what others like or are all “likes” distasteful? Does our innate intelligence connect with the broader context of culture and history? Do our experiences shape what catches our attention? Do we pursue what fits or what doesn’t? Do we even notice what doesn’t fit? Or does it stick out? By what measure?

These questions arise when facing the empty table and blank page. They are confrontations of purpose.

“My Methodology told me to do it”

Methodology seems to give purpose when it actually bypasses the questions of purpose by redefining purpose itself. Methods provide steps for generating stuff: from externally generated random stuff to internally stimulated dreams/hallucinations and to rule based, sensible planning. However the stuff appears, choices still need to be made as to what to do with it. Methodologies provide procedures for this as well. The propulsion through the steps give comfort of purpose and a priori reasoning. But do we feel connected to what is generated? Is it meaningful? Methodologies make decisions for you. With time, methodologies fall short, become irrelevant and obsolete. They come and go and come back again.

Earned Authorship:

All the courses I have developed over 30 years are consistent with these beliefs as these are reflections born out of my 30 years of teaching. “The Making of Design Principles,” the core design curriculum for Architecture at RISD is “a kind of A-foundational studio where we expect the students to reach out for a foundation only to find one is not there.”[1] As I wrote in one iteration of its syllabus: “The most important lesson of this class is learning how to make decisions. Methodologies provide specific ways of making decisions. While they facilitate a way of moving ahead in the design process, they do so providing limited and biased choices that in some situations can be unsuitable and counterproductive. If methodologies are given as a foundation of a design studio education, then the education is based upon a way of making decisions that doesn’t serve all of the unique and emerging situations. Inevitably, methodologies become outdated and obsolete.” Michael Thomas Ruffing used this pedagogy as the main example in his essay, “EMERGENT DESIGN THROUGH CRITICAL MAKING: A dynamical systems view of self-organizing and emergent behavior as pedagogy for design.” In this article, Ruffing quotes Lynnette Widder from my book[2]:

“Since the overall trajectory is never revealed to the student in the course of the semester, they cannot conceive of each piece of work as necessarily linked to its potential use; all assumptions about the application of each piece of work are provisional, allowing the criteria operable at that moment primacy, as in the natural sciences.” Ruffing continues, “The Making of Design Principles is composed as a course of successive, simple project statements which are applied to a single evolving work by each student throughout the term. As depicted in the quote by Widder above, each project statement is given without reference to any subsequent project statements to come. This is in effort to eliminate the possibility for a deterministic process and to foster a sense of immediacy in creation.”

There are other courses which I developed based upon these pedagogic beliefs. A course I developed and taught at the China Academy of Art was called, “Finding Your Way.” Again, its syllabus reiterates the value of improvisation, process and discovery.

“Something out of nothing. The first mark is arbitrary; it’s o.k.—all right—but all wrong. The exchange that follows takes one into a labyrinth of the creative process. If one commits oneself to its workings, not knowing its destination or how to get there, but attentive to the work at hand, the journey is rich with discovery and invention.”[3]

The Thesis Seminar which I have taught for years and is the basis of the current iteration of Thesis Seminar was called “Navigating the Creative Process.” From its syllabus:

“The authority of the work necessarily reticulates with the wide aperture of the creative process, with the open field of association rather than the narrow delusion of definition. We will read a number of essays that address this unfastened direction of creativity. . .while also mining the bildungsroman of seminal poetic texts, some of which have now been published alongside their more humble beginnings in manuscript form.”

Two studios make their intention clear in their titles: A design studio I taught in I.D. was called “All Without Design” and another Advanced Studio I ran was completely improvisational and was therefore just titled “Studio.”

While Head of the Department of Architecture I introduced a course as a seed for a MFA in Architecture, called, “Outside the Guidelines.” From the course proposal:

“Like all architecture programs, however, our curriculum is heavily scripted by the requirements of the NAAB, (National Architectural Accreditation Board). We would like to propose an interdisciplinary workshop as a protected time and space within the Architecture Department for investigating “Space.” It will be taught by a rotating team of architects, visual artists, dancers, scientists, etc. who have invested their life’s work in the medium of space. . . .What is key here, is that the students and visiting faculty are brought together with an opportunity to think out loud, to improvise and to have a window into the visiting faculty’s current thinking, process and work.”

These courses plus my two years as the Chief Critic in Rome was the antithesis of “directed research.” In my mind the two words are contradictory.

DIRECT: Meaning “to govern, regulate” is from c. 1500; “to order, ordain” is from 1650s. Sense of “to write the destination on the outside of a letter”.
RESEARCH: from Latin circare “go about, wander, traverse,” in Late Latin “to wander hither and thither,” from circus “circle” (see circus).

I should add here, that the very first Advanced Studio I authored, and a subsequent one, ten years later were called, “Circus.”

Instead of directing the wanderings of the creative process I offer a pedagogy that encourages dwelling in the uncertainty that comes from having assumptions and preconceptions pulled out from under you. Keats called the ability to dwell in uncertainty “negative capability.” In 1817, Keats wrote: “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Wandering uncertainty, mystery, and doubts is a way to find your way and leads to authorship in your work.

[1] From The Making of Design Principles, Kyna Leski. Page 23. 2007.

[2] Ibid. page 12.

[3] From the China Academy of Art book published in 2017 on my class called, Finding Your Way