Sometimes I lie about what I do for a living. I don’t always have time for a long conversation and puzzled expressions. I can’t find my job title on insurance forms. There are few jobs for me on LinkedIn. Almost no one knows what a Creative Technologist (CT) is. Sometimes even CTs are confused.
So what is a CT then?
As a child, I spent an unreasonable amount of time cutting, pasting, drawing and inventing. I sketched and scribbled. I authored and stapled together long, terrible books. I built my own arcade of video games out of paper. I did this for hours and hours. My grandmother suggested I see a counselor.
As a teenager, I lived in India for a couple of years (long story), where I started a business painting signs for local shops after school. I made hundreds and hundreds of cents. I’ve rarely been happier.
Most of my childhood, I wanted to be an artist or designer, but all my life I’ve been colorblind. When I was 14 I spent a week painting a portrait and didn’t notice the skin was green until the grand, embarrassing reveal.
Eventually, at long last, I found my creative medium: code.
CTs are a rare mix of design, UX, and engineering. We admire beautiful user interfaces and think a lot about unusual UX. Yet, we’re fundamentally technical. We’re often plucked from a classic software engineering role when we see an opportunity to straddle the fence between design and engineering. I was writing software for almost two decades before I found my true calling. Now I’m back to cutting, pasting and building. For hours and hours. Sorry, Grandma.
What does a CT do?
If you were to ask 20 people what a CT is, you might get five different answers. The other 15 have no clue. For some, it’s closer to an art practice, where much of the time is spent programming drones or literally exhibiting art in a gallery. Others are tinkerers, often playing around with VR, and posting experiments on a personal website. Others focus on adding value to a company’s brand and products. This is the CT I’m focusing on here.
If I had to distill the role of a CT into a single sentence, I would say: “We are the best in the world at communicating new user experiences with code”. The word “communicate” is important because while we do have the skills to build like an engineer, our primary role is to communicate new ideas and answer questions. For example:
- “How can a user tell AI what she needs without having to be a prompt engineer?”
- “How can we supercharge the hover state of a website panel?”
- “What is a surprising and delightful way to engage attendees of a developer conference?”
We answer these questions with research, collaboration, and often a proof of concept written in code. Sometimes we solve hard technical problems relating to animation and interaction. Sometimes we spend all week in a terminal evaluating an AI model. But most of the time, we pass the code and technical findings to engineering for final implementation so we can answer the next question.
Designers design. Engineers engineer. Our job is to think, collaborate, and communicate.
So are we just engineers who get to do the fun stuff? Not really. Sure, we have fun, but we also deal with a lot of ambiguity. We’re also in a lot of meetings. We write crappy, scrappy code, and sometimes our work goes nowhere. Often we don’t get the same product impact bragging rights as a designer or engineer.
But that’s okay because, at long last, we’ve found our true calling. I’ve rarely been happier.
