Future Creative

A Book by Dean Terry

Overview

Future Creative is a book about personal, artistic, and professional creativity in the 21st century. With automation and AI and other technologies set to transform every walk of life, creativity is key to navigating the near future. The book anticipates these changes and provides strategies and ideas for making sense of our experience through creative transformation.

The book draws on 15+ years of providing guidance to undergraduate and graduate students in the arts, humanities, technology, and sciences. The strategies and ideas within are informed by a wide range of the author’s experiences from successful technology entrepreneurship to running a university research lab to producing cutting edge arts projects. The book is a master class in creative practice for the 21st century.

Three things distinguish this book from others on creativity. One, there is a deep dive into the intricacies of the creative process, providing the reader with multiple perspectives from which to view their own efforts. Two, there is an eye to how changes in technology that will dwarf even the Internet revolution will affect creative practice in the future. Three, at the end, the book introduces the idea of creativity as a way of creating meaning and making sense of our experience.

The book is structured into major sections on creative practice, creative thinking, and creativity as a way of life. Each section dives a bit deeper and introduces more challenging ideas. The first details strategies and techniques that can be applied to any creative process. The second, creative thinking, presents thought experiments and thinking practices that allow for deeper explorations. The final section introduces creativity as meaning making. There is a well documented “crisis of meaning” in the 21ct century, with the big questions smothered over with superficial, prepackaged answers and lifestyles, and distractions. This section is presented in broad strokes and leaves an opening for a second planned follow on book on the subject of creativity as a way of life.

Future Creative is a book about the creative life for everyone. It is written for a non-specialized audience looking for new creative challenges and a peek into the future. It aims to reignite long dormant creative instincts and provide new ideas and strategies for those at all levels of experience.

Future Creative will be published in 2019.