Lensing Laura
Three words help define me: Curious Creative Catalyst.
Curious
Curiosity is a driving force. I love to learn, to listen, to understand, and use all of that colored glass as inputs to form a kaleidoscopic response to the world. I quest, I push, I probe, I explore, and I learn the art of the possible this way. It’s my secret sauce.
A few examples.
When I wrote my first novel, a mystery suspense fictional work titled In Soft Focus, I lensed the writing from three perspectives: a female photographer as protagonist, a detective, and a killer, who also had a penchant for photography. To speak from three perspectives, I naturally and passionately launched myself into exploration and discovery. I took a photography class, I went on ride-alongs with detectives, I witnessed a live autopsy at the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office, I walked a tour of Austin’s very own serial killer, and I learned about handwriting analysis, historical torture devices, and the history of Hyde Park in Austin, among other activities. Each of these not only yielded a depth to the character’s authenticity, but through the experience, I became more, and was shaped.
In my work, this manifests as empathy and immersion in a discovery and research phase. I jokingly called it “snuggling with the data and the research” (and have pillows gifted me with those two words from a former colleague.) There is nothing more thrilling than the content of a scientist’s notebook or understanding others mental models for whom we design. I leave space for discovery. I inhale information and experience. I’m a deconstructor and a synthesizer. I see in systems and I design in detail. This natural curiosity is how I can quickly become more adroit and adept at understanding any domain — from the complexity of genomics to the devastating journey of cancer care, from the intricacies of retail across physical and digital to leveraging emerging technologies as critical differentiators, from playing with “play” for a future that favors the flexible to deconstructing the opportunities in the mouth for an intra-oral device, from conversations with Claude for applied AI to a custom GPT as a brand’s corpus.
Creative
Creativity is the air I breathe. The outcomes of my curiosity are tangible in form in which I make the internal, external, and the invisible, visible. I am a speaker, a writer, a poet, a photographer, a song writer, a novelist, and an idea artist.
A few examples.
When I was asked to give a keynote on The Future of Play at MIT, I spent four months being actively curious — everything from scanning the existing play frameworks to interviews with parents, children, designers, toy manufacturers, technologists, animal behaviorists, scientists, and neuroscientists, from playing in my own life, to lensing my entire world through play, including all five senses through applied synesthesia. Not only did this lead to an immersive keynote presentation (the audience smelled letters, felt objects, and used 3D glasses) and other speaking engagements, but four (4) conceptual digital apps, articles for Fast Co. Design as well as the cover of Parents Magazine in March 2014, a Periodic Table of Play, and ultimately a framework for creativity and innovation that could be applied to any individual (child or adult), and any business (as the basis for innovation is creativity, and there is no creativity unless you play with ideas, materials, existing processes, and the world as we know it). The outcome became Play Possible, a set of cards and a teaching framework that won a Silver Aware for Social Impact from IDSA. Not only did I become a better designer by becoming and creating, I also became a better parent, a better leader, and a better client collaborator. I simply became more.
In my work, this creativity has led to envisioning game-changing client outcomes, customized client frameworks for organizational change, customized client scorecards for evaluating innovation efforts, innovation pipelines for managing innovation initiatives over time, a workshop toolkit including a workshop creation canvas and 100 method cards. One game changing client outcome was a unique way to “lock” a client’s liquid with their software using an infrared dye invisible to the eye but visible to the software.
Catalyst
Catalyst is my middle name. I’m a change maker biased toward action. I’m a transformative multiplier. For every client and colleague open to growth and transformation, I’m a collaborative facilitator.
A few examples.
When I was at frogdesign, we were asked to fill out our “I Love To Make” Manifesto. I wrote, “What I love to make are people and companies active participants in the discovery of answers to questions they never thought to ask. As Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist that I interviewed once said, “It starts first with seeing yourself see.” Once we see ourselves see, we can start to see things from a different perspective. We become more adaptive, more flexible, more creative and more innovative – because ultimately innovation comes down to seeing things in a different way.”
As a catalyst, enabling active participants in discovery takes many forms. Sometimes its through stories and scenarios — really seeing what’s possible so everyone can discuss and feel a future. Other times, it’s helping clients empathetically understand customers or employees and design for them through behavior archetypes. It may be in synthesizing everyone’s perspective and mirroring it back as a North Star to iterate. I’ve asked designers to each “draw a house” — but one from the sky, from the sidewalk, from the inside, from a mouse’s point of view — to demonstrate the value in working on the same topic but seeing differently. It may be prototyping a space so clients can “feel” the interactions or body storming a design. Sometimes it’s in the deconstruction of a process for opportunity identification — such as for Sam’s Club between checkout and the exit door or Southwest Airlines in deconstructing innovation ideas that could be filtered, sorted, and changed as they were tried and discarded or moved forward for implementation. Sometimes it’s about honesty, pinning down a client’s vague “we know that through the data we capture” to doing the leg work and revealing the real data and its efficacy so they can make more informed decisions based in reality. And sometimes it’s simply failing fast, so we can move quickly through a test and iterate cycle to a product in market.