Your life is your most important project. Navigate, build, and live it with creative intention.
The Creative Life Project® offers a fresh, functional perspective on creativity and being creative. It begins with a simple but consequential idea: creativity is not a rare talent reserved for artists and innovators. It is a universal human trait.
Yet creativity remains surrounded by a Cloud of Confusion™ created by competing definitions, cultural assumptions, clichés, and misconceptions. This confusion can prevent us from recognizing creativity in ourselves, understanding how it operates, and developing it intentionally.
The Creative Life Project helps clear that confusion and establishes a foundation for Creative Self Development™: the lifelong process of discovering, developing, managing, and expressing your Creative Self Potential™.
At the center of this process is your Creative Self: you as the creator in your life and of your life. Through the philosophy, process, and practice organized within the Creative Self Development Framework™, you learn to transform your individual genetic and cultural blueprint into the distinctive fingerprint you leave on your world.
The purpose is practical and personal: to help you develop the Life Skill of Being Creative™ so you can navigate change, build with intention, and live the vision of your best life. As you develop and express your Creative Self, your influence can also support others seeking the same, helping cultivate creative individuals, relationships, organizations, and cultures.
My interest in creativity has developed across more than fifty years of working in education, technology, communication design, consulting, photography, and fine art.
I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and attended Indiana University, where I majored in biology and minored in psychology. After graduating, I taught high school biology in Cincinnati before moving to Arizona to continue my education at Arizona State University.
At ASU, I earned a master’s degree in educational technology and an MFA in photography. I produced multimedia programs for the university and later became Director of the Media Resource Center at the College of Architecture, where I also taught presentation design.
My interest in technology, communication, and creative problem-solving eventually led me to leave the university and establish Communication Design. For twenty-three years, the company provided interactive multimedia consulting and design services to educational institutions, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and businesses.
Clients included the Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Art Museum, Heard Museum, Phoenix Zoo, Phoenix Newspapers, YWCA of the USA, Sinclair Oil, The Phoenician Resort, Central Arizona Project, Association of Junior Leagues International, Salt River Project, and ASML Technology.
One particularly significant project was my work as a consultant and founding collaborator to Educational Management Group (EMG), an early distance-learning company established before the widespread adoption of the internet. Communication Design developed the original interactive multimedia and communication technologies upon which the company’s educational services were built.
EMG combined live and recorded educational video delivered by satellite with supporting digital content transmitted through 56K modems. During its early development, the company also used a satellite-uplink and production facility I had helped design. This integration of video, computers, telecommunications, and interactive instruction enabled EMG to deliver educational programming beyond the physical classroom years before internet-based distance learning became commonplace.
By 1996, EMG had grown into a major educational media enterprise serving approximately two million students in four thousand schools across the United States. The company was subsequently acquired by Simon & Schuster, then part of Viacom.
The project was an early demonstration of how emerging technologies, educational design, and creative communication could be strategically integrated to create an innovative learning system at a national scale.
During this period, I also explored creative expression through mixed-media sculpture, combining metal, fused glass, wood, and stone. After selling Communication Design, I founded Fusion Studios, where I continued my creative consulting while producing commissioned artwork for corporate and private collections.
Clients included Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Lucent Technologies, Avaya Communications, Maxtor Technologies, Princess Cruises, and Renown Regional Medical Center. Collaborative projects created with Lyle London for Princess Cruises and Renown received national recognition in Glass Art Magazine and other publications.
Across these different fields, I encountered the same underlying human capacity at work. Whether teaching, designing an interactive system, solving a communication problem, making a photograph, or creating a sculpture, creativity involved imagining possibilities and crafting responses within real-world conditions and constraints.
Over time, I also became increasingly aware of the confusion surrounding creativity. Popular explanations often reduced it to artistic talent, inspiration, brainstorming, novelty, or a collection of techniques. None provided the complete developmental foundation I had been seeking since first encountering the relationship between creativity and self-actualization as a college student.
The Creative Life Project grew from my effort to connect those dots: lived experience, professional practice, ongoing research, and a lifelong desire to understand the role creativity plays in shaping who we are and how we live.
I created the philosophy, process, and practice of Creative Self Development™ because it is the kind of guidance I wish someone had shared with me when I was trying to find my own way.
My hope is that the Creative Life Project helps you understand and trust your Creative Self, develop your Creative Self Potential with intention, and create a life that leaves your distinctive fingerprint on your world.
And, along the way, I hope it helps you inspire and support others wanting to do the same.