Creativity is the Job Skill of the Future

Doreen Lorenzo didn't train as a designer. She came out of film and video, got fascinated by the early internet, and ended up running the digital practice at frog design almost by accident — the interface developers she'd hired to sell computers online were acquired by frog mid-project, and when frog asked her to build the business, everyone told her not to take it. She didn't know anything about design. She knew how to build things. Seventeen years later she'd taken frog from a new digital practice to record growth as COO and then president, and what she's proudest of isn't the work: it's that they built a place where people could go out on the edge without anyone letting them tank it.

That perspective shapes how she reads the current moment. She's lived through one industrial revolution already, and she sees the same rush to believe a new tool will solve world peace and world hunger. AI is a tool. It can hand you fifty thousand images, but you still need the design skill to know which one is right, and the judgment to reconcile it with everything you've learned about your users. Her old boss used to say form follows emotion — and no machine is doing the empathetic work of figuring out what a product needs to make someone feel. Which is why she pounds her fist about creativity being the job skill of the future rather than a nice-to-have soft skill. Filed under soft skills, it gets cut. Filed correctly, it's the thing that keeps you employable.

Teaching it is mostly unglamorous repetition. Doreen tells the story of guest-lecturing in UT's business school and having a student gasp at the idea of going out and talking to people — the moment that told her exactly what was missing. Finding unmet needs is a practiced skill, not a lecture. So is understanding the ethics of how information gets served up, and so is working on a team: the Center for Integrated Design she founded is a 19-credit undergraduate minor that curates students from business, architecture, engineering, health, and design onto shared problems, deliberately catching them before the bad habits set in. Design isn't art, she says. Art is self-expression; design is solving a problem, usually for a business, with real constraints on cost and reach. Her advice to people entering the field now is unromantic and specific: be curious, follow the process, and network, because you can be the best designer alive and nobody will know it if you're not talking to anyone. If the door gets slammed fifty times, the fifty-first is still worth knocking on.