I wanted to ask Ana Maria Pinto da Silva where creativity comes from. We ended up talking about something bigger: how we learn across a lifetime, and what we lose and gain when institutions define learning for us.
Ana is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. She’s been an architect, a world builder in the early games industry, and a UX design leader at Microsoft and Amazon. She also founded PechaKucha Seattle, after moving to a new city where she didn’t know anyone.
Let’s dive in.
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“Learning” and “Education” Are Not the Same Word
Learning and education aren’t the same thing, even though we tend to use the words interchangeably. Education comes from a different lineage. It’s tied to plowing, to tending fields, to the collective work of building a civilization. Learning is instinct. It’s what a toddler does before anyone teaches them to sit still: taste everything, touch everything, follow the impulse.
“The etymology is so fascinating. It means to follow the sole of your foot.”
The Teachers Who Were Never in a Classroom
Curiosity, in Ana’s experience, isn’t something institutions install. It comes from people: her best friend since she was fifteen, the artist Charlie Levin. Her father, an artist, a scientist, a diplomat, and by her own description “an all-around troublemaker.” Her son. All three carry a curiosity that comes from somewhere deep. No school installed it. No school could contain it either.
Institutions can’t hold creativity, but they can help cultivate it:
“The institutional frame cannot hold creativity, but it can help cultivate and foster it.”
Ducks, Notifications, and the Substack Moment
Midway through talking about nature, and the extraordinary colors of woodland ducks (she’d design a whole menswear line around them, given the chance), Ana’s phone lit up. A Substack notification. Someone, somewhere, had written something. There we were, half a world apart, actually talking to each other, and the modern world found a way to interrupt anyway.
Nature doesn’t ask for our attention. It just holds it, if we let it. Everything else is built to interrupt.
“There is no greater teacher than nature when it comes to design, when it comes to creativity. Period.”
Nobody Built School for a 50-Year Career
Formal education is barely 150 years old, younger than most of us think. It was built for a 60-year life: school, maybe university, a couple decades of work, then retirement. Almost nobody’s life looks like that now. Ana calls the new pattern “tours of duty”: three or four years at a company, then a shift. Roughly the same rhythm as an undergraduate degree.
“But today we have 50-year careers. 50 years. How do we stay relevant?”
It’s a problem without an easy answer. But rarely framed that plainly.
Why AI Makes This More Urgent, Not Less
AI isn’t a reason to deprioritize education. It’s the opposite. If you’re not well-educated, you can’t catch an AI-generated answer that’s subtly wrong.
Ana traced the instinct back to Margaret Morrison Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie’s mother, who fled economic collapse in industrial Scotland with nothing. Her son went on to fund mass education for the workers in his mills. This moment asks the same of us now: not retreating from education under pressure, but scaling it up.
“We need education desperately, and the quality of education needs to rise exponentially to meet the moment.”
From the Front of the Room to Alongside the Table
The image of a teacher standing at the front of a room doesn’t hold up anymore, in Ana’s telling. She sees educators, no matter the subject, as expert learners first. Coaches, she calls them. People who study learning itself and sit beside their students rather than above them.
“Educators have always been expert learners.”
It’s a small shift in language, but it changes what humility looks like in a classroom.
What Seventy Events and 750 Strangers Taught Her
Ana moved to Seattle knowing no one, and started PechaKucha Seattle almost as a way to meet people. Over seventy events, roughly 750 people have crossed that stage. She calls it her greatest university.
The same is true, she says, of her time at Microsoft and Amazon. Not because of company size or title, but because of the privilege of building something with other people, on purpose, together.
“The work is the teacher. It’s the work, it’s the privilege of coming together around a shared purpose, of defining goals together, and then running and leaping towards them with everything that you’ve got and doing that together.”
Design Was Never Supposed to Belong to a Few People
Ana gave a talk earlier this year called “Designing Futures: Community, Care and Courage in the Age of AI.” Design, in her view, is a fundamentally optimistic act. An act of care, usually delivered without a single word.
The portfolios she reviews as an educator are starting to look alike, she admits. Everyone converges on whatever reads as most “designerly” to an admissions committee. Her instinct is to go backward to go forward, to a time before the industrial revolution, when everyone embroidered their own clothes and carved their own butter molds. Design wasn’t a credential then. It was just something you did. AI, she thinks, could help us get back there, if we don’t let it flatten things instead.
“Design is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor.”
Her Grandmother Was the Original Search Engine
What do we lose when we stop going to physical places to find things out? Ana’s answer traces back to her grandmother, a research librarian in Lisbon, who helped grow a library from 3,000 volumes to over half a million. There were no search engines then, because she was one. She’d hand-curate stacks of books for researchers and simply say: you must read this.
If Ana ever built a search engine, she’d name it after her grandmother. Kiteria. She remembers her own job reshelving books as an undergraduate at Berkeley, where getting pulled off course by some random title on the cart was its own kind of discovery. No algorithm has replicated that yet.
“You can think of cafes as a kind of library as well, right? A library of people.”
I’ll leave it there. Not with a conclusion. Just the sense that the best learning happens sideways: through a friend, a grandmother, a duck’s feathers, a cafe, a phone left face-down on the table.
To connect with Ana Maria Pinto da Silva, find her on LinkedIn. To explore the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, visit design.cmu.edu.
