When I was in fifth grade, my school held an auction to raise money. Students were encouraged to contribute something they had made themselves. While most kids donated crafts, lawn mowing services, or baked goods, I decided to provide something entirely different: mazes. At the time, I was fascinated with them. I had stacks of graph paper, a pencil with an eraser, and an imagination that seemed perfectly content getting lost before finding its way out again. So, I created a booklet of twenty original mazes.
Looking back, they weren’t particularly sophisticated. Every page began with the exact same constraints: the same sheet of paper, the same light blue grid, the same pencil, the same rules. Yet somehow every maze developed its own personality. Some wandered diagonally across the page while others followed rigid horizontal and vertical paths. Some were sprawling and complex. Others were deceptively simple. Several developed into defined shapes. One even experimented with bridges and tunnels that crossed over and under themselves.
I have no idea how much money the booklet raised at the auction. That was never the point–the personal challenge was. And in the process what I discovered, without realizing it, I had stumbled onto my first lesson in design. It wasn’t about drawing. It wasn’t even about mazes. It was about discovering that creativity doesn’t require unlimited freedom. Quite the opposite. Creativity often flourishes because of constraints. That truth has followed me ever since. Today even, as I find myself designing with light, I return to the essence of that fifth-grade graph paper more than I would have imagined.
Because that’s what design still feels like. The medium has changed. The process hasn’t.
A few years ago, when speaking at an Oasys Residential Technology Group conference, I described design this way:
Design is the elegant application of creativity, grounded in reality, in service to humanity.
Every word in that definition matters. Creativity without reality is fantasy. Reality without creativity becomes mere engineering. Both, without service, become self-indulgence. And the elegance of application pushes one towards excellence of pursuit, because one is never done refining one’s own craft. Therefore, true design happens where imagination meets limitation in pursuit of making life better for someone else.
Unfortunately, our industry often mistakes design for its tools. Lighting becomes fixtures. Technology becomes hardware. Architecture becomes floor plans. Automation becomes programming. We become so fixated on the instruments that we forget the music.
The fixture is not the design.
The keypad is not the design.
Not even the drawing itself is design.
They’re simply the mediums through which design is expressed.
Over parts of my creative journey, I’ve been privileged to lead folks in collaborative art-making experiences, whether a graffiti wall for a kite fest or a large community canvas for a special needs camp. In the process, I’ve had countless conversations with people where someone eventually walks up and says, “I’m no artist. I could never do that.”
My answer is always the same: “Everyone is an artist, it’s just that we each may use a different medium.”
They usually give me a strange look, then I explain further. While I might paint or draw, some compose with music, others swing hammer and build homes. Some might develop software, and others comfort patients or teach children or sell cars. And some even run low-voltage wire throughout extraordinary homes, bringing technology together into seamless experiences.
The medium changes–the creative act does not.
I think we’ve done creativity a disservice by confining it to the arts. We tend to imagine creativity as using crayons, paintbrushes, chisels, clarinets, and stages. But creativity is just as alive in a sales conversation as it is in an uncut stone.
A creative salesperson doesn’t simply run through a rehearsed script or answer questions. They ask better ones. They uncover needs clients haven’t yet recognized. They don’t just sell products. They stoke the imagination and reveal possibilities.
A creative marketer doesn’t merely advertise. They envision unique client journeys and tell compelling stories. They give people new language for things they’ve always felt but never knew how to describe.
Even running a business can fundamentally become a design exercise. Every workflow can be designed. Every client experience can be designed. Every proposal can be designed. Every meeting can be designed. Every workplace culture can be designed–sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally.
Design isn’t something we occasionally do; it’s something we’re always doing. The real question is whether we’re doing it consciously and with purpose.
Perhaps that’s why I believe everyone has the potential to be creative and enter a creative space. Not because everyone paints, not because everyone draws, but because every one of us encounters moments where we begin with what is and imagine what could be.
That, to me, is the essence of creativity. Design is what happens next, it’s what gives creativity a focused direction.
I’ve come to believe that one of the greatest misconceptions about creativity is that it requires unlimited freedom: a blank canvas, a blank page, a blank check. In reality, some of the most creative people I’ve ever met spend their lives surrounded by constraints.
Chefs have ingredients and various ways to mix, chop, grate, sear food on the limitation of a single plate. A composer’s scale is only eight primary tones, and they use various combinations of notes and rests on a lined piece of paper. Architects have building codes and material limitations–stone doesn’t bend. Lighting designers also have electrical codes and material limitations–a beam of light doesn’t bend either. Technology integrators have infrastructure, build schedules, programming compatibility, and client budgets. The constraints don’t suppress creativity. They shape it. Like water flowing through a canyon, creativity often becomes visible only after reality gives it something to push against. That’s what those fifth-grade mazes were teaching me all along. Every page had identical boundaries, but the creativity emerged from discovering how many different journeys could exist within them.
I think that’s what I love about lighting design. It’s not really about designing the placement of fixture symbols on a 24×36 sheet of plotter paper. I’m designing experiences for people. I’m designing emotion. I’m helping shape spatial perception. I’m designing orientation, comfort, beauty, safety, rhythm, and delight. I’m supporting overall health and well-being. Light simply happens to be my medium.
For someone else, it may be technology. For another, it may be architecture. Or music. Or medicine. Or education. Or accounting. Or hospitality. Or leadership.
The medium isn’t what makes someone creative; the willingness to imagine a better path is.
At its heart, every designer begins with the same blank page I faced in fifth grade. A handful of constraints. A collection of tools. A problem waiting to be solved. And the quiet conviction that there is more than one way through the maze. Perhaps that’s what design has always been. Not simply making things beautiful or merely functional but helping people find a better path from where they are to where they desire to be.
Whether that path is illuminated with light, built with technology, drawn with ink, spoken with words, or sketched onto a sheet of graph paper is simply a matter of medium. The creative journey is the same.
