Every Wednesday, a photographer friend of mine posts a #WhatsItWednesday on social media. Some weeks, it’s a household object cropped to make its subject unclear; other weeks, it’s an unusual industrial item or an antique that is no longer commonplace.
My friend’s followers guess the identity of the object throughout the day and the winner is awarded a virtual certificate.
It’s a fun midweek distraction — and an exercise in creativity.
Organizers of FS’s “Returning to the Creator Within: A Community Reimagined” included such an exercise in their kickoff event Jan. 28 over Zoom.
Here’s the image the FS team shared:

What do you think it is? Here’s what some of the Zoom participants guessed: a hat, a tomato, a cat bed, a dried plum, a dog basket, a fuzzy plant, a cloth pomegranate and a red Yorkshire pudding. I like those last two oddly specific theories. I guessed an upside-down orange cat sleeping in its bed.
The object is, in fact, a crumpled sock.
Design News Now readers work in creative fields — interior design, product design, architecture, retail merchandising, marketing and more. And yet even when it is a fundamental part of your job, it can be hard to make time and space for creative thinking. To-do lists, daily crises and general busyness get in the way. When we’re desperate, our creative muscle memory kicks in, but we’d be better off creating a regular regimen for stretching our creative muscles so they can power us through each day.
Lilly Berelovich, co-founder and chief creative officer for New York-based trend forecasting and consumer insights firm FS, and GiGi Madl, FS client engagement manager and community events co-lead, understand the importance of developing practices and habits that continually foster creativity. And they know it can be hard to do.
They led the first seminar in FS’s new program for what the firm calls “curious creators.” Program elements include monthly webinars (the next one will be Feb. 25), in-person events (including one in London on April 2 and one planned for New York City sometime in late April) and company-specific workshops (arranged through FS).
Berelovich and Madl encouraged participants in the first Zoom event to follow three creativity-boosting principles: tune into their inner wisdom, honor their unique point of view and nurture their curiosity within a supportive community.
“At FS, our mission is to unleash human creativity,” Berelovich said. “… This whole conversation is about how we tap back into our creativity, a sustainable resource we that we’re here to protect.”
Madle led the Zoom group through a mind-calming, mind-clearing breathing exercise and then participants listened to a musical meditation on intuition featuring the voice of the late Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher, psychologist and author.
“There is a whole way of being in the universe that is intuitive,” Dass said during the meditation. “… If you look at great composers, great poets, great scientists, you find again and again people who transcended their intellect in order to tune to a deeper place in their being. … And then they brought that back down into their conceptual framework.”
In echoing Dass, Berelovich noted, “our evolution as creators depends on how well we navigate between our analytical mind and our inner wisdom.”
“We’ve studied for years,” she said. “We’ve automated, we’ve programmed, we’ve sequenced. We’ve done a really great job working our analytical minds. We’ve done it so well that we’ve created a whole world of AI. All our analytical minds have been captured, fed into big machines and now, to be honest, they’re smarter than us in the realm of the analytical mind. But where we get to stand out as humans and where we get to evolve as creators is mixing the two — our analytical mind and our inner wisdom.”
“We need (our analytical mind) to process the information we need to turn our inner wisdom into a great idea,” she continued. “They have to be co-pilots, working together to bring something forward that is new and interesting.”
But in today’s world, it can be harder to tap into our inner wisdom, Berelovich said.
“Our inner wisdom is always available to use, but we are too distracted, moving way too fast, living in a reality that pulls our attention outward,” she noted. “… We (must) have a commitment to sitting in that inner well of wisdom — our intuitive knowing — and developing that practice. That takes dedication. … We want to bring that forward in this curious creators’ community.”
Whether you choose to participate in a supportive group like FS’s or prefer to follow your own practices to foster creativity, it’s worth making time for it, especially as we become more reliant on artificial intelligence and other technologies to do much of our day-to-day work. Just imagine where a focus on creativity could take you.