Boosting Up Your Creativity Without Endless Reference Scrolling — Smashing Magazine

Designing With Both Halves of the Brain

Product design sits at an unusual crossroads: it demands rigorous logic for user flows, technical constraints, and data analysis, yet it also requires the kind of spontaneous, visual creativity that resists scheduling. The common advice for designers who feel uninspired is to lean on discipline, planning, and reference collection. But there is another route, grounded in how the brain actually operates, that can make creativity more accessible and less dependent on waiting for a lucky spark.

Design is one of the few professions where analytical thinking and artistic expression are equally important. This is not a matter of favoring one side of the brain over the other. While each hemisphere is associated with distinct functions, they are designed to work together. For product design specifically, both are indispensable.

The left hemisphere's logical capabilities are what allow a designer to break down complex problems, create structured wireframes, and ensure usability. The right hemisphere contributes the spatial and creative thinking needed for visual appeal and innovative problem-solving. Relying on one at the expense of the other typically results in a product that either functions well but looks unpolished, or looks great but fails to meet user needs.

A harmonious interaction between the two hemispheres allows product designers to seamlessly integrate both practical functionality and creative innovation.

A Historical Precedent For Visual Thinking

The idea that creativity requires cooperation between rational and intuitive modes is not new. Robert H. McKim, an Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering, explored this extensively in his book Experiences in Visual Thinking. His work, which draws on psychology, neurology, and art, later became recommended reading for Stanford University's engineering and design students.

McKim’s core argument is that productive thinking requires an “internal transfer” between what he calls the rational and intuitive halves of the brain. The goal is to integrate the artist and the scientist within each person. He provides a series of exercises to demonstrate that both hemispheres complement each other in cognition and creativity.

His simplest exercise, the Dominant Eye, uses an ambiguous image to show how perception can shift based on which hemisphere is leading. If you see a duck first, your left hemisphere is more active; if you see a rabbit first, your right hemisphere is leading. The point is that you can consciously train yourself to shift between these modes of thinking.

McKim also describes the complementary modes of thought as a two-stage process. First comes the generation of a broad array of ideas, often through visual thinking. Second comes the selection and refinement of those ideas into a tangible outcome. Creativity happens in the first stage, but execution depends on the second. He notes that even mathematicians frequently use vague images and visual intuition before translating their ideas into symbolic language.

For this process to work, McKim emphasizes the need for a state he calls “relaxed attention.” This is the condition where ideas emerge naturally — supported by meditation, breaks, physical relaxation, and non-linear activities like doodling or daydreaming. Creativity, in other words, is not something that happens in isolation. It stems from diverse activities that support an open and flexible mental state.

Side Activities As Creative Fuel

If creativity is supported by relaxed attention, then non-design-related activities may be more valuable to a designer’s output than they appear. Rather than distracting from work, they can serve as a deliberate strategy for enhancing creative thinking.

Shifting the brain into a different mode through physical or mental activity is an effective way to promote interhemispheric interaction. By deliberately engaging in these practices, designers can make their brainstorming sessions more productive, improve their ability to solve complex problems, and ultimately keep inspiration from feeling like an unreliable, external force.

Movement as a Creative Catalyst

Design work is mentally demanding, but the physical body and the creative mind are more connected than many of us realize. Movement triggers active brain activity — and motor skills are governed by both hemispheres, meaning that physical actions engage the whole brain. The principle, rooted in neuroscience, is straightforward: you move to learn. Sensory experience, reflection, and action are all part of the learning loop, which makes movement essential to learning (Source: Anne Green Gilbert. Brain-Compatible Dance Education, 2019).

Sports that combine the need to develop a strategy while also requiring active movement may work best for turning up creativity.

Tennis: Chess in Motion

Tennis is often called “chess in motion” because it demands rapid analysis of the situation, quick decisions, and total involvement. It develops memory, concentration, and strategic thinking while the group dynamic of workouts helps lower stress and improve mood. Table tennis offers similar cognitive benefits — building concentration through memorizing combinations, honing motor skills, and tracking the opponent’s movements, ball speed, angle, and spin — and works well for those without access to a full court.

Product Designer Ilia Kanazin, who has over 7 years of experience in SaaS, credits tennis with sharpening his professional focus:

“I started playing tennis a couple of years ago. I work out once or twice a week individually with a coach or in a group. This is a sport that requires high concentration during the game. It seems to me that this skill helped me in my work as well; before that, I was often distracted, and it was difficult for me to do the same task for a long time.

At the same time, due to the fact that I have to fully concentrate during the game, I manage to switch from everyday problems and unload my brain. I prefer to play in the morning or afternoon and take a break from work. Therefore, I return to work more energetically and can take a fresh look at my tasks.”

Tennis is specifically recognized for its brain-health benefits. It enhances the ability to process sensory information quickly, improving cognitive processing speed and reaction time. Strategic play engages the prefrontal cortex — the hub for decision-making and planning — demonstrating the far-reaching cognitive benefits of physical exercise.

Dance and Balance: Training Neuroplasticity

Dance stimulates the brain through the integration of movement, rhythm, coordination, and memory. This promotes neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to form new neural connections. The more varied the movement patterns and rhythmic complexities, the more the brain adapts and reorganizes. Improved neuroplasticity benefits memory, learning, and problem-solving, which directly supports design work. Since dancers constantly improvise, adapt to rhythm changes, and learn new combinations, they build connections between brain hemispheres that influence creative thinking overall.

The cognitive flexibility developed through dance mirrors the demands of design, where you must adjust decisions based on new data from user testing and stakeholder feedback.

For a low-barrier home option, the balance board is one of the most convenient simulators. Short sessions during the day provide a break from screen work, leaving you with a fresh perspective. Balance exercises can be varied: add squats, light upper-body weights, or shoulder and neck warm-ups to boost cognitive activity. You can even stand on the board passively while on calls that don’t require your full participation, watching shows, or talking with friends.

From Walking Paths to the Lab

While documented cases of specific designs born from physical activity are scarce, historically grounded examples do exist. Charles Darwin’s daily walks at Down House became known as Darwin’s “Thinking Path.” He developed his major works, “On the Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man,” through this walking routine, which is well-documented in how it shaped his scientific contemplation.

With the rise of neuroscience in the mid-20th century, we now have empirical perspectives on how various activities shape creative thinking. Marily Oppezzo, a behavioral and learning scientist at Stanford, experimented with how walking affects creativity. She compared treadmill walking, outdoor walking, sitting indoors and outdoors, and being pushed in a wheelchair. Even treadmill walking in a dull room boosted creativity by 60% compared to sitting.

“By training your body to move more creatively, you train your mind to think more creatively.”

— Jennifer Heisz. Move The Body, Heal The Mind, 2022

“It’s not specific activities but individuals’ experiences of them that determine their effect.”

— Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Associate Professor at the University of Kent

Not all sports impact creativity equally, however. Interestingly, it’s not artistic sports — such as figure skating, gymnastics, or synchronized swimming — that have the strongest effect, but rather net and combat sports. Why? These artistic disciplines involve memorizing predefined steps and routines. Though creating those routines may involve creativity, the training itself is predictable and structured. In contrast, sports like badminton, tennis, volleyball, and fencing train you to act instinctively. Such unpredictable physical training keeps the brain mentally flexible, strengthening cognitive flexibility and enhancing creative output. (Source: Jennifer Heisz. Move The Body, Heal The Mind, 2022)

Training the Mind for Creative Work

Physical exercise isn’t the only route to the “relaxed attention” state that balances the brain’s hemispheres. Several purely mental activities trigger the same neurological processes and can sharpen your creativity on the job just as effectively.

Learning Foreign Languages

The design process draws on both hemispheres, and language learning exercises the brain in a comparable way. Language processing is primarily a left-hemisphere task, but the right hemisphere handles emotional intonation and context — sarcasm, tone, and subtext. When someone says “Oh, great!” after receiving bad news, the left brain decodes the literal words while the right brain reads the tone, revealing the true meaning.

Picking up a second language exposes you to new ways of expressing the same thought. Hunting for synonyms, grasping idiomatic expressions, and switching between languages all nurture divergent thinking — the capacity to produce multiple solutions to a single problem. Language study also builds storytelling and self-presentation skills, both valuable in design work.

“I’ve lived in several countries for a long time, so in addition to my native language, I speak three other foreign languages as well. It helps me to build communication with different people, which is very important in the designer’s work.

I think because I know how to say the same thing in different languages, I also use this approach in design. To solve the same problem, I can offer several solutions and choose the most appropriate one together with the stakeholders.

Now I am a Senior Growth Designer, and this job requires constantly looking for non-standard solutions and implementing them quickly. I think the use of different languages contributes to this from the point of view of brain function.

Speaking multiple languages also comes really handy when you are dealing with personas from different nationalities. For example, Western Saas products use a more minimalist approach, whereas Saas from Asia or China, for example, more information is better than less.”

— Maxence Akodjenou, Senior Growth Designer (working on complex B2B apps)

Board Games

Tabletop games build strategic thinking. Players must anticipate opponents’ moves, solve problems in real time, and occasionally think sideways. Classic games like chess demand critical thinking, as players assess the situation, weigh outcomes, and commit to a course of action — strengthening the brain’s executive functions, including decision-making, planning, and strategy.

Role-playing and storytelling games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Dixit push players to invent characters, craft narratives, and navigate imagined scenarios, directly exercising creative imagination. Group play also refines communication skills, which product designers lean on constantly. Cooperative games in particular develop collaboration skills: finding compromises, negotiating, and making concessions.

Music Lessons

Neuroscience has spent decades studying musical training. Playing an instrument improves cognitive abilities by strengthening neural connections between the hemispheres, with positive knock-on effects on memory, learning, and non-verbal thinking. The brain learns to hear and interpret sound in a way that passive listening never achieves, and musicians become better at processing complex information. Instrumental practice ties together motor, sensory, auditory, visual, and emotional systems across the central and peripheral nervous systems, blending artistic and aesthetic learning with the linguistic and mathematical work of the left hemisphere in coordination with the right brain’s creative functions.

Albert Einstein famously played the violin during his deepest thinking, saying that music was an extension of his thought process and helped him crack especially difficult problems.

Cross-Disciplinary Lessons

The relationship runs in both directions: music sharpens your design work, and design can boost your musicianship. In Enchanted Neurons, French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez recounts how visual artist Paul Klee’s Bauhaus teaching influenced his own composition.

“Theoretical reflection is particularly interesting to me when it is applied to something that is completely foreign to music because it then makes it possible to discover solutions that you would never have found if you had remained bound by the limits of your art.

I’ll give you a personal example: the discovery not only of Klee’s painting but also the lessons that he gave at the Bauhaus, which we spoke about earlier, was extremely important to me, especially from the point of view of composition. I understood how using very simple elements like two motifs made it possible to think about the way in which these two motifs could interact. I remember, in particular, an exercise given by Klee to his students: a straight line and a circle. That’s it. The exercise consisted of trying to invent something, a meeting of this line and this circle.”

— Pierre Boulez, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Manoury. Enchanted Neurons, 2020

Boulez’s example shows how interdisciplinary inspiration — ideas from outside your field — can unlock solutions you would never find within its boundaries. The same logic suggests that music and its structural principles can seed creativity in other disciplines.

“I started composing music even earlier than I started designing. Music has a composition and rhythm-like design. And development in one area also entails a boost in another. It works both ways; success in music develops my design skills. Design helps me make more complex music.

In addition, there is also a practical benefit; I make my own covers for my tracks and use my tracks for my showcases. Plus, I listen to a lot of different music, and it develops my world perception, fills me with energy, and creates the right mood for working on projects.”

— Sergei Diuzhev, Design Leader at MuseScore

Building a Sustainable Creative Routine

When you’re stuck on a design or feeling overly critical of your prototypes, the strategies above offer a starting point. A few general principles can help you weave them into daily life.

1. Pick something you genuinely enjoy or have always wanted to try, and start small. It doesn’t have to be a brand-new hobby. Dance to your favourite music at home, use a balance board between work calls, or try a new activity monthly or quarterly with friends, such as skating or rock climbing.
2. Keep exploring, even on a small scale. Take new routes to work, cook unfamiliar dishes, or listen to music you don’t know. Even if you end up disliking it, the experience still enriches your brain.
3. Meet new people. Beyond the professional communication skills designers rely on, fresh connections can introduce you to unexpected sports, hobbies, or activities — ones you might even try together.

Designers like those quoted above have rebuilt their creativity through tennis, music, and language study, and new hobbies have a tangible effect on daily output.

Conclusion

Creativity develops through many channels. Reference-site browsing and deliberate practice matter, but so do activities that promote creativity while improving mental and physical health. The options for increasing brain activity are broad, and you can invent your own enjoyable ways of spending time. Trying something new generates fresh thoughts and breaks the monotony of routine.

Whether you experience virtual reality, read poetry or fiction, watch a film, listen to music, or dance, you are biologically changed. That neurochemical exchange can produce what Aristotle called catharsis — a release of emotion that leaves you feeling more connected to yourself and others. (Source: Susan Magsamen, Ivy Ross. Your Brain on Art, 2023)