Opening keynote talk at ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition. Hosted online by Celine Latulipe, University of Manitoba, and Brian Bailey, University of Illinois at Urbana.

"When we seek to unlock and facilitate creativity we need to first understand that starting a creative journey can be a terrifying prospect". In this talk in front of an audience of academic researchers and educators in the field of creativity, Martijn shares his personal insights on overcoming some of the most common obstacles in releasing our own creative potential as well as unlocking creative behaviour in students in our classes.

Martijn van de Wiel is an independent Dutch creative entrepreneur and design teacher with a background in Industrial and Spatial Design. Operating from his studio in The Hague, he teaches courses and runs workshops in the field of Design Sketching.

The institutions he is affiliated with include: Technical University Delft, Technical University Eindhoven, and The Hague University of Applied Science. His sketching workshops, packaged under the Design Sketching label, include design schools, corporate teams and life long learners.

Martijn is on a mission to help aspiring and professional designers unlock their creative potential. He believes all humans are creative by nature, yet our risk-averse tendencies often block the ability to tap into our creativity. He is convinced that training exploratory sketching muscles is an effective way to build confidence and allow creativity to flow.

This belief has been driving him for more than two decades to share his insights with a worldwide audience. Through hands-on classes, keynote talks, and a firm online presence, Martijn keeps beating the drum for sketching as a vehicle to support thinking and stimulate the imagination.

Learn by doing is not only his didactical approach in class, it’s also his own modus operandi. In close collaboration with like-minded creatives he is constantly experimenting with new interactive formats and tools for remote and on-site skill training.

In search of a solution to share content with his students, he co-founded Sketchdrive in 2014 – an online platform for sharing visual work in online classes. It is now successfully being used worldwide in online courses with image based content and hands-on assignments.

As a result of the challenges brought on by the 2020 pandemic and inspired by a new generation of online creators, Martijn started experimenting with live streaming video from his studio. Tired of serving his students on platforms incompatible with his needs, he responded with a multi-camera setup, video lights and high quality sound. This new studio setup enabled him to host his remote classes like a tv-show, professionally directing his visual content on-the-fly.

This new tv-format proved to be better at engaging participants in live sketching activities compared to the pre-pandemic method, leading him to implement his remote setup in a new post-pandemic format. Martijn is currently exploring new ways to scale up his reach and amplify his impact.