What is the Creative Capacity Lab?
The Creative Capacity Lab is a research and practice initiative housed within the School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin. We believe creativity is a core human capacity essential for navigating complexity, solving ill-defined problems, and challenging the status quo.
Our mission is to cultivate creative competence in individuals, teams, and institutions through structured, design-based practices. We design and deliver experiential curricula, facilitate guided practice with community partners, and conduct research that advances our understanding of creativity as a teachable, measurable, and vital skill set.
Through collaborations with community organizations, UT students, and interdisciplinary scholars, we develop real-world projects that expand creative capacity while generating new insights into how people learn, work, and innovate together.
The Lab partners with nonprofit, civic, and public organizations working to create positive community impact. We collaborate closely with teams to support real-world projects through guided design practice. Each partnership is grounded in shared learning, experimentation, and long-term capacity building.
Who does the lab work with?
What is the Creative Capacity Library?
The Creative Capacity Library is a growing collection of toolkits designed to guide teams through specific organizational moments where creativity or innovation is needed. Each toolkit offers practical agendas, worksheets, and activities allowing teams to facilitate themselves.
The resources in the Creative Capacity Library are drawn from real design collaborations between the Creative Capacity Lab and community partners. Through these projects, professors and students developed tools (worksheets, agendas etc.) to support workshops or other learning moments. We make those tools free and publicly available so other organizations can use them.
Custom Workshops
We offer customized learning experiences tailored to the needs of specific teams. These sessions provide hands-on guidance in creative practices, helping groups apply design methods to their own real-world challenges.
kcanales@austin.utexas.edu or graygarmon@austin.utexas.edu
KUT Case Study
In 2025, The Creative Capacity Lab partnered with KUT Public Media - Austin’s NPR affiliate - for a multi-month engagement that brought design practice directly into their newsroom. Through a series of facilitated workshops, professors worked alongside KUT staff to explore challenges, prototype new ideas, and build collaborative problem-solving skills. The sessions were designed not as one-off trainings, but as an ongoing, embedded process that allowed the team to reflect, experiment, and gradually integrate creative approaches into their everyday work. This hands-on collaboration now serves as the foundation for the “Design by Doing” toolkit featured in the Creative Capacity Library.
Creative Capacity Lab Faculty
Kate Canales
Gray Garmon
Suzie Wright
Meggie Do
Creative Capacity Lab Student Associates
Diya Jayachandran