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.
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 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.
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.
The Lab partners with nonprofit, civic, and public organizations working to create positive community impact.
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.
Book a Custom Workshop
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.
Contact Kate Canales or Gray Garmon for inquiries.
What our partners are saying:
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"Can’t quite remember the last time I had universal, positive praise for a session…but that ticker got reset yesterday."
half-day brainstorming workshop client
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“Fun, well-paced, useful, fresh…just some of the adjectives I heard. I’m feeling quite grateful for your time and expertise..”
half-day ideation capacity building client
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“Amazing and eye-opening. The whole experience was like a breath of fresh air."
multi-week service prototype capacity client
Creative Capacity Lab Faculty
Kate Canales
Gray Garmon
Suzie Wright
Meggie Do
Creative Capacity Lab
Student Associates
Catherine Li
Zach Robison
Diya Jayachandran