I started a conference about inspiration. Five years in, here’s what I’ve learned about staying inspired at work.
发布时间：2026-08-17 ｜ 浏览：1
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By Minnie Bredouw
I joined Pinterest because I felt drawn to its mission, “To bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.” The very same month I started, the world shut down. Spring 2020. I met all of my coworkers through a screen, often without formal introduction. This felt removed from the mission that attracted me, especially since inspiration is essential fuel for designers like myself. As my colleague so aptly put it, “Athletes train. Designers get inspired.” As the pandemic droned on and work burnout reached an all time high , it became increasingly clear that everyone (not just me) was in need of feeling lit up again. My ethos is that inspiration can be found almost anywhere—it’s just a matter of tuning one’s receptors to see it. Could our 140-person Design team tune our receptors to see inspiration in our work, our craft, and most importantly, each other at a moment in time that felt anything but? I took this question to task and threw together a proposal for an event to cultivate inspiration. I called it Re:Inspire. Much to my surprise, my plan was met with an enthusiastic yes. I got to work. While homespun, the first year of Re:Inspire set a tone for what could be. Now entering its fifth year, our entire Design org now convenes once a year for a week to recharge our creative batteries and re-connect to our mission . Here’s what facilitating this event has taught me about finding inspiration at work:
1
Learn what lights people up
When so many companies switched to remote work, it felt like complete, complex people were reduced to faces in boxes. With this, it became harder to take an extra few moments to understand who the people I work with are — their motivations, creative ethos, or aspirations. To bring humanity back into the people behind the work, we hosted an event called Museum of Us — an immersive way to learn about one another. Each person brought in an object that represented inspiration to them. These objects ranged from a pair of mittens to music posters to a felted miniature of their dog. With over 100 objects, we meticulously organized them into groups—sports memorabilia, crafts, books—and put them on display until everything found its place.
We then did a gallery walk through our collective museum. People quietly milled past dozens of cherished stories, until eventually, we walked to our object, and people took turns sharing the significance of their object with the people at their table. This did two important things: 1. It introduced people to an entirely new group of people outside just their team or discipline and 2. It served as a catalyst for conversation about someone’s 17-year study of the stars or longstanding relationship with sewing. Moreover, we were able to cross-pollinate ideas about what inspired us, sharing books, movies, projects, and mediums that meant everyone walked away with new creative fodder to chew on. What does your team’s “museum” look like?
2
Look back to move forward
Working in tech right now can feel almost dizzying. Personally, I can't think of a time I’ve felt pressure to move faster or adapt quicker. With so much focus on emerging tech and forward momentum, it can be all too easy to forget to pace ourselves and self-direct thoughtfully. During Re:Inspire, we spend a portion of the event looking back in time. This is inspired by a practice in dialectical behavioral therapy called opposite action . Opposite action encourages us to do the opposite of things as whatever our emotional impulse is telling us to do (eg: instead of putting all of our energy into planning for what’s next, what if we take inventory of where we’ve been?)
Enter the “Pinterest Grannies.” Two of my coworkers who have been at Pinterest for over 10 years took the stage to not only give us a history lesson of the company and where we’ve been, but channeled their best Granny personas, complete with costumes and accents. Not only was the audience highly entertained, but we learned about the origins of this company—which started with a love of bug collecting , believe it or not. The history lesson was a poignant reminder of what has gotten us here and helped teams ground their aspirations around growth in what’s unique to us, our mission, and the value we are uniquely positioned to bring our users. In your own job, take just a moment to pause and think about where you’ve come from and why you are doing what you’re doing. It can be just the inflection needed to spark a bit of magic and make connections between past, present, and future.
3
Change up your medium
Part of the conference is also about helping folks rebuild their creative muscles, even if the mediums we use are different from their day-to-day discipline. I’ve found a fresh method of expression can help designers explore a problem in a new way. For example, if you are struggling to visualize something, try writing down the “story version” first. Or if you are getting lost in pixels, sketch your idea by hand for a bit. Even movement helps. Sometimes, I will take a topic from work “on a run” with me, and work through the problem while in motion and in an altered brain state. This year at Re:Inspire, we pushed the edge of our mediums of expression. It ranged from creating thoughtfully crafted TED–style stories to Ikebana floral arranging to hip hop dancing to abstract cake decorating. Something unexpected happened while we dove into these new mediums: people started working together in new ways. They planned (“How can we perfect this breakdance move?”), they brainstormed (“Which flowers best tell the story of surrealism?”), and they solved problems (“How can we get this monster cake to stand on its own?”).
These questions might seem silly in the context of work, but the process of working together on a creative problem is 100% transferable back to our day-to-day. In fact, taking the pressure off and just focusing on creating the perfect monster cake, might be just what teams need right now. Creativity begets creativity. The more we nourish our creative muscles, the easier it is to apply it in other capacities. The art of creative translation from idea to artifact can help be as useful in the form of a cake as it can be in a creative brief.
4
Draw inspiration from ecosystems
Finding inspiration can be a little less obvious in the day-to-day operations of supporting a business. I’ll admit, it’s not always easy for me to see the magic in budgets or compliance training. At Re:Inspire, we hosted a panel on just this topic—can organizational needs be just as inspiring as community or creativity? What emerged from the conversation was a rich conversation about living systems. My colleague Amy shared, “Organizations are like organisms. They’re constantly changing. There are new antibodies and new nutrients. How do you keep an organism healthy?” In the natural world, there is a phenomenon called emergence , which occurs when individual components come together to form complex systems. Out of those systems, behaviors arise that are not evident in the individual components themselves. We see this with flocking birds when they create murmurations or even the cells in our bodies when they work together to fight off disease. When I think about natural systems, it becomes easier to see the workplace as such a living, breathing ecosystem as well, and the operational side is one of many ingredients to keep that ecosystem healthy. Systems (organizational, financial, educational, etc.) are what connect us and the backbone of what lets individual talent shine. The next time you feel like you are drowning in process, ask—what is this process affording me, my colleagues, or my company?
5
Connect to craft
Broadly speaking, I encourage people to look at three things when finding meaning in their work: 1. Cause —the mission you are working towards 2. Community —the people you work with and 3. Craft —the skill behind what you do. The last ingredient invites the question: When you think about your job, how would you define your craft ? Answering this has gotten murkier with the rise of the generalist and the prevalence of AI filling in gaps in our own skillset. When I started design school, the iPhone did not exist . Visual design was at the heart of my discipline. I studied the color wheel, obsessed over ligatures, and spent hours on exercises exploring the interplay between positive and negative space. But in a world where anyone now can create an entire brand in seconds, are these skills still valuable? I’d argue—as much as ever. Re:Inspire encouraged designers, program managers, researchers, and writers alike all to reflect on the depth in their craft. While emerging technologies like generative AI provide amazing resources to help us explore new ideas, they are not the idea. They are the tools. One session brought depth to how color works—the emotions elicited by color, brought to life with a watercolor exercise about analogous color pairings. This methodology was what inspired our latest design language, now in the Pinterest app today.
Chloe explains how color works on a risograph machine
This activity was a timely reminder that not all craft can be replicated by a machine. In today’s landscape, how would you define your craft and your unique contribution as a practitioner?
Parting thoughts
We can let the beating drum of our day-to-day work fatigue us, or we can see the underlying opportunities for inspiration beneath it all — from the people that we work with, to the mediums we choose to express our ideas, to the dynamic, complex ecosystem we work within. In a moment in time marked with so much uncertainty and suffering, finding beauty and meaning in our day-to-day (yes even our work), seems like the least we can do to bring a little more light into the world.
Inspiration
Culture
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