What is a ‘Creative Technologist’?

Except when I’m in London, telling people that I’m a Creative Technologist (CT) usually leads to the question of what that title actually means.
As a self described CT, this has often a bit of a challenge for myself – which is why I decided to write my Master’s thesis on the subject.
The TL;DR of it all is that the title is deliberately vague. Anyone who uses applied technical expertise together with creative problem solving methods (eg. different flavours of design thinking) may call themselves a Creative Technologist. And that vagueness is the discipline’s greatest strength, as much as it is a barrier to being recognised.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Ask ten Creative Technologists what they do, and you'll get ten different answers. In a traditional job market, that's a problem. Recruiters want legible titles: Senior Java Developer, UX Designer, Product Manager. These fit HR systems, command known salary bands, come with clear progression paths. "Creative Technologist" fits none of that. Every new room requires fresh negotiation.
During my research, I started calling this the Recognition Gap: organisations say they desperately need people who can bridge creativity and technology – the World Economic Forum literally lists these among the most critical skills of the next decade – yet their hiring mechanisms systematically filter those same people out. Research shows interdisciplinary candidates get rated as less competent than specialists. The label used is remarkably consistent: "unfocused."
But here's the thing: that's not a description of a deficit. It's a description of a mismatch.
Our professional infrastructure inherits the logic of the assembly line. It's built to evaluate depth within a domain, so it literally cannot see synthesis across domains. That worked fine when tools and industries were stable enough for a specialisation to pay off over a career. It stops working when technology moves faster than institutions can adapt – which, if you've been paying attention, is exactly the world we're in now. Tools shift faster than training can track. Employers write job ads asking for ten years of experience in things that have existed for three.
This is where the vagueness becomes a strength. The CT isn't defined by a toolset – the tools change too fast for that. What defines us is a stance: an exploratory orientation, a way of making sense of the shifting frontier by building things. The job title, the project, the industry – those are just temporary containers. I call them Deployments. In the past few years alone, my own Stance has been deployed as a teacher, a researcher, and a startup co-founder. Traditional career logic reads that movement as an inability to commit. I'd argue it's the actual capability.
Think of honeybees. Roughly eighty percent of foragers follow the waggle dance – precise instructions to known nectar sources. Efficient, predictable. But twenty percent ignore the dance entirely and fly at random. They look wasteful, right up until the flower field dies – at which point they're the only reason the hive survives.
Creative Technologists are the twenty percent. We look unfocused to systems calibrated for a stable world. But the world isn't stable anymore, and someone has to go find the new flowers.
The catch – and this is what most of my thesis wrestles with – is that this capability is worthless if nobody can recognise it. There's no CT curriculum, no licence, no shared vocabulary that travels between contexts. So we can't rely on credentials; we have to rely on demonstration. The prototype, the portfolio, the thing you can point at. In a field without gatekeepers, showing your work isn't marketing – it's the entire mechanism of legitimacy.
So: what is a Creative Technologist? Someone who treats adaptability, not specialisation, as their core skill – and who proves it by building, in public, over and over, until the world catches up with a category for it.
Which is, incidentally, exactly what this blog is for.

Adapted from my MA thesis (Hyper Island / Teesside University, 2026), researched through a twelve-week practice-based inquiry in Tokyo.