Making art can pop your brain out of habitual ways of seeing and thinking. Here are three accessible, no-talent-required art activities — to do alone or in a group – to help your brain notice what it has been ignoring.

Most museum advice tells you to plan ahead, pace yourself, and hit the highlights. This post offers something different: what actually happens in the brain when we look at art, and how artists — and one fictional grandfather with an urgent mission — approach the experience of seeing.

A visit to the Uffizi left me less interested in the paintings than in the people looking at them. What I noticed got me thinking about how the brain actually sees, what happens when we stop observing, and why it matters beyond the walls of a museum.

Muddling may sound like a poor way to make decisions or live a life. But the art of muddling through – in the sense of taking incremental experimental steps based on experience, intuition, and opportunity – can serve us well when journeying through a complex and uncertain world.

A chance remark by a painter I admire sent me down a rabbit hole from which I am only just emerging. And now that I think about it, that is exactly what this post is about. What is the difference between meaningful exploration and creative procrastination? How can we resolve the tension between chasing the new and buckling down to work? Is there a magic allocation of time or is there perhaps something better?

Understanding is good medicine. When we know what’s going on we are less stressed, less likely to become mentally fatigued, and better able to make decisions. Our brains are generally good at building the mental maps that support understanding, but it helps immensely if the environment or information itself is organized to make map-making easier. What does this look like?

Meredith King, one of reDirect’s 2025 fellows, shares how the SEE framework shaped her project with Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations (OSI). She created a community engagement guide to help staff turn a mobile nanogrid into a learning lab to help citizens take steps toward more sustainable living.

The ping-pong conversational style of information sharing and anecdote exchange seems to dominate my conversations these days. And while there’s nothing particularly wrong with this, these conversations often leave me wanting more. Is our need to share drowning out our need to be understood and to understand others? Is our default conversational style making us inadvertently miss out on opportunities for deeper connection and growth? How can we literally reframe the conversation?

In any kind of caregiving – whether for plants or our own creative selves – it is the cumulative effects of the environments experienced day in and out that impact us most. Good intentions are fine but having environments that support the creative process is what allows our creativity to blossom. What does creativity need and how can we create an environment that helps meet those needs?

Uncertainty brings its own kind of mental pain. And the temptation to avoid it – even when it is part of learning and discovery – can be hard to resist. Whether we cling to familiar shores out of a sense of self-preservation, love, or entitlement, we often end up limiting our own opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth. How can we change our environments or our own mindsets to support us while we swim in deeper waters?

People are designed to be curious just like greyhounds are designed to run. Both can probably still survive if those natural tendencies are caged, but they are unlikely to flourish. How does curiosity help us be our best selves? What can we do to free our curiosity if we find it has been caged through neglect, complacency, or an inhospitable environment?

Just like the pain of hunger is a signal to feed our bodies, the pain of boredom is a signal to feed our brains. Boredom cries out for mental engagement but it doesn’t tell us how or with what. The big businesses of the attention economy are more than happy to provide quick and easy short term boredom balms, but these rarely enrich us. How can we learn to listen to our boredom and reach for something that is more nourishing in the long run?