We recently connected with Tiago Aragona and have shared our conversation below.
Tiago, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
I see creativity as a muscle that has to be trained every day. It is not a single spark that appears in a special moment, but something that grows through consistency and movement. I keep creativity alive by constantly generating ideas, testing them, prototyping, and even failing. Often an idea that doesn’t work still opens the door to another that does, and I’ve learned to value that process. A lot of my creative processes start without a clear direction, and evolve through time.
For me, creativity thrives when I am in motion. I find inspiration in culture, in the energy of the street, in conversations with people, and in the experiences that take me outside my comfort zone. I have always been more introverted by nature, but over time I chose to place myself in situations that challenged me, because that is where I learned to understand the stories I wanted to tell through my craft. Craft, art, and technology are the canvas I pick to communicate my ideas.
As an Argentine living in the United States, I am constantly inspired by the contrasts and everyday details I encounter in both cultural and physical landscapes. I try to approach them with the curiosity of a child seeing the world for the first time. That way of looking keeps creativity alive for me, because it transforms the ordinary into something worth exploring and reshaping into new ideas.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am an Argentine creative technologist, designer, and digital artist whose practice moves between code, narrative, and cultural critique. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, I spent two years in New York completing my MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School, and I am now based in San Francisco, working as a Creative Technologist at Google Brand Studio via Magnit.
My practice is rooted in the belief that design and technology should place humanity at the center. I don’t see creativity as a sudden spark, but as a muscle that gets trained through iteration, failure, and constant movement. Every prototype, every piece of research, and every interaction I design begins with a couple of questions: is this going to improve people’s lives? Is this going to have a bigger impact on a system? Who does this benefit and who is left out? To answer all these, I immerse myself in research, observing, listening, and engaging with the stories of the communities I design for. I believe that technology should be a tool for empathy, accessibility, and cultural reflection, not an amplifier of inequities or biases. In a world in which hostile design is becoming the norm, we, as artists, should question what is taken for granted.
Much of my work explores the tensions between technology, culture and society. I approach design holistically, considering the systems we live in and the structures that shape them. I am interested in how technology often perpetuates hidden, colonial and cyclical power structures, whether through exploitative labor, resource extraction, or biased datasets, and how art and design can reframe, or resist those dynamics. This perspective shaped Artificial Us, one of my latest projects in collaboration with the Chilean artist Matías Piña, which interrogates GenAI’s representational bias and the neo-extractivism of data and natural resources in Latin America. Using AI models fine-tuned with self-curated Latin American images, we created interactive environments that invite audiences to reflect on the asymmetries of who benefits from technology and whose stories are filtered.
At the same time, I move fluidly between experimental installations, interactive media, creative coding, and strategic design. My projects have been exhibited in various spaces across New York, including the Microsoft Garage (Sensescape Exhibition), Parsons The New School (Mosaic Exhibition), Inter NYC Museum and MIT (Reality Hack Art Grant). At Google, I apply this same spirit of experimentation to collaborations that blur the line between design, engineering, and storytelling, prototyping ideas that bring technology to life in ways that feel human, intuitive, and alive.
Art remains my personal space of reflection. I create digital works that track my state of mind, explore narratives of identity, and blur the line between technology, design, and art. While design, for me, is about solving real problems for others, art is where I confront my own journey, explore my heritage and reflect on my experiences as a Latino navigating a new society.
I see technology as an evolving language, a medium to create critical, participatory storytelling. My goal is to invite people to engage with technology not passively, but actively, as collaborators in shaping meaning. In a world where design too often defaults to efficiency, profit, or exclusion, I am committed to using my craft to expand empathy, challenge dominant narratives, and imagine alternative futures.
You can see more of my work at www.tiagoaragona.com.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Looking back, the three qualities that shaped my journey the most are resilience, curiosity, and what I’d call a refusal to take the world at face value.
Resilience mattered because every creative path is filled with failure, rejection, and unexpected turns. Projects collapse, ideas don’t land, but the ability to keep going, to see failure as iteration rather than defeat, is what sustains growth. Every idea, even if it doesn’t work now, leaves a learning for future projects. The only way to be creative is by doing.
Curiosity is what keeps me moving. I have never seen creativity as something you wait for, but as something you actively pursue. It means immersing yourself fully in what surrounds you: culture, people, technology, or experimentation, and diving deep instead of skimming the surface. Curiosity drives me to learn new tools, step into unfamiliar spaces, and question how things work beneath what we take for granted. Take yourself on creative dates, talk to people that you admire, reach out to that person that seems unreachable, don’t be afraid of rejection. The best stories to tell or problems to solve are out there waiting to be discovered.
Finally, non-conformism has been essential. I don’t mean rebellion for its own sake, but rather the conviction that we should not take systems, technologies, or cultural narratives as fixed. We need to interrogate them, ask who they serve, and imagine how they could be different. This mindset has guided my practice, from questioning bias in AI to rethinking how audiences interact with art and design.
My advice for anyone starting out is to build resilience by treating failures as prototypes, be curious and constantly expose yourself to new perspectives, and practice non-conformism by asking deeper questions about the systems around you. That combination not only fuels creativity but also ensures that your work has impact beyond aesthetics. Art and craft can be both visually stunning and meaningful. There is a sweet spot between those two aspects that will certainly make your creative practice stand the test of time.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
That is a fantastic question. There is a growing trend to underestimate formal education, often because of debt or the feeling that people don’t learn what they expect. For me, though, formal education has been very important. It gave me the time and freedom to idealize projects, to experiment without the pressure of clients or profit shaping every decision, and to build ideas that were purely exploratory.
At the same time, I started working early during my college years. Balancing school with real-world projects was the perfect combination. In class, I could push boundaries and imagine new possibilities, while at work I was grounded in constraints, collaboration, and execution. That balance taught me how to carry creativity into practice.
Of course, none of this was just about formal spaces. What made the difference was complementing education with relentless curiosity. I taught myself constantly, watched endless YouTube tutorials, and said yes to projects I wasn’t sure I could pull off. That mix of structured learning, hands-on practice, and self-driven exploration has been the most helpful in developing the skills and qualities I needed to grow.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tiagoaragona.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiagosdesign/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiagoaragona/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TiagoAragona
