Pelayo Arbués

Cultivating Curiosity for People

7 min read

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • Curiosity is usually framed as intellectual hunger: the drive to learn new tools, explore new fields, stay ahead of change. That kind of curiosity has served me well as an engineer and a researcher. But over the years, I came to the conclusion that it is not the curiosity that has shaped my life most.
    The curiosity that mattered most is harder to cultivate: curiosity for people. (View Highlight)
  • Fifteen years ago I sat on Nina Valkanova’s PhD jury at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, one of the panel approving her research proposal. I had just finished my own doctorate; she was starting hers. We spent a few hours in the same room. I read about her ideas, listened to her answers, and then we went our separate ways.
    But we stayed on each other’s radar. A comment on a piece of work. A message when something resonated. Brief, unhurried exchanges across years and continents, the kind that never feel like maintenance, because they shouldn’t. (View Highlight)
  • Recently, Nina interviewed me for Design in Flux, the series she co-runs with Miles Johnson about how design is changing in the age of AI. That conversation exists because of a curiosity Nina has never let atrophy.
    That, I think, is what a professional network actually is. Not a contact list, but a web of people who stay curious about each other over time and who show up in ways you cannot plan. It is the network that creates collisions and inflection points. It is my friend Nicolas Nova bumping into Professor Carlo Ratti, mentioning my experimental work on urban dynamics, and the next thing I know I am invited to pursue that research at MIT. In a recent interview, José María Álvarez-Pallete, the former president of Telefónica, reflected on the people who opened doors for him across his life, from his first job to the invitation to an event that changed everything. As he puts it:

    “La gente te va abriendo puertas, y estas puertas te abren la mente” (people keep opening doors for you, and those doors open your mind). (View Highlight)

  • Over the years I gave these moments a name: happy derailments, or déraillements heureux. I was on the tracks an engineer stays on, and through a series of small derailments set off by other people, I forked into the academic world. Today, after several of these inflection points, it is hard for me to describe my work in a few words.
    So here is a question worth sitting with. Think of a real inflection point in your life, and trace it back. Chances are it began with a person: a conversation with a mentor, a friend who pushed you to take a leap, the extra energy or knowledge that only reached you because someone else was in the room. (View Highlight)
  • I think about these inflection points a lot when students ask me how to navigate an uncertain world. I do not tell them what to learn. I tell them that being open, generous, and curious is what gave me the ability to move through constant change, because it kept me surrounded by people on the same journey. That network is where resilience comes from when you need it. And it is built slowly, through small moments of genuine interest in others, regular, or not-so-regular, catch-ups, and “this made me think of you” messages. (View Highlight)
  • That kind of curiosity comes with practice, and with the effort of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. My whole life I watched my parents talk to strangers and come back reporting “incredible coincidences”: the person in the next seat who had a friend in common, or who had once passed through Delémont, the village where I grew up. What they taught me is that we badly underestimate how connected we already are to one another. On a bus, on a plane, alone at an event or in a park, there is almost always a thread to pull. Like my parents, I have learned to pull it. It is a beautiful way to enter someone’s life: to learn about their circumstances, to see the world through them, without judgment, without preconceptions, without trying to convince anyone of anything. There is a literature on talking to strangers, and what it consistently shows is that we overestimate how awkward it will be and underestimate how much the other person wants to be approached. People like to be seen. (View Highlight)
  • I consider myself an introvert, and I think it works in my favor here: listening and observing are my defaults. When I listen, I pay close attention to the other person’s vocabulary, and I adapt mine to theirs. I borrow their words. The ones I do not understand become a way to learn more about the person, not just the topic. Over time I have grown better at asking the questions that move a conversation past small talk. A genuine question is the clearest sign that you are interested in someone. And as the exchange takes shape, it becomes a place to articulate what I do, to model my current thinking out loud, to test an idea and watch how someone reacts to it. (View Highlight)
  • Over time the connections multiply, and priorities shift. Family, work, pressure. It gets harder to tend to any of it. This is where the small gestures matter: the how-are-you message, the like on a post, the catch-up call, the drink, the one-to-one moment rather than the large gathering. The point is not to stay in touch with everyone. It is also learning to let people go, especially the ones who never ask a question back, and to protect the ones, like Nina, with whom, after years apart, it feels like you left off the conversation yesterday. (View Highlight)
  • And it is about constantly refreshing the diversity of people around you. In A Little More Social, the behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley opens with the idea of Homo socialis highlighting that our large brains likely evolved specifically to navigate complex social networks and cooperate with non-kin. So I try to cultivate the conditions for it. I create room for unexpected collisions with people who are not like me: different interests, different backgrounds, different perspectives, different generations. It is one reason I teach and tutor, and why I am writing this and sharing it. It is also why I co-created my own curiosity engine, the Pre-Alpha Club where I facilitate tertulias. A concept originally from Spain, a tertulia describes a regular social gathering of people to share their recent creations and talk about current affairs. Unlike a social media recommender system that filters people down to their existing affinities, the tertulia is curated for the opposite: complementarity. (View Highlight)
  • In the interview with Nina, I said:

    “Curiosity is the key to feeling comfortable with change. Not just for designers, but for everybody.”
    I meant it in the widest sense. There is a curiosity for technology that carried me as an engineer and a researcher. And there is a curiosity for people that quietly shaped the whole trajectory. The first helped me stay ahead of change. The second offers a resilience that comes from being surrounded by people on the same journey. (View Highlight)

Graph View

Backlinks