“Curiosity starts with interest and grows into passionate investigation.” Brene Brown

What does it mean to be curious?

According to author and researcher, Brené Brown, curiosity and interest are not the same thing, but they are reliant on each other.

The pattern goes like this:

mild interest —> a little knowledge—> growing curiosity—> passionate investigation

Brown defines the terms this way: “Interest is a cognitive openness to engaging with a topic or experience. Curiosity is an emotional state…Curiosity means recognizing a gap in our knowledge about something that interests us and becoming emotionally and cognitively invested in closing that gap through exploration and learning. Curiosity starts with interest and grows into passionate investigation. Interest is a cognitive function. With curiosity, our heart and head are both invested in closing that gap.”

In other words, interest happens in the head; curiosity happens with both head and heart. You have to get emotionally invested, excited, about learning more. Learning more creates more questions and fuels discovery of new knowledge.

How do we move from interest to curiosity?

According to the article, The psychology of curiosity (1994) by Carnegie Melon Professor of Economics and Psychology, George Lowenstein: “Curiosity is the feeling of deprivation we experience when we identify and focus on a gap in our knowledge.”

This means we have to have some level of knowledge and awareness of the gap in our knowledge before we can get truly curious. Brown says, “Simply encouraging people to ask more questions doesn’t move people from interest to curiosity. Curiosity and knowledge-building grow together.”

So as we learn a little, we can move from interest to then being truly curious and then start to dig deeper. This means that the more questions we have about a topic isn’t a bad thing, but is a reflection of our genuine curiosity about the topic and a willingness to engage to try and fill in that knowledge gap. Having more questions actually means we’re learning!

What does this mean for product design and research?

As we continue to build on our knowledge of topics through research, we will all move from interest to knowledge to increased curiosity which leads to more passionate investigation of all the things we want to know. As we learn more, we will naturally have more and better questions. Better questions yield better answers which creates better products.

Counterintuitively, having more and better questions is a sign that we are learning and becoming more invested in the topics at hand. So get comfortable asking questions! Not knowing is where creativity begins.