Binge-watching. Doomscrolling. Rabbit-holing. Brain-rotting. These, it seems, are the behaviors encouraged by our computers and digital devices—intoxicating masterworks of engineering that we stumble away from, glassy-eyed. It’s a sad state of affairs, especially if, like me, you grew up in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when digital technology was exciting and liberatory. Back then, Steve Jobs called the computer a “bicycle for the mind”; parents bought PCs hoping that their kids would become “computer whizzes.” The idea was that circuits and software could unleash our potential.

Today, of course, we associate screens with mindlessness, and computers with distraction and drudgery. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Gadgets are still great, and computers remain delightful. In fact, it’s easy to turn your personal tech dystopia into a utopia: all you have to do is shift from being a consumer to becoming a creator. We live in a golden age of digital creativity. Forget A.I.: you, yourself, can record an album from your sofa, or curate a photo-essay on the train. In that spirit, here are some of my favorite creative digital tools.

Sketching and Writing

Perhaps you’ve seen, on YouTube, videos of “infinite sketchbooks”—digital drawings that can be zoomed into seemingly forever, revealing worlds within worlds. It turns out that tablets aren’t just for Netflix: even a small model, like the iPad Mini ($699), can open up onto endless vistas when it’s equipped with a digital pencil ($119) and an app like Endless Paper (free). Tablets are always getting slimmer and lighter, making them better for watching than for drawing. But turning a tablet into an ergonomic drawing surface is simple: just get a drawing board ($45)—one of those slanted wooden surfaces that illustrators use. Add a book stand and a copy of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” ($24).

If a tablet is too distracting, there are other ways to make digital art. For years, I’ve been doing a lot of my writing and sketching using e-ink tablets made by reMarkable, a Norwegian company. The deluxe version, the Paper Pro ($629), has a big screen and can be expanded with a keyboard. But the Paper Pro Move ($449) is the size of a pocket notebook and lets you sketch in color. There’s no e-mail, web browsing, or social media on these—only a Kindle-esque e-ink display that feels paperlike beneath your stylus. (When my eight-year-old son and I are bored, I sometimes make sketches so that he can color them in and add to them.) I also find that writing in longhand on an e-ink device can loosen up one’s brain, and I’ve written many articles—including this one—on my reMarkable, eventually using the device’s handwriting-recognition feature to transform my scrawls into editable text. For those who like writing but want to get away from their work computer, this sort of freestanding writing device can be a godsend. The BYOK ($199) is a little portable screen that’s made entirely for writing; as its name suggests, you should bring your own keyboard, and a tiny, pleasantly clicky model like the Keychron K2 ($60) would be a good choice. The Freewrite Alpha ($349) is like a digital typewriter, and includes its own keyboard.

Music and Images

I was in college when the iPod appeared. In the two decades since, dedicated music players have almost completely disappeared. And yet, beneath the radar, music-making devices have proliferated. Today, there are zillions of cool little synthesizers and “grooveboxes” on the market, and they’re not at all difficult to use.

You can make beats with a Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator ($59), which is about the size of a deck of cards. You can compose lovely melodies and soundscapes with the Roland P-6 ($270), a sampler the size of a paperback book, with rechargeable batteries so that you can use it on the go. (The P-6 can be hooked up to its siblings, which include a synth, for $270, and a drum machine, also for $270, to form a synth-pop band.) Bigger units let you build whole tracks, with different parts playing in parallel. The Elektron Model:Cycles ($349) offers modern sounds and medical-device chic; the Sonicware Deconstruct ($399) lets you pretend your living room is Berghain. The most elegant grooveboxes are probably the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field ($1,999) and OP-XY ($2,299), which are like scaled-down music studios with Apple-calibre designs and batteries that last all day; the Field is better for keyboard players, while the XY works best for purely electronic music.

A computer or a tablet can, itself, become a musical gadget, with the addition of the right piano-style keyboard. The Arturia MiniLab 3 ($119) is a compact model that connects to your computer and lets you play, compose, and record in apps like GarageBand, which contain hundreds of free synthesized instruments. You can listen through the lightweight, comfortable Koss PortaPro headphones ($50), which weigh nothing but sound gorgeous, and record your songs with a phone app like Tape It, for listening on the go. If you know a lapsed musician, any of these tools could help get them back up and running—especially in combination with a lesson or two from an online instructor. I’m hoping to learn more about my synthesizers from Jeremy, at Red Means Recording, this winter.

Photography and Filmmaking

Aura Carver Frame 

Aura Frames

Everyone has a smartphone, and every smartphone has a camera; this means that everyone is just a step away from becoming a hobby photographer. Doing so is partly a matter of self-perception—you have to look at your pictures with a critical, artistic eye—but it also has to do with equipment. The Canon Selphy Printer ($159), which allows you to effortlessly print four-by-six photographs at home, can help bridge the gap between taking pictures and making photographs to keep. The Aura Carver Frame ($149), which can rotate through pictures you select, creates a place for your best digital pictures to live.

Giving someone a dedicated camera is like giving them a new form of self-expression. There are all sorts of cameras, and they suit different kinds of photographers—but don’t overthink it, since people can grow into the tools they happen to have. The Insta360 Go Retro Bundle ($320) contains an action camera (great for filming daredevilry and dynamic exploits) that can also be used as a pocketable point-and-shoot. The Polaroid Now ($120) is a stylish instant camera perfect for social butterflies. The Lomography MC-A ($549) is a 35-mm. film camera with autofocus. And the Panasonic Lumix L10 ($1,498) is a discreet but powerful model with a built-in zoom lens and options for “color-grading”—that is, giving photos or footage a professional, cinematic look.

Playing and Exploring

Playdate 

Playdate

Writing, drawing, music-making—an art form that combines them all is game design. Earlier this year, I bought our family a Playdate ($229), a handheld video-game console with its own easy-to-use game-creation tool, which runs in a web browser. My son and I had fun making a little game; we even moved beyond the browser-based editor, writing our own code directly (with a little help from Claude). And we also played Big Walk ($20), an unforgettable adventure from a game studio called House House. In Big Walk, you play together but on separate screens—I used a Nintendo Switch, he used his computer—solving puzzles while communicating almost entirely through systems of symbol and gesture that you improvise. It’s a video game that brings out new aspects of your own creativity and ingenuity—a perfect example of how humanizing technology can be. ♦