Dalkin dips into Pinterest at the farmers’ market or in the back of an Uber—whenever she’s hungry for ideas. Valero Doval

Gaby Dalkin, whose blog, What's Gaby Cooking, gets half a million uniques a month, is a Pinterest obsessive. On one of those hot, airless Los Angeles days that melt makeup, ice cream, and spirits, we meet in her kitchen, where she prepares a colorful salad and discusses her devotion to the popular social media platform. Dalkin attended culinary and pastry school before working as a private chef. (Her former client, a pregnant Jessica Simpson, hailed her “slutty brownies” on a Tonight Show appearance.) She develops all her recipes from scratch, depending on what's fresh at the farmers' market: “You could give me five ingredients and say, ‘Make something,’ and I'd be able to.” These days, Dalkin gets many of her ideas from Pinterest; she searches the app whenever she has a free moment. On an airplane or idling in traffic in the back of an Uber, she says, she'll open Pinterest “and decide what I want to cook for the next couple of days.” She compares the inspiration hit she gets to a shot of caffeine.

When Dalkin, who has a light, fizzy, almost caffeinating energy herself—she's like the human equivalent of Coca-Cola—is shopping for ingredients at the farmers' market, she often checks her Pinterest boards for ideas. (She currently maintains 86 boards and has more than 43,000 followers.) If she wants to make a burger recipe, say, she'll go back and refer to an image she's saved, asking herself what she can find at the market that's going to make her food “equally if not more beautiful.” The picture serves as a kind of visual prod, a jolt to her inventive inner chef: “And I'm like, oh my God, I need purple basil to put on top of this … Asian pork burger!”

Gaby Dalkin Maciek Jasik

Anyone who has used Pinterest or, like me, simply lurked around on it—and some 70 million people have—knows that if you are blocked, stumped, or in a slump, a visit to the site or app will likely offer an inspirational spark. In fact, this is the company's raison d'être. “Our mission is twofold,” says cofounder Evan Sharp, who started Pinterest with CEO Ben Silbermann in 2009. “The first half is to help people discover the things that they love. The second half is to enable people to go out and act on those things, to make them actually part of their life.”

The first half of the Pinterest mission is fairly straightforward. Users, known as pinners, can search within or contribute to Pinterest's immense database of images, or pins, of which there are more than 30 billion to date—the number has increased by an astonishing 50 percent in the past six months. Then they pin these images to thematically arranged pages that are like virtual corkboards or mood boards. The result is a visual collection of whatever tickles a pinner's fancy, whether that's anime characters, European travel destinations, vintage tabloid magazines, or race cars. Pinners can also follow fellow users with similar tastes and interests. By doing so, they are curating a personalized stream of images that constantly refreshes itself. Mia Blume, Pinterest's product design manager, has a name for users' tendency to periodically return to, and draw ideas from, this image stream: “inspiration snacking.”

According to Pinterest, the company's mobile segment grew 50 percent in 2013 and now makes up 75 percent of all usage. This growth, Blume says, means that Pinterest has “a unique opportunity to connect you to inspiration anywhere, anytime”—on the bus, in line at the bank, in the waiting room at the doctor's office.

Mimi Goodwin Maciek Jasik

The fact that so many users are on mobile also makes it easier for Pinterest to fulfill the second part of its mission, which is to motivate pinners to act on all that found inspiration: to cook the exotic dish, build those office bookshelves, get the crazy layered haircut. When it comes to this second part, our mobile phones are indispensable, arguably even essential, tools. After all, how many of us cook, sew, garden, shop, saw, or hammer while planted at our computers? “If you always had to have your computer with you,” Sharp says, “you just wouldn't use the service. For us, it's really about the phone being part of your daily life, and Pinterest being there with you.”

Because they are always with us, our phones (and the apps on them) facilitate a kind of fluid creativity that in the past few years has come to define our daily lives. Instagram has rendered us amateur photographers, taking pre-meal pictures in fancy restaurants or shooting deep in nature, midhike. Twitter has made us epigrammatists trading bons mots. Vine has made us videographers filming bite-size documentaries. And Facebook has made us chroniclers of the everyday (some might call this artful complaining). For many of us, these kinds of activities, once the province of elementary school art class and summer camp, have been cordoned off since childhood: They were acceptable weekend hobbies, perhaps, but not a seamless extension of our quotidian lives. Yet now our phones have put our once-latent imaginativeness and inventiveness on tap.

Pinterest-on-mobile is, in some sense, just one more avenue to creative expression. But it's also a particularly illustrative example of the way we currently dip into our imaginations, passions, and hobbies in the course of our days. “I probably go on four or five times a day,” says Mimi Goodwin, an avid Pinterest user whose fashion and DIY sewing blog, Mimi G. Style, gets more than 1.2 million pageviews a month. “It's where I get my juice.”

Goodwin’s Pinterest boards include All That Glitters, Leather & Lace, and Shoe Porn. Valero Doval

On a side entrance to Pinterest's San Francisco headquarters, a bright orange sign with white lettering reads: CREATIVITY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER. And indeed, just around the corner, in a sprawling warehouse space decorated with midcentury-modern furniture and neon posters (STOP TWEETING DUMB SHIT), the Pinterest staff toils in an open floor plan amidst the happy clutter of art supplies in frequent use. The company treats its mission of creative inspiration with high seriousness. Yes, there's the requisite tech-office game room with Ping-Pong and foosball tables, but there's also a working letterpress on which much of the colorful office signage is made. (There's even a company event called Printerest.) Various art projects are displayed around the office. One wall is covered with Legos; a 3-D cardboard sign in filigree cursive reads: DISCOVERY IGNITES THE PASSION TO CREATE. The vibe is art-school studio meets Crate & Barrel showroom meets the set of Friends.

MIA BLUME CALLS THE PROCESS OF BROWSING ON PINTEREST “INSPIRATION SNACKING.”

Given that its mobile use skyrocketed last year, Pinterest has trained its creative sights on its mobile offerings. “Crafting delightful, powerful mobile experiences is a huge focus for our team,” Blume says. The company has begun designing new features and updates for smartphones first, then adapting them for the web. In 2013, for example, it introduced a shortcut that allows pinners to tap the phone screen for a menu of options (Pin it, Like it, Send it). And pinners can now swipe from right to left to advance quickly through a feed of pins or swipe up to view Related Pins. In late April, Pinterest launched a discovery tool called Guided Search. With a single directional input, Guided Search helps steer pinners toward what they're looking for, even if they don't quite know what that is. If, for instance, you want a new couch but don't know what kind, type in “couch.” You'll get various topics accompanied by images: Comfy, Covers, Sectional, Modern, Vintage. Simply tap one of them (and on successive refining filters) until you find what you're looking for. Finally, also in late April, Pinterest introduced Custom Categories, which allow you to set up a feed around any interest, no matter how obscure. Blume showed me some of her own categories, Sacred Geometry among them. I laughed—I'd recently bought a book on the topic—and we had the kind of you-too? moment we might have had if we followed each other on Pinterest.

Eddie Rossetti’s most popular board, Extra Flair, has 2,335 pins and nearly 12,000 followers. Valero Doval

Ultimately, of course, pinning is a form of collecting, and collecting can be an integral part of the creative process. Think of Freud in his study surrounded by his antiquities, or Vladimir Nabokov, not-so-amateur lepidopterist. Researchers who study creativity—that elusive, almost mystical phenomenon—note that Pinterest, as a locus of digital collecting, can be a useful imaginative aid. That's because collectors often recognize patterns in their collections. And as Robert Root-Bernstein, an expert on creativity and coauthor of Sparks of Genius, tells me, “All art is the creation of patterns from basic elements.”

Pinterest can certainly be a useful tool for spotting patterns and making connections. Sure, there are plenty of people for whom it functions as a pictorial shopping list. (Interestingly, the percentage of female pinners closely parallels the percentage of US household spending controlled by women: somewhere between 70 and 80 percent.) Then there are those who use the platform as a place to bookmark things, assembling boards that, like a kitchen bulletin board, are free of any aesthetic principles. But for many pinners, Pinterest functions as a kind of creative helpmate or muse.

Take Edgardo “Eddie” Rossetti. A self-described menswear addict who lives outside of Hartford, Connecticut, and works as a social media specialist, Rossetti can rattle off details of an outfit with the speed and authority of a sports commentator talking stats. Before joining Pinterest, he used to cut out pictures from magazines and post them to his college dorm walls. Early on, he primarily used Pinterest to keep track of favorite styles. But he came to view the platform as a creative opportunity, a place where he could post photos of outfits he liked or, as he does frequently these days, those he has assembled himself. People seem to be responding to the affordable, accessible ensembles he pins: His Pinterest page has more than 89,200 followers.

Mimi Goodwin underwent a similar creative transition. Before she joined Pinterest, the walls in her design studio were “covered in magazine tear sheets, swatches of fabrics, prints that I loved, whatever I could find.” But she found herself overwhelmed. “I would go to my walls, and it was too much,” she says. So she re-created those walls on Pinterest, and she turns to this virtual collection whenever she needs an idea—she posts a new DIY sewing project every week. “Some weeks I've got nothing, then 15 minutes in it's like, I gotta make this,” she says. She often brings an image she finds with her to the fabric store. “You usually can't take a corkboard with you. Having Pinterest on your phone is crucial.”

Pinterest mobile not only enables pinners to find inspiration wherever they happen to be; it also enables them to stockpile ideas. This is how Matt Sutton, a special education teacher from Wheaton, Illinois, uses Pinterest. He checks the app on his phone during the in-between moments of the school day. “Just about any time I have downtime,” he says. He calls Pinterest a gold mine for teachers and estimates that 70 percent of his ideas and projects come from the database: “If I find something, I can put it in my back pocket for later.”

Eddie Rossetti Maciek Jasik

When it comes to the second part of Pinterest's mission, helping pinners close the gap between ideation and action, the mobile version can act as a blueprint or set of instructions. Rossetti, for example, once took an image he'd pinned (a close-up of a denim shirt, its cuff hemmed with a red bandanna) along with his sewing machine to Jo-Ann Fabrics, where for $10 he received a tutorial on how to reimagine the look as a patch for his jeans. He snapped a picture of the final product and uploaded it to his Pinterest board from the store. At Piston & Chain, a community motorcycle workshop in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, Bret Blount also frequently accesses Pinterest via smartphone; he says it makes it easier for him to walk through ideas with his design partner to fabricate custom parts. They layer a screen of a prototype or interesting image on top of, or next to, the actual motorcycle so that they can “collectively ideate,” as he puts it. “Images do come from other sources and can be printed,” Blount says, “but Pinterest mobile is the easiest to quickly access alongside the bike.”

Blount, a lanky fortysomething with artfully mussed hair, makes “little micro-inspiration boards that are very specific.” He calls up one he's named K Bike Inspire. Blount recently bought an old K-bike—a motorcycle that BMW debuted in the mid-'80s—with the intention of customizing it and began pinning to his board ideas for different projects. Each motorcycle, he explains, contains a multitude of smaller projects—wiring, suspension, headlights. He clicks on an image of a deconstructed, copper-colored K-bike that has been stripped down and rearranged into clean, diagonal lines. “I found this on Pinterest, and I thought it was beautiful and simple,” he says. “This was the inspiration.”

Blount's motorcycle board, like those of any dedicated pinner, is a precise evocation of his taste. As anyone who has ever created a mixtape, a playlist, or a collage knows, a collection necessarily conveys the sensibility, viewpoint, and aesthetic of the person who arranged it. In Rossetti's words: “These images reflect who you are. You're not going to pin something if it doesn't mean anything to you.” This notion of identity, of a collection revealing characteristics of the collector, is the real magic behind the Pinterest experience. Many pinners report that the page they assembled surprised them by illuminating personal qualities, tastes, or preferences they were only dimly aware of when they started pinning. The images they collect allow them to recognize or discover aspects of themselves they've never been able to put into words. Gabe Trionfi, a developmental psychologist who is now a user research manager at Pinterest, says, “When you put enough objects together, you suddenly see a pattern that you didn't even necessarily know you were building, and you have this moment of self-discovery.”

Maybe we're all narcissists at heart, but this journey of self-discovery, of self-excavation, can feel as creative as any artistic endeavor. It may be, at root, why Pinterest is so popular and why Pinterest's mobile incarnation is more popular still. Our mobile phones are unequivocally the most personal piece of technology we carry. They are arguably the most personal anything we carry, more intimate even than a purse or wallet. They're a diary, a portfolio, a canvas, a notepad, a camera, a tape recorder, even an appendage of sorts. (If you have ever had your phone ripped out of your hand, you understand what I mean; it feels as violating as having your arm twisted or your glasses snatched from your face.) All that phones contain—photographs, notes, apps, videos, emails, contacts of colleagues, family, friends—amounts to a reflection of who we are. But since they also help us record and execute our ideas, plans, and dreams, they are vehicles that steer us to who we want to be.

Perhaps this is why Pinterest is so well-suited to our mobile phones. What we create on Pinterest is not always synonymous with who we are. Often, it's synonymous with who we want to become—with our hopes, our dreams, our future gardens, motorcycles, haircuts, selves. Mia Blume explains that for many pinners, Pinterest is aspirational. “It's about curating their future, defining what the possibilities are,” she says. “Whether it's what I'm going to cook for dinner or how I want to dress, how I want to shape my career or decorate my home, you're basically designing your future.” And that, you might say, is the ultimate creative act.