Monthly Archives: July 2015

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Uncategorised

#MakingLondon – a first person account

Guest post by Kasia Wojcicka, Making London participant and marketing assistant

On Saturday 18th July the weather in London was particularly beautiful. It seemed to be a sign that what we wanted to discuss on that day was good and important for the city. The ‘Making London’ event at Stockwell Street Building attracted a large group of creative individuals interested in identifying points of urban crisis and looking for solutions to them. This day of talks, workshops and creative thinking, designed to develop a community-friendly environment within the city, was an initiative of Creative Conversations and an interdisciplinary collective, the XDs.

The discussion panel was opened by Fran Boait from Positive Money who delivered a convincing speech about the mechanisms behind money creation. This not-for-profit organisation based in London aims to challenge the current status quo in our city – the highest personal debts in history, unaffordable housing system and high unemployment – which all have roots in the monetary system. It came as a big surprise to most of the ‘Making London’ participants that only 3% of money is physically released by The Bank of England, while the remaining 97% gets created digitally in a form of loans and disappears as soon as we repay them. Positive Money is campaigning to change the national financial system in order to create a fairer and more stable economy for the benefit of and not against the public. Many questions arose during this talk. We wondered how much sovereign money we actually needed. Society is obsessed with money. It is now socially deviant to be a citizen and not a consumer. But maybe money should only be an option? After all, it is merely a measure of value and not the value in itself. By supporting local Positive Money groups in London we could all attempt to have an impact on this issue.

Another example of excellent team work, which creates changes for the better, is The November Project. Their concept, a boat, created to become an arts hub, run by zero carbon tidal powered technology, will not only be community friendly, but also a green-energy solution. It will offer a money-saving alternative while eradicating the use of damaging fossil fuels from Thames River. So far, however, it has met with a lot of scrutiny and negativity from the local authorities. Everyone agreed that we should not let projects like this sink – they benefit us all. The title of Moira Dennison’s powerful speech –‘Thinking Globally, Acting Locally’ – could not be more true in our times.

Following the creative projects theme, Sydney Levinson from Barry’s Lounge gave us a lot of useful, metaphor-packed tips. He point out that every creative practice should be sustainable – run with not only Mary Poppins’ fun and Hannibal Lecter-like passion but also an underlying business model that is sound. It is important to be resilient in order to deal with plans going wrong. Nearly every project is based on collaboration with other people, whether on purpose or accidentally. To be successful, we need to trust each other to ‘catch the brick’ before it falls on us. However, not every piece of advice given by others is useful, so it should be carefully tested against our own business model. Creators of projects need to be like the Babel Fish (in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)– using a separate language when talking to their audience, compared to with funders and different again with collaborators. Sydney himself calls himself a ‘babel fish accountant’. He shared with us a number of great examples of playing by the rules of the environment in his creative practice. A very memorable one was House of St Barnabas at Greek Street in London – on the top floor it runs an academy teaching the homeless to work in the hospitality industry, on the ground floor they find employment in a busy Soho club.

During the speeches a graphic scribe visually summarised the speakers’ main points as well as the participants’ own ideas and concepts which emerged from the discussion. We realised that the way out of our powerlessness might, in fact, be acting local. We asked ourselves – is planning created to avoid mistakes, or maybe it comes out of them? The communities want value – but who is going to create it – the government, the council, or maybe businesses, networks or even just the individuals?

The talks were followed by the Mapping London exercise, during which participants shared their memories, values and issues about living and working in London on a gigantic map of the city. It created a picture marked by unique, personal experiences. Often the perceptions of one place were extremely different from each other – some people were happy to have managed to leave it, while others claimed it to be their haven.

Once we mapped our own experiences, J. Paul Neeley invited us to think a little less literally and see the world around us through metaphors. Yossarian, a creative search tool, provides an alternative to traditional internet tools, such as Google or Bing, which limit us greatly by coming up with stereotypical explanations, slogans and telling us what to think. Yossarian invites us to find new meanings and rethink what we already know. Doing a number of searches with results ranging from only slightly lateral to serendipitous and infinite in their possibilities, encouraged us to use metaphor and creative thinking more, while learning about the world around us. After all, knowledge is power but imagination is more important than knowledge.

We then, with the help of Giles Lane of Proboscis, looked at outliers in communications, social behaviour, health, work, leisure, housing and transport-related issues currently visible to us over the horizon. We highlighted them in a graphic form and started looking at what potential impact they could have on us and the city in the future, in which new directions we may go, as everyday commuters, rental tenants, NHS patients or social media users, and discussed the emergent themes, many of which oscillated around isolation, tension, privatisation and searching for alternatives for practically everything, in the context of over-massification, the need for sharing and global, rather than national, thinking. Based on our findings, we created story cubes with six key words describing the themes in connection with critical concepts, such as standards, efficiency, labour, infrastructure, logistics, energy or waste. We then placed the cubes on our map of London in areas most affected by these factors.

In an experience design workshop led by Nicholas O’donnell-Hoare we worked in three teams  with the task of designing a piece of disruptive technology that did either good or bad.  We often make bad decisions in terms of finance, climate change, healthcare or policies without realising the hidden reasons for this. In order to think beyond our usual mindset, Nicholas presented us with method cards which had three categories: motivation, accessibility and habits. We shortly discovered that planning is much easier if we consider what motivates us – the piece of technology could be instantaneous – something that happens straight away, when we get an instant reward for using it, it could also be imminent, if the result is easier to notice, more obvious, or it can tap into immorality. Another category was accessibility – the scarcer a device is, the more or less impactful it can become. If something takes too much of our time – we may give up on it, if it’s too expensive, it might become impossible to buy. On the other hand, it might in fact be seen as a desirable product. To connect these insights to current issues, we could ask – if solar panels were twice more expensive, would they be more popular in climate change tackling? Would people see them as a must-have object of luxury? The last category connects to our habits – routine is one of the key factors in our life – it is common that we want to know what is going to happen on a Sunday morning, but we might also change our actions based on various triggers – boredom or stress could turn us into smokers! We realised that it is much easier and fun to design a piece of technology which will be bad for us, than go through the complicated process of designing one with a good effect. Playing the bad designers helped us release our dark side in a creative way and see how much manipulation we are subject to in everyday life.

During the final mapping workshop we were asked to put the results of all sessions onto the map and draw connection points. Based on mapping these experiences, the participants discussed the points of crisis and potential actions that could be taken to challenge them. We came up with a unique urban tapestry, which represented the memories, needs and hopes of real London inhabitants. It is much easier to realise our problems when we see them right in front of us!

The ‘Making London’ event gathered a group of very creative and open-minded individuals from a variety of backgrounds. We managed to come up with many problems, which could be discussed further and solved in the future. Some of them were very simple and could be sorted within a few days. Future ‘Making London’ events will concentrate on finding points of action and implementing the solutions into the city life. Many participants were impressed by the openness and ability to listen to each other of a group of people who have never met before – a value which should not be taken for granted in a world, where often individuals with a different perspective are not listened or even heard.

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

Can Design get to the Heart of what Matters for Communities?

To begin to answer this question we first need to take a step back and consider what design actually is? Design is one of those funny words that talks both about process to design and products the design within the same word.

We are surrounded by design but our experience of it is often limited to the way we use, own, buy and even desire products. However it is the way these products are created and the reason why they have come to be that is often the more compelling story. These reasons (or insights) are developed during the design process and can exist even without the product themselves. They impact the way we understand people’s values and needs, allowing us to design for specific groups of people. If we take this insight and use it to develop new systems, experiences or even new relationships to our needs, it can be a powerful tool for social change. When we look at design as a process, an engagement or an interpretation, its potential is also much wider. This is not something new; there are entire sectors of the design industry devoted to this kind of process-based design thinking, design research, or even design making. Fields such as social design, experience design, service design or systems design are all examples of the way that design can be used across a wide range of industries to rethink everything from health care to politics to technology & innovation.

However understanding what design means is only one half of the question. To drill deeper we should next consider how design can be used, by both designers and non-designers, within a specific community to tackle complex issues that need a range of expertise and experience. The key to this is giving everyone an equal playing field and language to communicate. In order to do this a community-based design process must be both intuitive and reproducible. If it is not intuitive, people will spend so much time trying to work out how to apply it that they will not be able to drill deeply into the issues they originally wanted to tackle. If it is not reproducible then – as soon as the original designer leaves – the network could collapse and no further action would be possible. One approach is to use a design toolkit. These can be useful if a community wants to try a design process for the first time. There are many available on the market but, although they can be useful in getting to solutions fast, they also (through their design) fix the level of response you can give and peoples roles within the process. This is charted in great depth by Lucy Kimbell in her blogpost Mapping Social Design Practice: Beyond the Toolkit.

Another approach to working with communities of designers and non-designers is to use Metadesign. Metadesign is a process that aims to flatten hierarchies and develop methods which allow everyone within the group to actively learn from the knowledge and expertise of one another. Within the article Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: Enriching Participatory Design with Informed Participation Fischer uses the term underdesigning to describe the focus of metadesign. It aims to limit the control of the designer and allow flexibility and evolution of ideas by creating conducive “environments and not the solutions, allowing… [people] to create the solutions themselves” (Fischer, 2003). This allows for the fusion and fission between individual and communal goals and gives the design process space and flexibility to evolve within any given community in a specific and clearly situated way.

DESI_ROAST_EVA

From a design perspective, this is what we are aiming to do with Making London. By breaking down some of the boundaries between the University of Greenwich and the local community we can use design to help understand our social role as an institution and the challenges we are all facing in an ever-evolving London. The event aims to weave individual needs and values into a collective understanding and to co-create ideas for how the creative industries can continue to innovate in an increasingly corporate and financial capital. This will be challenged within three distinct workshops and framed through a large-scale mapping exercise. We will draw out these design ideas in order to be further developed within subsequent events. The workshops will give everyone the opportunity to engage deeply with what matters to them about living and working in London, mapping out the intersections and points of crisis within their local area. The workshops will use design processes to explore how metaphor can be used as a tool for rethinking problems, help us to imagine the fabric of the city in order to envision uses of data for the near future and try out some fun methods for making complex things simpler and influencing peoples’ decisions towards the social ‘good.’

The first of our #MakingLondon events is this Saturday the 18th June, join us by registering at: https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

View our MakingLondon Programme here!

creativity, Markets and Communities, Research, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Experimental publishing, copyright laws and Mix03

 

I have had a fascination with publishing and its potential most of my life, so much so that I was Head of Art for a small publishing company for nearly four years alongside my teaching commitments. I am very interested in the new space opened up by the advent of digital publishing and all of the new business models that are emerging.

It could be argued that everything nowadays is publishing: the social streams in which we document every part of our lives for a variety of audiences as well as our blogs. We need to be careful about what we write in these digital spaces as we are just as responsible for the comments we make, defamatory statements or intellectual property infringement as the traditional and mainstream press. As Alex Newson with Deryck Houghton and Justin Patten point out, we can’t cite ignorance of these laws as our defense. Even high profile comedian Alan Davies had to pay £15,000 in damages to Lord McAlpine to settle a libel action over a tweet relating to false child sex abuse allegations in 2013. We are all fast becoming published authors, even if we are not very good ones.

It was with this interest and an awareness of the published nature of our modern lives that I went to Mix03. Co organised by one of our key Creative Conversations  The New Space of Publishing speakers, Kate Pullinger, the Mix Digital Conference at Bath Spa was held over 3 days and explored the various worlds of publishing looking at transmedia, ambient literature, reader participation, moving from analogue to digital, pedagogy, interactive forms and digital poetry to mention only a few areas.

Mix03 had speakers that explore and innovate in this fast growing sector. I was able to listen to exciting key note speakers, such as award winning novelist and game creator Naomi Alderman, Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen of Visual Editions and Ju Row Farr from Blast Theory. There were also interesting projects presented such as Colin Thomas’s Making Digital History and Claudio Pires Franco‘s research on new media forms of the book: both experimenting with the more interactive components in the digital publishing space.

It is the copyright laws, and their relationship with fan fiction and participatory writing projects that I find particularly interesting and while not under the remit of this conference, as it was more experimental and creative, they have an impact on all of us amateur journalists/authors/commentators/artists.  In particular Fan Fiction as described by Ciaran Roberts has interesting and complex issues around copyright. For experimental participatory writing projects such as Sarah Haynes’ The Memory Store mutual respect and recognition is a pre-requisite as the project requires participation in order for it to evolve  ‘Participatory projects are about both process and product.’ and so the copyright laws need to evolve in order to protect and not hinder these new projects and participants. 

The great joy of such conferences is not only to meet like minded people but also to meet people that have a viewpoint at odds with your own, or come at a subject from an entirely different angle. This allows you to reflect and think more deeply about your subject. For me new collaborations and new projects were sparked and new ways to think about existing projects were suggested. I came away feeling wonderfully invigorated, as though my brain had taken a much needed holiday to somewhere new and exciting. It is a conference that I would heartily recommend and I will be booking myself in for next year’s when the option arises.

Markets and Communities, Past Events, Uncategorised

The Marketisation of London – 3 ideas for change

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In a recent article in The Observer, Rowan Moore provided an incisive and sobering analysis of the ever increasing marketisation of  London, which he diagnosed as ‘suffering from a form of entropy whereby anything distinctive is converted into property value’.  The resulting landscape is one in which more and more land is colonised by new builds designed ‘not to make homes or communities but as units of investment’. Nor is it only homes that are under threat, businesses and social amenities are being evicted from land that is then redeveloped as yet more luxury housing, whose absent owners will not sustain the shops and businesses that remain. As Moore points out, this process is destroying social and commercial life, the very markets, pubs, high streets and communities, that make London desirable and attractive to outside investment. ‘London is eating itself’.

What can be done? The problem is immense, the issues are numerous and there are many potential solutions. Here are three ideas, from three different sources, on how to do things differently:

1) Change the monetary system

According to Positive Money, a not-for-profit organisation based in London, the money that we’re actually using for most of the economy is money created by banks to fund loans. That money only comes into existence at the moment that the loan is created, but from that moment on it starts to create profit in the form of interest for the bank.  In the words of Positive Money this means that ‘the entire money supply is on loan from the banking system’. It relies on the creation and perpetuation of debt and ‘transfers £200 billion a year from the public to the financial sector’ in the form of interest. So, while many consumers and businesses are struggling to service unsustainable levels of debt, ‘if we all paid off our debts, the current economic system would collapse’.

The solution Positive Money proposes is to remove this power to create  money from the banks and give it instead to ‘a transparent, democratic, accountable body’ with the result that money is created in the public interest and spent into ‘the real economy (i.e a broader range of business and other economic activity), rather than into property bubbles and financial markets’.

2) Don’t leave it to the politicians, join a movement (or start your own).

In his book How to Change the World, John-Paul Flintoff makes clear that we cannot and perhaps should not expect the government to provide all the solutions. He points out that history is created through everyone’s actions and not just those of a few well known and important people. He stresses how important it is not to fall into defeatism or to passively accept things as they are, if we feel they should be different – something that it is quite easy to do, as long as our situation remains uncomfortable, but not actually unbearable.

Instead we need to recognise our own agency and the full significance of the fact that democratic governments are meant to enact the will of the people, not the other way round. People need to make their will known, which may involve action, as well as reaction. Movements may grow into political parties, but political parties rarely start movements. Flintoff has lots of practical suggestions as to how act on these insights. Community organisations, such as those that belong to Reclaim London and projects like The November Project are already acting.

3) Frugal Innovation

In his book, The Frugal Innovator, Charles Leadbeater explores the possibilities of innovation that is lean, simple, social and clean. His view is that ‘innovation needs to be recast and rethought… a new ethic, less about a proliferation of products and features, more about meeting basic needs well’ and adds that ‘frugal innovators… do not seek to create from scratch a product which might bring them fame and fortune. Instead their frugal approach to innovation relies on ‘ ‘re’-thinking: reuse, recycle, repurpose, renew’.  This is the kind of innovation that is providing radical solutions in healthcare, housing, education and arts and culture in developing economies where there is no private or public money to invest in the kind of complex and expensive approaches that ‘the developed world’ is used to. In these societies, necessity is the mother of frugal innovation.

However, Leadbeater makes the point that the developed world also needs frugal innovators, both to address the need for sustainability, which current systems cannot meet, and also because society is becoming more and more unequal:  ‘the share of economic growth that goes to workers and wages rather than investors and capital has fallen… even if economic growth were to return to pre-recession levels, it would not materially benefit those on median incomes.’ If economic growth is not the answer for the poor and the squeezed middle classes, frugal innovation might be. Leadbeater provides many examples, from a range of sectors and countries, to show how this might work.

For more ideas and to share your own join us at #MakingLondon on the 18th July. Register at https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

 

creativity, Uncategorised

Creativity and the Digital

Guest post by Gregory Sporton, Professor of Digital Creativity, Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts, University of Greenwich and author of Digital Creativity

People of my generation have lived through quite an astonishing set of transformations of the idea of creativity.  As a young man embarking on a career in the arts, I was warned by my high school teacher that the best skill I could learn was how to fill in application forms for unemployment benefit.  The purpose of the sort of education I had was to create obedient and passive citizen-workers, and the very idea of the exercise of imagination was deemed an existential threat, about which at least someone felt they should intervene.

It turned out not be entirely true.  Certainly my work as a dancer never made me rich, and it was trivialised no end by those who thought it an eccentric career, but it also extended to me a range of opportunities and challenged my notions about the world in a way that a life in a factory or an office would never have been able to do.  For this alone, I have always thought of the exercise of the imagination as nothing other than a good.  The great art and artists I encountered offer alternative versions of life to the conventions of the societies in which I have lived.  Their work, at its best, asked questions about the accepted ways of a given culture, or reflected it through prisms that brought to light its properties. This is no small thing, and whilst there was not bountiful  material reward, there was a sense of morality (even if the work of art wasn’t always moral in a conventional sense).  But change was on the horizon in the shape of technologies that could help formulate and distribute ideas and image simply and quickly, and thus different notions about the role and function of creativity began to crystallise.

Whilst the education system continued to pump out graduates with the type of skills the industrial revolution required (mostly a capacity to show up on time and not revolt against doing repetitive tasks), the industries they thought they were servicing disappeared.  The principle of industry as the designated destination for the youth of industrialised societies did not die with them.  Instead, there has been a recalibrating of purpose, towards something formulated as the Creative Industries, the implication in its title one of reassurance about matching the productive efforts of those who were sent off to factories or mines.  The achievement of modern education in sticking with the industrial model despite the passing of its relevance is really quite something, reflecting a profound conservatism about the usefulness of such an education. But, as modern, developed economies lighted upon the potential for developing their intellectual and imaginative capacities as the new means for economic growth, the education system and the notion of creativity itself has had to change.  At stake has been jobs and futures, and a marginal practice has come to be seen as a key economic driver.  Having been combined with digital technologies, it is a powerful economic force as well as the cultural one it has always been.

There has come to be an association between notions about creativity and ideas about the application of technology through the creative industries.  The very phrase ‘creative industries’ suggests a significant change from the time when creativity, especially as manifested in the arts, was a domain of free play, thoroughly untrusted, and certainly of nugatory economic value.  Just how a widespread practice of creativity should manifest never seems to me to be entirely clear.  Given the rusted-on ideas that continue to dominate our education system, it is no surprise that the certainties and forms provided by the technology industries should form the aspiration and practice of what it is to be creative.  Thus an idea like ‘creativity’ comes to look a lot more like conformism than one would automatically think.  This manifests in all kinds of ways, from Cascading Style Sheets to Apple’s ‘Swift’ programming language: the means of creating is determined by the platform that is provided.  When encountering software interfaces that are designed for use by creative practitioners, we see the same levels of control, the victory of the usability engineers over the potential to experiment, as evidenced in that most deterministic environment of all: Creative Suite.  In its online iteration, it now learns more and more from its users, and can update itself to get rid of the workarounds or user choices, all in the interests of improved usability.

Art becomes the means of escaping the technological determinism that might be thrust on us by the corporates, but it may also suggest modes of operation or processes that might improve our relationship with technology rather than simply being dependent upon it.  The tendency of technology to systemise the creative is hardly surprising in an environment like the Internet.  Engineers, as Jaron Lanier has regularly pointed out, prefer interoperability to fidelity, and thus their conventions reflect this value.  But there is a more powerful undercurrent in the technology-driven version of creativity we now have that places an emphasis on improvisation and flexibility within a given system. This is especially true because those ‘given’ systems are latterly thrust upon us without giving us much choice, having been hooked in the first place into proprietary platforms.  Those who engage become users rather than creators, constrained by the protocols of technology if not by the mores of society.  That this is at the expense of narrative and expression, previously powerful tools in the artist’s arsenal, is not something the creative industries are particularly concerned about, but this must surely be where the road ends.  The ersatz creativity offered in the interface is only an extension of the decision trees and critical paths allowed us by the engineers.  What artists can really offer are those alternative versions, the parallel universes and a utilisation of technology for more than economic purposes.