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Business Models, Creative Business, Markets and Communities, Past Events

How can creative businesses be both ethical and profitable?

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The relationship between cultural value and economic value lies at the heart of the creative industries and is crucial to the lives and work of every artist and creative practitioner. The value that creative businesses aim to create is not only financial, but also cultural and social and they are often motivated by strong ethics. This has a significant effect on how they function as businesses.

It is however a complex and varied relationship, much contested and, perhaps, often misunderstood. David Throsby attempted a thorough examination of this relationship in Economics and Culture.[1] It is also central to more recent research carried out by NESTA[2]  and the AHRC [3] .  Such enquiries and analyses have begun to develop a more expansive and richer language and set of concepts for thinking and talking about the connection between cultural and economic value. Our discussion panel ‘How Can Creative Businesses be both Ethical and Profitable?’ (University of Greenwich, 3/5/17) sought to contribute to this ongoing discussion, with a particular focus on social value, understanding the latter to constitute an important form of cultural value.

The three contributors to the panel each occupy a particular position with regard to cultural and economic value:

Sheeza Ahmed Shah is the co-founder of The Up Effect, a crowd funding platform for social enterprises. Before they accept a business onto their platform, The Up Effect staff scrutinize its business and social impact plans to determine whether they are mutually supportive and add up to a coherent package. They are looking for businesses with a clear social purpose, which also have a viable and scaleable revenue model. Sheeza is clear that social impact is only achievable and sustainable to the extent that a company can make money and grow.

Seva Phillips manages NESTA’s Arts Impact Fund, which supports cultural organisations in developing their social aims and making sure that the cultural value that they create has social impact. Seva stressed that, to be successful in this endeavour, organisations need to be clear about motivation – why they want to achieve a social impact in the first place, outcomes – what exactly the change is that they want to achieve, and accountability – how they will evaluate whether they have achieved these outcomes.

Florence Magee is Head of Artist Development at SPACE and Programme Manager of the London Creative Network. Her role is to help individual content creators, such as artists, photographers and crafts people, to strengthen the sustainability and increase the capacity of their businesses. The majority of people she works with do not currently make a living from their creative practice alone, but sustain it financially through income from other work. Sustainability and growth in this context mean helping people to maintain their arts practice and to develop its profile, but not necessarily to derive their main income from it.

Our panel thus represented a broad spectrum with regard to the aims, objectives and context of cultural production with a social purpose and it became clear that certain aspects of business and creative production mean different things in different contexts. While Sheeza’s platform helps companies to grow in terms of scaleability and expanding their size and customer reach, for the individual cultural content makers that Florence works with, growth does not so much mean expanding the size of the company (many of her clients are sole traders) as increasing the cultural value of their work – in terms of their profile, the venues in which they exhibit, the publications in which they publish and so on. This increase in cultural value, she points out, is what will increase financial value. Furthermore, while the companies who crowd fund on The Up Effect explicitly define themselves as social enterprises, most of the practitioners who Florence works with would not categorise their practice as having a social purpose, despite the fact that ethics and politics may deeply motivate their work and how they approach it. Their values may be embodied and expressed in their work but they would not generally produce a specific plan for the social impact of their work. Social value is likely to be implicit rather than explicit.

At the same time, Seva pointed out, ethics is becoming something that consumers and audiences want to buy into. Ecological sustainability, fair trade and employment practices and social activism have the potential to translate into financial value and to be advantageous to a company in the marketplace. Large corporations are as aware of this as are social purpose startups. This is why Bank of America Merrill Lynch are investors in NESTA’s Social Impact Fund.

Both Seva and Sheeza stressed that social enterprise is in fact becoming a crowded market and it is vital that part of the social impact that a social purpose company achieves is to tell its story effectively and to make this story a central part of its brand. At the same time, this story needs to genuinely reflect the core mission of the company, not be simply a marketing strategy. This is not easy to get right and is something that large corporations often get wrong in social media campaigns, as Colette Henry recounted in a previous Creative Conversation. There are, in general, some obvious pitfalls inherent in the monetization of social value and care must be taken to get the balance right.

Another issue that arose in discussion was the lack of equitable reward structures to encourage the development, sharing and exploitation of original and innovative ideas. Creativity and innovation are buzzwords in contemporary culture, not only in the creative arts, but in government and across all business sectors. However, it is often the case that, while artists and other innovators generate cultural and social value through new ideas and practices, the financial value is realized by other agencies, which have the resources to scale up and monetise these ideas. Sometimes this may be the result of a fruitful and equitable partnership, but, as ideas are not in themselves protectable intellectual property, this is often not the case.

Some Conclusions and Further Questions

As expected, the wide ranging discussion threw up more questions than it answered. Social impact has clearly become a central focus for discussions about the relationship between cultural and economic value. At its most basic level, this is because evidence of social impact has become something that customers will pay for, making it an easily identifiable and measurable signifier of the correlation between economic and cultural value. This is largely a positive development. Adam Arvidsson has written about the way that businesses may become more and more dependent on ‘productive consumer publics’ for their value in the marketplace, giving such publics the power to ‘set the values that are attributed to consumer brands.’ [4]

However, if ‘economic impact, often defined more narrowly than conventionally understood by economists, has become the principal way for proponents of arts and culture to argue its economic importance,’ [5] so too the application of too narrow a definition of social impact and/or an overemphasis on its monetisation or cost effectiveness (an important consideration with regard to the introduction of the Public Services Social Value Act) would be unhelpful. This would have the effect of straitjacketing, rather than developing and encouraging creative and social practice.

At the same time, the prevalence of discussion around community interest, social purpose and social impact could and should encourage creative practitioners and businesses to think more about how relevant this might be to what they do. Many creative practitioners and companies may not immediately think of themselves in these terms, but, on reflection, might find that they do operate according to strong ethics and are creating social value or have the potential to do so. Building this more explicitly into their strategy could help their business and the local and wider communities of which they are part.

Questions that seem particularly pertinent to explore further, with regard to how creative enterprises might practically develop their cultural, social and financial value, include:

    • Cultural content producers tend to channel creativity and develop original ideas at the level of content, while pursuing traditional business models for their sector, e.g seeking public funding, focusing on increasing the cultural value of their work through existing institutional frameworks. Should they perhaps also be focusing on developing original and creative approaches to their business model itself? If so, what might these be?
    • What more equitable reward structures might be developed to encourage the development, sharing and exploitation of original and innovative ideas? How might artists and other creative practitioners develop forms of expression for early stage ideas and creative practices that give them a status as cultural assets with a definable and tradable value?
    • Crowd funding is an example of how digital technologies can be used to catalyze and motivate users to come together to form a customer base that is simultaneously a community. What other ways might there be to achieve a scalable convergence of market place and community ? For example, a multitude of online hosting platforms exist – for websites, video, audio, designs, online stores etc. – to facilitate marketing and distribution of creative work. To what extent are these helping creatives to create viable businesses? Where are the opportunities for increasing cultural and social impact and profit? How might such approaches perhaps address the two questions above?

[1] Throsby, D, Economics and Culture, C.U.P 2001

[2] Bakhshi, H, Measuring Cultural Value, NESTA 2012

[3] Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P, Understanding The Value of Arts and Culture, AHRC 2016

[4] Arvidsson, A, ephemera: theory & politics in organization, Volume 13(2): 367-391, 2013

[5] Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P, Understanding The Value of Arts and Culture, AHRC 2016

 

creativity, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing

Writing & Collaboration

The romantic myth of the artist as lone genius is an enduring one. Writers such as Boltanski & Chiapello and Brouillette have written persuasively about the way that this ideal has merged with the individualistic culture of capitalism to produce the contemporary model of the worker as autonomous creative individual, embracing the values of flexibility, innovation and self-sufficiency.

However, this myth actually erases much of the process and social context that characterise the act of writing. In fact, writers have always depended on the collaboration of others in a multitude of ways. They have depended morally, creatively and financially on family, friends and lovers to support them in their endeavours (famous examples include William & Dorothy Wordsworth; Percy Bysshe Shelley & Mary Shelley; Anais Nin, her husband Hugo Guiler & her lover Henry Miller). They have frequently developed their work as part of a collective movement of mutual inspiration (the Bloomsbury group, the Surrealists, the beat poets). Writers also regularly collaborate with agents and editors; screenwriters collaborate with producers, script editors, directors, actors, distributors, financers. And of course writers need readers. Dickens was acutely aware of his readers, writing for them in installments, and going on frequent public reading tours.

So it did not take digital culture to make writing an interactive and collaborative phenomenon. However, it has made such collaborative processes more visible and more scaleable. As Henry Jenkins points out, contemporary cultural practices, such as social media and fan fiction, have made online writing and reading feel more like a back and forth conversation than a one way process of production (by the writer) and reception (by the reader). On social network writing sites, such as Wattpad, writers actively engage readers in the development of their work. Many writers engage extensively with their reader community via social media and new business models, such as crowdfunding, also bring many active collaborators besides the writer into the writing process.

Our recent panel on The Writer as Catalyst & Collaborator featured five writers, whose work has explicitly involved the contribution of others: raising questions about how such processes might characterize writing in general. Four main themes emerged:

the changing role of the reader: readers are becoming more actively involved with texts and engaged with writers. Sarah Haynes, creator of internet collaborative fiction, The Button Jar discussed her particular interest in creating work that involves alternating between writing and reading. Visitors to the site can both read the stories of others and upload their own stories. Novelist Jean-Paul Flintoff crowd funded his book through the publisher Unbound. He worked with an improvisation group to develop the story and, later in the process, his funders provided feedback on drafts, which resulted in some important changes to the final work. These examples from new media storytelling and new funding models are part of a wider groundswell in the importance of reader communities. Across the publishing landscape, the relationship between readers and writers is becoming more interactive and collaborative.

 

 

the writer as conductor/editor: the role of the writer is also expanding. In her work, Haynes recasts the writer as editor/conductor and sees her role as being to devise a narrative frame for the interaction of other writers and readers that will facilitate ‘organized serendipity’. Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, who together researched and wrote the short story collection breach – which tells the story of the refugee crisis through six voices based on interviews with refugees in Calais – join Flintoff in rejecting the idea of the writer as ‘sole presiding genius of a work of art.’

Maya Chowdhry, poet and transmedia artist, sees the writer as ‘a sign-writer illuminating the way, or a compass showing that there are many directions’. She explained how pro-active she needed to be in going out to find her audience and facilitating ways for them to get involved in the location based narrative Tales from the Towpath. Flintoff says he has followed the example of the editor of a newspaper he used to work for, who saw his job as editor as being like ‘creating a party that people want to come to’.

As they develop more interactive, collaborative relationships with readers and other partners, writers need to develop a clear conception of what their role is within the collective. There are a range of metaphors to choose from: catalyst, compass, sign-writer, conductor, editor, party convenor… each project may require a different label, but a guiding metaphor can provide an important direction for a project.

ethics of collaboration: our panel’s experiences suggest that, although these are crucial, there may not be a one size fits all approach. The ethics will be determined to a certain extent by the nature of the project. Transparency about the aims of the project may be one guiding principle. Popoola and Holmes felt it important to make their aims absolutely clear to the people they spoke to at the refugee camp in Calais. They explained that they wanted to produce a fictional work, to provide a different perspective on the refugee crisis, and that they would not be telling the refugees’ individual stories in any direct way. Instead their intention was to draw on them more loosely as material. The writers found that most people at Calais were happy to talk, because they were bored and frustrated and keen to make connections with others. This human connection was as, if not more, important to them than getting their stories told to a wider audience. Nor did those refugees who had now made it to the UK have any great desire to be identified with the book or to be involved in its promotion. They were happy that it had been written and hoped that it would interest and move readers, but it was more important to them to get on with rebuilding their lives than to be identified as collaborators in the book.

Flintoff stated that, quite simply, ‘everyone needs to get something out of it.’ What ‘it’ is, however, may not always be fully defineable in advance. There are many different reasons why people might get involved in a project. Some may have a story to tell. Someone else might want to contribute in a small way to a big project they think is worthwhile. People might want to learn new skills, have new experiences, meet people. They might have a life goal they want to achieve or simply to take part in something fun. Furthermore the answer may develop and change as the project itself develops through the collaborative process. Therefore, although the writer as conductor needs to provide a clear framework for engagement, there also needs to be flexibility. As Chowdhry points out, rather than assign a role to collaborators in advance, it may be necessary to allow them to find it through their participation of the project.

A collaborative approach to writing has much in common with collective ventures such as performance, co-design and community activism and can draw on insights from these fields. The ethics of collaboration also depend on an acknowledgement of the process as productive of more than a work of art or a commercial product, as discussed below.

writing and reading as social practice: the informality, relationality and embeddedness of the writing practices discussed by our panel remind us that writing and reading are not aesthetic activities bracketed off from the rest of life and society. Popoola and Holmes said that they had made some lasting connections with the people they met in Calais and were still in touch. This was partly related to the book, but also to the friendship that had developed between them. The process of researching refugee experiences had thus led to two distinct outcomes: to new relationships and understandings of the world on the one hand and to a book of short stories on the other. They were equally important. Haynes and Flintoff also commented on the way that the structures within which they were writing led to and indeed were dependent on the development of human relationships.

Forms of writing and reading, which blur the boundaries between professional and social activities (social media, blogs, life writing, crowd funded works, interactive fiction, fan fiction) remind us, among other things, that professional writers draw on and develop personal relationships through their writing; non-professional writers can have huge public influence, and that both writing and reading can be variously and also simultaneously professional, political and leisure activities.

Watch all video clips from this and other creative conversations here

creativity, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

The Writer as Catalyst and Collaborator 27th April

Writing is self-expression, but it is also much more. Writing can start a conversation, issue a call to action or stand as an act of witness. Writing may be the work of a unique author, but it can also be interactive and collaborative.  Our panel will discuss the potential of writing as a form of action and collaboration.

Panel Members:

Olumide Popoola & Annie Holmes, co-authors of forthcoming book breach,  a short story collection, which tells the story of the refugee crisis through six voices based on interviews with refugees in Calais.

(c) Deborah moses-Sanks
Photo (c) Deborah Moses-Sanks

Nigerian-German Olumide Popoola is a writer and performer. Her other publications include essays, poetry, short stories, the novella this is not about sadness (Unrast Verlag, 2010) and the play text Also by Mail (Edition Assemblage, 2013).

Olumide’s interests include creative/critical investigations into the ‘in-between’ of culture, language and public space. She is an associate lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College London.

 

Jean-Paul Flintoff, author of How to Change the World

Screen Shot 2016-03-22 at 12.54.27Jean-Paul Flintoff is the author of five books, published in 16 languages. His latest is a novel, which he crowdfunded with Unbound, and the writing of which involved collaboration with theatrical performers, fellow authors, and many of the individuals who pledged money to the book.

www.flintoff.org  

@jpflintoff

 

Sarah Haynes, Head of Media Production at the Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University and creator of collaborative fiction The Button Jar

SarahHaynesFollowing a career in video production Sarah moved into new media and for a number of years was a multimedia developer at the International Centre for Digital Content, Liverpool, in a team working on CD Rom, web and digital games research projects.

Her research explores the opportunities digital technology affords for collaboration in writing fiction and the potential for new reading experiences.

Sarah is currently working on The Memory Store, an online narrative set in Liverpool in 2115. Readers are invited to contribute their own writing, influencing the story and expanding the narrative universe.

http://www.buttonjar.co.uk/

 

Maya Chowdhry, poet and interactive artist
MayaChowdhry-reading-med-cropped

A poet and Transmedia artist, Maya’s writing is infused and influenced through her work for radio, film and theatre. Her collaboration Tales from the Towpath at Manchester Literature Festival was shortlisted for the 2014 New Media Writing Prize, and her recent digital poetic work Ripple was shortlisted for the 2015 Dot Award. She is currently working for Lets Go as a Digital Artist, making interactive theatre and completing Fossil, a chap book of her poetry.

http://interactiveartist.org/

@MayaChowdhry

www.linkedin.com/in/maya-chowdhry

https://www.facebook.com/maya.chowdhry

 

Join us to discuss the following questions and more:

What is the role of a writer and writing in society? Has this changed?

Do new technologies offer new ways of writing?

How might we think differently about the relationship between writers and readers?

Is it possible to have too much writing in the world?

 

Date and Time: 27/4/16. 6pm Welcome Drinks, 6.30pm Panel Discussion

Venue: Stephen Lawrence Gallery, 10 Stockwell Street, London SE10 9BD

Attendance is free, but you need to register at Eventbrite

Business Models, Markets and Communities, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

How to Build Communities – Speaker highlights

If you missed our Building Reader Communities Panel on 2nd March 2016, or want to revisit the discussion, wise words and valuable insights from our speakers can be found below. (You can also read a short report on the key insights we took from the event here)

Sci-Fi author Kate Russell shares her experience of community building and gives her 5 rules for building a digital presence

‘It takes 3 years to establish a community’:  Auriol Bishop, Creative Director of Hodder & Stoughton, and writer Alex Pheby discuss their experiences in publishing and as co-directors of the Greenwich Book Festival.

‘Community is a tangible business asset’: Alexis Kennedy, Creative Director of Failbetter Games.

‘Reading communities are the public & the private sphere colliding’ Meike Ziervogel on building a community around Peirene Press.

Panel discussion on building communities in publishing, interactive fiction and games

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

What #MakingLondon Made

This blogpost is the final reflection on the event Making London, held on the 18th July 2015 at the University of Greenwich (see #MAKINGLONDON – A First Person Account for full breakdown of the day).

The desire to run a design-led community engagement event like #MakingLondon was ignited by our Creative Professions & Digital Arts department settling into our new home in Stockwell Street, Greenwich. As we became habituated to our new setting and began enjoying the high tech equipment and creative environment, I couldn’t help but reflect on the vintage market place that, on weekends, used to take over this small piece of industrial land with its haphazard collection of furniture, books, clothes and traders. By reflecting on this I began to question what this shiny new RIBA nominated building does to the community here in Greenwich; does it offer new opportunities, collaborations and cultural activities, or is this just what we would like to see reflected in our possession of this space? Are we giving something to the community or displacing it through continued building and development? Through the series of Creative Conversations events we have begun to challenge ourselves, and allow ourselves to be challenged by others, to map out the impact and constellation of networks that have been shifted, altered and re-formed through our occupation of Stockwell Street.

From personal experience we also began to question ‘what does it mean to belong to such an amorphic city as London?’ and ‘whether this alters our sense of belonging and our ability to form connections with those around us?’

mapping

Fig 1: Our original Making London brainstorm considering everything from agile belonging to Pop-ups.

To consider this we have begun by looking outwards to see whether design could have an impact on the way that London is currently being shaped, and to question the relationship forming between building developments, financial markets, local communities and the creative industries. It became a trajectory that sought to give people a voice and space to reflect on and construct new perspectives on their own personal London-based issues. By bringing together a collection of diverse people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines; from game developers to political activists, from ages 20 to 65, our aim was to use design methods and workshops that would allow them to creatively rethink their relationship to London. These activities, writing and thoughts were spatialised within an oversized map of London. Attendees were invited to inscribe their most powerful memories of living in London, what they value about London in its current incarnation and the growing issues of living in a city that has become filtered through it being a financial hub.

MapLRg

The map data could be divided into four main themes; these are London in Flux, London Debates, Londoners on the Go and London Pride (further analysis of these can be found in the Making London report).

For the full information:

Read the report on our Making London Workshop

Watch footage of Making London, including interviews with participants (5 Minutes)

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.

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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!

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

 

Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

MAKING LONDON

 

We live in challenging times.

In the past seven years we have seen the world change. Every political action seems to be marked by a new word that has become ingrained into our very consciousness and fed into every sector of our lives – recession.

This intangible concept has impacted us socially, culturally and psychologically. We have seen people taking to the street and using their bodies to occupy spaces in protest. We have seen riots and we have seen a decline in the value of social support. We have seen the monetization of our services and a property market spiraling out of control. The city, which once took us in and gave us a home, feels somewhat distant; our sense of belonging skewed by fear of the rent rising or loss of employment.

I say this not because I hate London. I love London and could not imagine living anywhere else. It is a city full of creative inspiration; full of opportunities to re-make yourself on a daily basis without fear of social pressure or judgment. It is a place of discovery. Of education and culture, a place of history but also a place of technology and innovation. It is a place, which flourishes in spite of it all, where markets ebb and flow like the tide of the Thames popping up across the city and creating temporary communities; farmers markets, craft markets, Christmas markets, pound-a-bowl markets and many more.

Markets are vital to human societies, as they allow us to exchange goods and services between us, rather than every individual having to produce and do everything for him or herself. As a result, the marketplace becomes an arbiter of value, ‘discovering and representing the desires of society’. This is why the idea of the free market can be championed as a moral cause, because it represents people’s freedom to obtain what they want in life.

However, this idealized vision of the marketplace is not the reality we are currently living in. Real estate and business in London are currently driven by a worldview, which sees money not as a measure of value, but as, in itself, the ultimate value. It is very easy to make this mistake, since money acts as a proxy for something that is a constant variable – i.e what is important in life and society. However the effects are serious, since it is leading to the marketization of every aspect of society and to a conception of the market, which is very narrow and prohibits the many other kinds of exchange and interaction that might be possible.

Making London is a design-led event, which encourages you to step away from your workplace and see things with fresh eyes. It aims to bring together a community of designers, cultural movers and shakers, local businesses & charities, policy makers, planners et al. Using design methods, this workshop based event will take you through the process of considering the things you value about living in London and the issues you face. These will be collaboratively explored and built upon with the aim of developing some group insights into potential projects for social change and creative interpretation.

It is in essence a social hackathon, exploring, through design and making new approaches to collaborative problem solving.

To attend this event, register at: https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

See our E-flyer below, click for further information!

MakingLondonE_Flyer(large)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This event is organised in collaboration with The XDs (experience design group). The XDs are an experience design collective with 200+ specialists, an eclectic bunch of creatives, psychologists, data scientists and designers.

Other people & groups who are doing work in this area include:

http://sophiehope.org.uk/projects/

http://www.brave-new-alps.com/

http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/

http://positivemoney.org/

http://metabolicity.com/

http://www.neweconomics.org/

http://potlatch.typepad.com/about.html

http://mediaculturalwork.org/members/