Power Collaboration and Creative Co-Creation — the new norm.
A story about one of the UK’s most powerful women in the Arts, me, and the re-imagining of the impact of collaboration and co-creation. My story starts here.
President Barack Obama’s 100 days festival was fast approaching. It’s 2009. I’d been asked by then Dr. Shirley Thompson, now Prof Shirley Thompson OBE who recently was amongst the composers for King Charles’s Coronation to look into creating a visual film for a concert.
It would be performed at the Southbank Centre with Shirley conducting. I hadn’t the foggiest of what to do, and it’s one of the most scariest and rewarding projects to pull off.
That’s the thing about creativity, which psychologists identify as Fox qualities, as first proposed by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It involves a psychodrama of inner failure, before your interactions with friends and your neurons rescue you.
At about that time, Jude Kelly CBE (above photo), the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre had come up with an idea for her artists in residence. Walking into the artists room one afternoon with Turner Prize Winner Jeremy Deller, she asked eight of her artists who in the world we would like to share a space with for a fortnight.
Weeks later, I would also be working with one of the UK’s leading dance schools for young people, collaborating with a music school for a live staged performance. My film would show on the screen in the interval.
In all these cases, there’s a coming together, an uncertainty about how things will end up, but a safe space for co-creation. One from someone I knew in Shirley. We were at the same university and in 2004 I made a video on her album release New Nation Rising. The other the incredible Mark Cousins. I’d never met him before but enjoyed the most fascinating time with, and then the young dancers and musicians.
Jude had a name for this “Collisions”. It was the opportunity for creative practitioners to take risks, because creativity is transferable, and involves a sense of problem-solving from different places.
Put diverse creative people in a room and something happens. It’s often ill-defined, messy at first, and then it untangles. From the tenacity of its makers and habits garnered from co-sharing spaces something of a quilt of majesty is born.
These sentiments largely live in the arts world, and at night tiptoe cautiously in the academic environment where certainty needs to be assured. Hence there’s a worm hole that is often not passed through — denied access from the different modes of thinking from industry and diverse communities that academic wrestles with. I’ll come to this in a minute.
This week I was reminded of Collisions from the most extraordinary conversations with a range of parties’ framing of co-creations and collaborations - some immediate, some longer term.
A group in Europe looking to rewire journalism inviting a different thinking model, a tech platform that collapses Applied Storytelling into product design and the storytelling is in the works with amazing first hand features, and diversity-in-creative action — a project that bridges history and creative story telling.
I’m often asked a question by academics when I reel of my past. “Why on earth did you enter academia? Or what’s with the branded writing about you’re doing? ” This, in spite of me being involved in academic for 20 years.
There are several reasons. I genuinely believe/d I could offer something to a new generation from my lived experience and also build on creative ideas. And why I write? There’s a Ghanaian proverb that says the fingers on your hand are not the same.
There’s a catch in universities, particularly when it comes to research output. That is what’s acceptable and favourable, usually framed around projects that are tried and tested or meet requirements in line with the funders mind set. Their way of gauging fundable projects comes from a space that can by default eschew diversity and creativity.
Some of it is contained in this expression. There’s a scientific way of thinking at large. Here a hypothesis is modelled with convincing posited thought to show it’s doable? Design thinking takes a different path by experimenting via a loop with a problem statement and engaging key users. I’m a design thinker and spend time when I can exploring design in galleries like the Design Museum in London.
But design thinking doesn’t guarantee creative cultural thinking. Here difference in language and behaviour from different cultural groups frame the direction of travel towards a product. And then there’s system thinking, which requires considering often hidden elements in a process.
The opportunity to experience these (I’ve been a chemist, artist, journalist and lived in various countries and worked across the world) is both enriching and provides the conceptual framework for creativity within the Co-creators club. It’s a form that’s been tested on a programme I run, as one of the cohorts explains here.
For a project like this one below which would be generally assessed within the normative social science approach, its research weighting is minimised and yet its social (cultural & design) impact became obvious.
It was lauded by the Dean, industry publications, touring schools and housed at the London Mayor’s office for public events.
It’s the way funding is reviewed. Denied monies, I went ahead anyway. My co-producer and colleagues put it all together within three months.
Generally any output to gauge academic excellence (REF) revolves around writing books and journals. That’a not a criticism per se, but limits the wide range deliverables and pools of people who create world beating products in other way.
Talent like Prof Shirley Thompson OBE being recognised more recently for her work in academic circles is rare, and been long in coming.
In a video doing the rounds on social media Euan Blair ( son of the British PM Tony Blair), co founder of Multiverse, makes a great point about how universities have come to monopolise the paths of young people and their careers. You could easily dismiss it as a “doh, yeah!”, but no universities have engineered themselves into that position.
Apprenticeships are an alternative. For Euan who has skin in the game; his company that provides apprenticeships this is sticky point. There should be an alternative, and I agree; a third or fourth way.
Universities have a long history of working with industry, but there’s an achilles. It struggles with fast turnaround of ideas to meet emerging narratives, re-levelling the turf of decision makers so applicants’ lived experience in relatable industries are offered opportunities, and then this, how diversity of ideas from diverse groups are awarded and assessed.
There’s attempts to bridge this, through programmes like DORA — Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) that sees the need to reboot ways in which researchers and their work is assessed. That’s goes for scholars too. In theory it’s attractive, but the lack of a creative method for helping funders move forward on projects can be problematic.
However, I see a space expanding between projects of international or national impact, between co-creatives bringing different sets of knowledge and creativity to problems or producing events.
It’s a creative and intellectual process that bridges how universities can react to change from funders loosening their remits. Knowledge set to be encoded in AI available en mass will disrupt.
While not suggesting ideas should fail, for proposals that bring together diverse co-creators there should exist a platform for iterate-re-iteration of ideas. The beneficiaries of this is everyone but particularly marginalised groups seeking equity in spaces usually out of touch, in which invariably solutions lie within their living experiences.
That means bringing different people to work on ideas that yield an array of outcomes. Think of it as The Co-creators Club in which industry, scholars, and investors work together, and the key to empowerment is the plumb line of equity and belonging within diverse groups, whilst building multiple outlets.
For instance, there are a number of areas I have deep interests in from lived experiences and that includes Innovative journalism and tech, as this letter from the BBC illustrates.
Hence I’d like to be working on international transformative projects which build artefacts, products or story outputs. Are you involved in a project of such nature around AI, tech and looking to collide with someone who story tells in this area.
The wider Co-Creators Club would be to tackle projects that aren’t necessarily on the radar of establishment figures. There’s an evaluation that works, and involves groups in a matrix genuinely working towards a goal.
If this is something that interest you. Drop me a line. The thing to remember is it’s a co-sharing space, and people involved can be remunerated. If you want to book for events etc here’s my visual resume/cv
