Soul Food, and Music: Research and Innovation for

Soul Food, and Music:
Research and Innovation
for Creative Business
By Kim Errington,
Neil Maycroft
and Jim Shorthose
Illustrations – some by Jon Burgerman
and some by Ali Hazeldene
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Soul Food, and Music: Research and
Innovation for Creative Business
ISBN: 9781842331347
Dedications
The Authors
Copyright © Kim Errington, Neil Maycroft and Jim Shorthose 2008
The rights of Kim Errington, Neil Maycroft and Jim Shorthose to be identified
as the author of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright © Jon Burgerman or Ali Hazeldene. Jon Burgerman or Ali
Hazeldene retain copyright on works where they are identified as
original artists.
You can find out more about Jon’s work at www.jonburgerman.com and you can
contact Ali at thebonsaiprojects@hotmail.com.
Graphic Design
Graphics by Steve O’Brien. www.1512design.com, email:steve@1512design.com
Printing
Printing by Ashford Colour Press. www.ashford-colour-press.co.uk
Proofreading
David Blazye. davidblazye@googlemail.com
Kimberley Errington is currently completing her Masters Degree at Nottingham
Trent University, which entails her developing the FEED Project, an on-line
creative network to connect graduates and independent fashion businesses.
She was part of the delivery of the British Council’s International Young Fashion
Entrepreneur Award in 2008, and has recently been awarded the Sir Paul Smith
Scholarship for a study visit to Japan. But she is not going to sing any karaoke.
You can contact Kim on info@feedideas.com and find out more about the
FEED Project at www.feedideas.co.uk
Neil Maycroft is Senior Lecturer at The Lincoln University, where he focuses upon
the Design M.A. Programme and supervising Ph.D projects. His other research
and publications focus upon material culture and a critique of consumerism. His
address is nmaycroft@lincoln.ac.uk
A lot of people have helped us whilst putting this book together in all sorts of
ways. We could never repay them fully, but we dedicate it to them anyway,
Raya Penelope Maycroft
George Claude Ellis
Ella Greenhill Naylor
Tim Rundle
Anita Lo Gatto
Jayne Childs
Edin’s bar
Jen Errington
Charlie Errington
Sheila Shorthose
Jim Shorthose (my Dad)
And also to Deborah McKeown.
Jim Shorthose co-developed the Nottingham Creative Network, and before that
Creative Collaborations, in a space half way between Broadway Media Centre
in Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. He works on other related
creative industry projects for Broadway Media Centre and combines this with
University lecturing. His address is james.shorthose@ntu.ac.uk
Disclaimer
We have made every effort to ensure the information in this book is accurate
and useful at the time of publication. Readers are advised that the information
contained in this book is of a general nature and the authors and publishers do
not accept any liability for its use in conjunction with a commercial or other
decision, nor for errors or omissions.
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Forewords
Excited to Be in Our Own Backyard –
by Andrew Cooper
The Design Responsibility –
by Martin Knox
Andrew Cooper is a partner at Berryman Solicitors.
Martin Knox is a business designer and brand developer.
People don’t tend to celebrate a city for the things it enjoys in common with
others – its shops, roads, hospitals and schools – important though those things
are to the everyday lives of its citizens. The things that mark one city out from
others are its distinctive features. Too often, we say that British cities and towns
look the same and have lost their distinctiveness, and too often that is true,
especially in the built environment. But deep down cities do differ, because the
people who live and work there make that difference.
In his wonderful book Chatham Vines (2006), Nottingham-based artist
John Newling (writing about regeneration and quoting his own earlier work
Transactions and Agreements, 2005), says ‘Communities are not plans; they are
us. …… Proper regeneration finds us all excited to be in our own backyard… it is a
substantive shift in how we view where we are’.
One of Nottingham’s greatest distinguishing features is its vibrant and
successful creative community, a group of creative producers, artists and
businesses which has the potential to regenerate the city – to shift not only how
Nottingham views itself, but also how the rest of the world views it.
Jim Shorthose’s first NCN book Fish, Horses and Other Animals played a big
part in raising the collective profile and self-confidence of Nottingham’s creative
community, and this new book, co-written with Kim Errington and Neil Maycroft
will take this process forward. As a long-term board member of Broadway, a
founder of the Nottingham Creative Business Awards and a passionate advocate
for the creative hot-bed that is Nottingham, I commend this book to you.
Berryman are delighted to have given support, both financial and through the
specific contribution from John Buckby, to its publication.
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Creatives have power.
Creative people and organisations have the power to change the way a
consumer thinks about a product or a brand. But it doesn’t end there. The
creative industries have the power to affect the way we perceive ourselves and
the world around us. They can influence an individual’s and society’s decision
making and affect behaviour. Creatives can change outlooks on particular objects
or ideas. Whether subconsciously or consciously, the work of the creative can
have a profound impact on the lives of many people. And with this power,
comes responsibility.
The ‘design responsibility’ is a (moral/social/ethical) obligation on the creative
industries to use this power positively and respectfully. It is not a requirement to
abstain from working with companies, industries or institutions that might come
with negative perceptions. It is an ethical responsibility to use every opportunity
to impart a positive message upon that individual, company or institution, through
the creatives response to a brief or an ongoing interaction with their audience, (In
this way, a positive message can reach both the client and the consumer).
Times are changing. The citizen is changing too. To survive in this age of
a ‘desire to trust and see that trust honoured’, creatives and audiences are
compelled to adapt alongside the society they operate in. And the first step is to
take responsibility.
I Felt So Strongly About It I Put Some of My Own
Real Money Into the Project! – by Susi Henson
Susi Henson is a fashion designer and director of Eternal Spirits
When I read the first Nottingham Creative Network book, Fish, Horses and Other
Animals, this is what I emailed back to them,
This book is amazing. I got given a copy and I have read it cover to cover. It’s just
totally right! It’s the only thing I’ve read where I’ve thought, ‘yes! somebody gets it’.
Having your own business is so lonely in so many respects and it just hits the nail on
the head for so many things!!
And I meant it. Running your own creative business can be a very isolating
experience, where everything is up to you all the time. You have to put your
heart and soul on the line everyday. So when I read Fish and Horses, and realised
it was part of growing a creative network in Nottingham to bring creatives
together more, it was like a breath of fresh air compared to all the traditional
business stuff.
When the NCN team told me that they were writing another book in the
series, I decided to put my money where my mouth was, quite literally. I felt so
strongly about it I put some of my own real money into the project!
The first book gave me such a lot of soul food, and I am sure this second book
will too, when I really get to grips with it. So I am really pleased to have been
able to add something to the overall project and I hope you all enjoy reading
these books as much as I have.
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Preface
A Book Series
Acknowledgements
We are not pleasantly surprised anymore by the contributions of the numerous
people whose expertise and experience appear in this book. We have grown
to expect them to generously give of their intellect in a way that makes these
books far, far better than they would otherwise be. They always do.
Neither are we pleasantly surprised anymore by the genuinely sharing and
mutually supportive attitude of the creative community of Nottingham and the
East Midlands, because they are always like that. But we still want to thank them
anyway for their fantastic input.
In alphabetical order, expert contributions have come from,
Adam Barnard – to find out more about Adam’s work go to www.ntu.ac.uk
Debbie Bryan – at www.debbiebryan.co.uk
John Buckby – at www.berryman.co.uk
Paul Coe
Annie Dickson and Adrian Reynolds of Evolver Talent – to find out more go to
www.evolver-talent.com
Carla Martinho – of Creative Launchpad – at www.creativelaunchpad.co.uk
Francine Pickering – of Clarity in Communications –
at www.clarity-in-communication.com
John Whittingham – of Plant a Card, at www.plantacard.com
The interviewees who have graciously given their time, expertise and energy are,
Wolfgang Buttress – at www.wolfgangandheron.com
Mik Godley – to find out more about Mik’s work, go to
www.nottinghamstudios.org.uk/egerton/artists/godley
Paul Matosic – at www.matosic.org.uk/artist.htm
John Newling – to find out more about John’s work, go to www.ntu.ac.uk
Raj Pathak – to find out more about Raj and LBK Pictures, look for him on
MySpace
Michael Pinchbeck – at www.michaelpinchbeck.co.uk
Terry Shave – to find out more about Terry’s work, go to www.ntu.ac.uk
Jennie Syson – at www.hinterlandprojects.com
Nick Wood – you can find out more about Nick’s work at
www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsW/wood-nick.html
Due to the costs of design and print, this book would not have happened
without the financial support of various public organisations and private
businesses. We are very grateful to,
Berryman Solicitors – at www.berryman.co.uk
Broadway – at www.broadway.org.uk
Eternal Spirits – at www.eternalspirits.com
Greater Nottingham Partnership – at www.gnpartnership.org.uk
Martin Knox – at www.mknox.co.uk
Lincoln University’s Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design –
at www.lincoln.ac.uk/aad
Nottingham Trent University’s Business, Innovation and Creation Team at www.ntu.ac.uk
Finally we would like to thank Mark Shaw, at www.standingrock.co.uk for again
providing invaluable editorial advice.
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This is the second in a series of publications that aim to be a vehicle for
the collective voice of the creative community of Nottingham and the East
Midlands, and at the same time provide useful and interesting ideas for the
creative industries of the city, the region and beyond.
The series is financed in part by public funding and in part by business
sponsorship. All revenue from sales goes directly back into a fund for the design
and print costs of the next book in the series.
The authors, along with other collaborators are currently working on the third
book in this series, which will try to say something about Ethical Creativity, a
theme that has emerged out of discussions with the creative community itself.
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Contents
A Collective Creative Voice
There are lots of people with lots of experience in various forms of creativity and
the different aspects of creative business. For Fish, Horses and Other Animals we
interviewed some of them. And we have done the same here. We strongly believe
that this adds sophistication, subtlety and deeper understanding to anything we
alone could write. Giving space for this collective voice means that this book
series will be infinitely more instructive, entertaining and useful. But it is also
a contribution to the vital dialogue that the creative network can have with
itself, which is in and of itself one of the best source of research, innovation and
creative business growth.
The book series started with Fish, Horses and Other Animals has a Nottingham
focus because it grew out of the Nottingham Creative Network project.
This time we have been able to work in a concrete way with creative
businesses in Lincoln, and with The Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at
Lincoln University. We hope that future editions in this series will have an even
broader regional scope, so as to contribute to the collective voice of an East
Midlands Creative Network.
Themes for future books and other contributions are up for discussion, and the
series organisers are always interested in discussing potential collaborations.
So get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.
10Chapter 1
An Introduction: Mozart and the
Innovation Economy
18Chapter 2
Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of:
Research Starting Points
26Chapter 3
Thinking About the Way to do
Thinking: Epistemology
46Chapter 4
Different Methods: Which Tools to Use,
Why, When and How
6 0Chapter 5
The Flow of Ideas: Creative Business
Innovation
74Chapter 6
The Rules and Peculiarities of Various
Instruments: Professional Skills for
Creative Research and Innovation
9 6Chapter 7
Making a Good Dish of It: Listening
to the Experts Talk about Research and
Innovation in Practice
References and Other Useful Reading
8
9
Story
Making a Good Dish of It
Chapter 1 – An Introduction:
Mozart and the Innovation Economy
When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer –
say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night
when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most
abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not; nor can I force them. Those
pleasures that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been
told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how
I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is
to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various
instruments etc.
All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself,
becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands
almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it…
When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of
memory, if I may use that phrase, what has been previously collected
into it the way I mentioned.
?
This is taken from a letter written in 1789 by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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More Soul Food
The first book in this series, Fish, Horses and Other Animals: Professional and
Business Development for the Creative Ecology was designed to deal with issues
concerning creative networks – how to understand them, work with them,
mutually develop them and grow your creativity and business within them.
We thought this was a good place to start because many creative industry
practitioners already live and work within creative networks, and instinctively
know how vital they can be in all sorts of ways.
We ended Fish, Horses and Other Animals, on the theme of Soul Food. This
chapter dealt with the following issues:
• The usefulness of self-reflexivity with your creativity, so that you can keep a
constant eye on things, prevent them getting stale and find new routes for
creativity.
• Building an element of experimentation into your normal creative day, through
the ‘play ethic’, the ‘gift economy’ and general sharing within a creative network.
This can help with sustaining innovation in that it helps to see the value of
stepping outside of the normal (often self-imposed) ways you work so you can
better engage with other creative disciplines or industries.
• The usefulness of lateral thinking exercises for this, and so…
• Building Soul Food strategies into your normal business plans and processes.
That is, having an element within your business that ensures innovation is more
regular and self-sustainable.
In this book we have tried to take some of these themes a little further, because
the innovation that comes from Soul Food is probably going to be key. And
being good at research is going to be an important route to this. As you will see
below, uncertainty is the only thing that we can rely upon in the current cultural
and economic context within which we all work. Dealing with change is the thing
that remains constant. Bringing research and innovation into the centre of one’s
creativity and business is thus increasingly fundamental to sustained success.
Of course, research for one’s creativity can be the result of accident and
chance. It is difficult for us to say much about this. But we can try to say
something about the more systematic and planned aspects of doing research.
To do this we have taken some important background concepts for research and
innovation – which often entails a fairly ‘philosophical’ discussion – and tried to
‘pin them down’ in a way that is more immediately relevant for creative practice.
We have tried to ‘translate’ some of these big, often quite complex concepts for
those who do not have a background in such debates, because we do believe
they hold a great deal of usefulness for the actual day-to-day thing of creative
thinking and doing.
It has not always been easy to translate things in this way. Whilst we have made
an effort to not come over as too ‘academic’ or jargon-istic, some of what appears
below might still come across as quite complicated. If it does come across like that,
12
we hope you can stick with it and give it a chance. And anyway, there is no point in
over-simplifying things so much that it does not capture the full complexity of this
philosophical stuff. And also that could easily get a bit patronising.
The other main balancing act we have been conscious of is connecting
the thing about research to the practicalities of the innovation thing. This
has entailed us getting into more ‘business’ oriented discussions concerning
the professional skills involved in doing research, some organisational and
‘management’ ideas that help to find routes to innovation and the planning
involved in keeping these things within your creativity, your own or through
collaborative working with other people.
So we hope we have got the balance of the book between ‘philosophy’ and
practice, big ideas for creative thinking and the concrete stuff for creative
business reasonably OK. We also hope the tone of voice of the book, somewhere
between depth, accessibility and an enjoyable read is about right too.
Chapter Plan
The chapter plan reflects this balance, as well as the initial statements made
by Mozart.
Chapter 2 is entitled Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of: Research Starting
Points because we are aware that some of the more philosophical issues
within this discussion may appear quite abstract and involve some jargon. It
introduces some general themes and sets up the basic contours of the Behind,
In/Through, For and In Front Of model of research that we use throughout the
book. Chapter 3 is entitled Thinking About the Way to do Thinking: Epistemology,
and gets into detailed discussions relating to the themes raised in Chapter 2.
It presents some of the more philosophical ideas and debates concerning the
grounds for doing research and the different conceptual frameworks one can
bring to bear when thinking about what your research is, what it is for and
how you are going to approach it. Chapter 4 is entitled Different Methods:
Which Tools to Use, Why, When and How. This chapter gets down to the ‘brass
tacks’ of using specific research tools for creative innovation, depending upon
the answers you come up with in response to the debates in previous chapter.
Whereas Chapter 3 is quite philosophical, Chapter 4 is more practical. In Chapter
5, we shift to a consideration of innovation for creative business. This chapter is
entitled The Flow of Ideas: Creative Business Innovation, because its focus is upon
how creative inspiration can lead you to the application of ideas that might
come out of research. Chapter 6 is entitled The Rules and Peculiarities of Various
Instruments; Professional Skills for Creative Research and Innovation, because it
looks at some of the associated professional and business skills that are needed
to develop creative research and innovative ideas into sustained and well
organised creativity. Some of these things can actually be the innovation in and
of themselves. Finally, Chapter 7 is made up of interviews with people who are
experienced in bringing all these aspects together to form the good dishes that
Mozart talks about. This is why it is entitled, Making a Good Dish of It: Listening to
the Experts Talk about Research and Innovation in Practice.
Qualification
Creativity: Being ‘in Business’ or Just ‘doing the business’?
Research and Innovation:
Two Sides of the Same Creative Coin
People bandy around the term research all the time, in lots of different ways.
Innovation is another term that is currently talked about a lot. These two terms
are often talked about as if there is some mysterious route to these things that
only a few people have access to. And you don’t.
Research leading to innovation can be something that stems from rigorous,
planned and prolonged inquiries into the world out there. Or it can be as simple
as talking to someone, thinking about it and changing the way you do things.
But fundamentally, it hinges upon two key things:
• How you can arrive at a better understanding of something and carry this
through so that you can develop better ideas for your creativity
• How your creativity can better apply these better ideas and do something
with them
Before we go any further, we have an editorial point. We will use the term
‘creativity’ throughout the book. We could have used the term ‘creative
business’, or we could have used the term ‘creative practice’. We do not see
any big distinction between these two terms. Rather we see them as part of a
spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, some people see themselves as creative
practitioners who may or may not be formally established as a business as
such, they just ‘do the business’. At the other end of the spectrum, some people
very much see themselves as a formal Business-with-a-capital-B.
We don’t want to get hung up on which terms to use, but for clarity’s sake,
we are telling you now that we will use the generic term ‘creativity’ to mean
this whole spectrum of activity. We hope that the points we make in this book
about creativity, research and innovation are relevant for both ends of this
spectrum, as well as for people somewhere in between.
The Innovation Economy
Research and innovation are, or at least should be, two sides of the same coin.
So what is all the fuss about?
Mozart implicitly suggests the following:
• People have been thinking about the way they do thinking for a long time.
• There are lots of different, often quite personal ways of doing research for
creat­­­ivity – that is, different methods – in a carriage, walking after a good
meal etc.
• Creativity innovation can come from unknown places. This does not really
matter, so long as they come somehow – that is, so long as the ideas flow.
• Creative people usually become aware very quickly that they are working
within a particular tradition of creativity – for Mozart, these were the rules of
counterpoint and the peculiarities of various instruments etc.
• Making something happen as a result of creative inspiration entails embracing
its unfinished nature and looking to develop it through applying associated
skills – this involves seeing how the subject. enlarges itself, and searching for
effective ways to methodize it, define it and crystallise (write down) the ideas.
• The first creative flash will have to be developed and worked upon – to create a
good dish.
We will explore all these issues in detail below, in terms of how initial creative
inspiration and research connect to each other, and how the research useful for
creativity connects to innovative applications for business.
Before we get into the details of research and innovation for creativity, we want
to make some broad comments about the context against which the themes of
this book are set.
• In Fish, Horses and Other Animals, we noted the following points about the new
cultural economy and the context within which creative business is situated:
• Changes in the nature of (Western) economies have seen a shift towards the
‘knowledge economy’ or the ‘weightless economy’ and the relative rise in the
economic importance of ideas, images, information, knowledge and meanings
• The increased speed of innovation has meant that economies of scale, (being
big and into mass production) has often been replaced by economies of speed,
(being small, flexible and able to respond quickly)
• New opportunities for portfolio working require fairly constant skills
development and the need to constantly develop new ideas
• New creative spaces such as creative networks and Web 2.0 bring a wider range
of choices about your creative business strategies and raise questions about
what, how and why you do what you do
• The globalised economy brings the need for new professional skills as creative
business increasingly flows around the world
• Technology keeps changing everything, sometimes fundamentally, but at the
very least a little bit
All these trends within the general economic context of creativity imply the
need for constant research and innovation, if you are to be good at taking
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advantage of the new possibilities opening up, and able to deal with the
competition. For instance, Geoffrey Hodgson has shown how we are now living
in a learning economy such that innovation and change is the only constant,
and uncertainty is the only think you can take for granted. These ever-present
innovations are intimately connected to economic growth.
What?
Born entirely through the frustration of not being able to find any well
designed greetings cards, an idea was born that is practical, functional, and
environmentally friendly. I decided to design and manufacture a capsule
containing seeds which could be attached to greetings cards and mailers, or any
other type of disposable packaging for that matter.
Quotation
How?
The capsule is made from a water soluble compound which instantly breaks down
within ten minutes of being planted and watered, releasing the seeds into the
ground for germination.
… new growth theory… postulates that technological change and economic
growth are intrinsically connected, since the well spring of growth is innovation
in products and processes, and new ways of combining inputs to generate new
types of outputs. As economist Paul Romer puts it, “Human history teaches us…
that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from cooking more.”
(from Creative Economy, by T. Flew)
Even back in 1789, Mozart knew you had to make a good dish.
Case Study
Post It… Plant It… Love It – by John Whittington
Plant a Card was launched upon an unsuspecting public in November 2007.
However, John’s active role in the creative industries began well over 10 years
ago, working on anything and everything, from computer games packaging, to
pharmaceutical advertising, to the simple annual report…
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Why?
Unlike most greetings cards and mailers that just get thrown away, this will give
the recipient a chance to plant a section of the card after it is no longer needed.
This secondary function enables the customer to plant a long lasting visual
image, be that a plant, a tree, or a shrub, for that special occasion and/or event.
As well as the obvious practical implications, it is also environmentally friendly,
helping neutralize carbon emissions plus giving everyone who purchases
greetings cards or receives direct mail a chance to combat the greenhouse
effect by covering their carbon footprint.
Design?
During the course of 15 years in business, my client list and mix of projects has
swung from one extreme to another – and back again. From a business point
of view, pursuing a diversity of work with Plant a Card has been strategically
important regardless of it’s size, subject, or budget. However, working with a wide
range of clients, media, and industries, has allowed me to cross-pollinate my
thinking for other design projects, enabling me to solve problems for a wide range
of clients, but the design process is consistent each time, no matter how unique.
Whilst we all have our favourite assignments, the diversity of work and the people
I meet is what I find the most rewarding.
Funding?
Easy? No. Helpful? Most certainly. Contrary to popular opinion, funding is
generally available without having to part with a large percentage of your
company. However, a good business plan combined with a sound idea, and a half
decent client list is always helpful.
Solution?
Each new design project needs a complete new solution which I can never
presume for any client or industry. I’m never entirely happy with my final designs,
because there are always so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. The most challenging thing I find
is to design something simple, because simple has to be perfect. If it’s not perfect
it will stand out a mile. It’s far easier to design something complex which can be
interesting to look at, but for me, I always take a more subjective approach.
Summarize?
Handwritten cards are a means of communication that touch lives, as they
distinctly identify thoughts, words, and activities; they comfort, inspire,
celebrate, and stir a vast range of emotions. That, in a nutshell, is what Plant
a Card is all about – portraying the simplest, most powerful message to the
consumer in a way they will easily understand. Simple as that!
Future?
While the progress of technology and design continues to increase at an alarming
rate, so are people’s awareness of environmental issues and the way we live
our lives. This can only broaden my design possibilities for future growth in the
market place and various sectors. People of all ages love getting back to basics,
nurturing plants and so on, and as long as they continue to do so, the possibilities
for Plant a Card are endless.
Production?
Again, this can be tricky, as taking a new product to market is generally very
expensive and time consuming. Once again, it is best to take your time and
explore all the possibilities before making any financial commitments.
Easy?
No.
Exciting?
Certainly.
Rewarding?
Absolutely.
15
Intensive Growth and Innovation
Economists make a useful distinction between extensive and intensive growth.
Extensive economic growth comes about when more and more land, raw
materials, resources, people, machinery etc. are brought into the economy.
Growth comes about because there is just more economy out there. Intensive
economic growth comes about when the same amount of stuff is used, but in a
smarter way. Growth comes about because the economy is made more efficient
by innovations.
And intensive economic growth is essentially what you are dealing with here.
Without overstating hard and fast binary distinctions, all this implies a shift from
the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ economy. The general contours of this shift are as follows:
OLD ECONOMY
NEW ECONOMY
Markets
Stable
Dynamic
Scope of Competition
National
Global
Organisational Form
Hierarchical, bureaucratic Networked
Source of value
Raw materials, physical
capital
Human and social capital
(skills and contacts)
Everything within the new economy column is about change, movement and the
need for a smart, flexible response to an ever-changing cultural and economic
environment. Everything either states explicitly, or at the very least strongly
implies the need to keep up with this change. So it is fundamentally about
research and innovation, whether that is within what you do with your creativity
(the products, objects, services you provide), why you do it (how you put your
motivations into action), for whom you do it (which markets you engage in and
how), and how you do it (the ways you work, organise your relationships with
other and ‘manage’ the processes involved).
Organisation of
Production
Mass production
Flexible production
Theory
Key drivers of growth
Capital/labour
Innovation/knowledge
Theories of Creative Innovation: No 1 – The Economic View
ISSUES
Economy-wide
Business
Key technological drivers Mechanisation
Digitisation
Source of competitive
advantage
Lowering costs through
scale
Innovation, quality,
adaptiveness
Importance of research/
innovation
Low-moderate
High
Relations to other firms
Go it alone
Collaboration,
outsourcing
Tastes
Stable
Changing rapidly
There has been a growing interest in the importance of creativity in the
knowledge economy… However (some of this is)… too often based upon a
common but flawed understanding of creativity. The attribution of creativity to
unique individual personalities loses sight of the extent to which creativity is best
understood as being the outcome of a process rather than a personae, and how
moments of creative discovery are characteristically the outcome of incremental
processes undertaken as part of a team of people that possess diverse skills…
the growing interest in creativity outside of the traditional domains of culture is
reflective of what has been termed the culturalization of economic life
Skills
Job-specific skills
Broad skills and
adaptability
(from Creative Economy, by T. Flew)
Educational needs
One-off craft training or
degree
Lifelong learning
Nature of Employment
Stable
Increasingly contract/
project specific
Customers/Workers
But enough of this general scene-setting, let’s get into it. Firstly by looking at the
general direction we want to explore in the subsequent chapters, and especially
the different starting points for research.
(this is a slightly adapted version of an original table from Getting the Measure of
the New Economy, by D. Coyle and D. Quah)
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17
Proverb
The questions you ask yourself will determine the answers you get
At first glance, this might seem counter-intuitive, but it suggests something
fairly straightforward. The direction you choose to travel in will determine
where you end up.
For instance:
What is White?
Pankaj Mishra tells the story of two blind guys sitting together one day
discussing the colour white.
Chapter 2 – Behind, In/Through,
For and In Front Of:
Research Starting Points
‘I’ve heard that white is the colour of snow’ said the first guy.
‘I asked my friend to take me up to the mountains so that I could feel it. He put me
into the snow, and I now realise that white is cold’.
‘I’ve heard that white is the colour of swans’ said the second guy.
What? Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of?
What does that mean? Sounds a bit complicated.
‘I asked my friend to take me down to the river. He took me near to the water, and
I now realise that white goes ‘swish-swish’.
White is cold and goes swish-swish?
In their attempts to research the colour white, the first guy used his sense
of touch and the second guy used his sense of hearing. Because they used a
particular sense (as a starting-point), their research of white was limited and
they both came up with a less than complete answer. Actually, whilst not
wanting to be unkind to them and their heartfelt attempts to understand
white, what they came up with was so limited you could say it was ‘wrong’. It
is the same for all of us. The basic research starting-point you adopt, and so ask
your question from, can all too often lead you to a less than fully developed
answer. You too could be ‘blind’ to other ways of seeing.
We want you to say it out loud just one more time and then we’ll drop it,
the questions you ask yourself will determine the answers you get!
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19
It is always useful for creativity to go beyond one’s usual way of doing things.
Or, if doing concerted research is new to you, it is useful to know about the
different starting-points upon which research can be based. This then almost
automatically asks you to think about the different research tools you can use,
because certain research tools are only really appropriate for certain research
agendas. Knowing these things will help you to create a coherent research design
and strategy. This helps to ensure that the questions you are asking within your
research, the basic conceptual position from which you set out, and the specific
tools you are going to use, all relate to each other in a clear and focused way. We
will come back to this later.
The idea that the questions you ask yourself determine your answers stems
from some fairly heavy-duty academic philosophy. But the practical benefits
of such an idea lies in asking that you are sure that the basic trajectory of your
creative journey is the one that will be most useful in the long run, because
there are always alternative directions that could be better.
A good way to start all this thinking about research and innovation is to
question all the different, sometimes overlapping elements of your creativity and
the research you might need to do within and for each element. That way, you
can begin to outline various research starting-points relevant for each of these
elements.
Behind the Text – what were the various economic, political, social and cultural
contexts which framed the writing of this text? How did these find expression
in the text? We would have to consider the Cold War, Soviet totalitarianism, the
nuclear arms race, the institutional bastardization of language and so on. The
stuff way beyond and outside of the book itself.
A Research Map: Boxes as Starting-Points, but
also Arrows as Navigation
In/Through the Text – the writing process itself; where did Orwell write the
book? How? Longhand or by typewriter? What particular routines or processes
did he follow in the editing and, how did all of these manifest themselves in
the text as a whole? The way the book itself came together, how the interior
dynamics of the writing process evolved.
Research Leading to Innovation
In Front Of the Text – what were the reactions of the various audiences who
read the text – editors, reviewers, critics, the general public and so on? How did
all these reactions effect the production of the developing text and the various
edits? What was the relationship between the book and what other people made
of it in terms of how it impacted upon Orwell’s creative process before, during
and after? What have we done with the book since and how this ‘in front of’
might actually now be the ‘official’ version of the book?
In terms of how the Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of model specifically
relates to the innovation, we can make some brief points by way of introducing
the basic model, before we return to the details of this in Chapters 5 and 6.
Research ‘Behind’ Leading to Innovation – can lead to innovation in two ways:
• Generic – research into the various broad contexts against which the creative
genre you work within is connected, and the other broad social, economic,
political and cultural features that impact upon the possibilities for innovation.
• Specific – research that takes a similar cue but which focuses more upon
how these contextual features impact upon the particular circumstances
surrounding your creativity and potential for innovation.
To the Ricouer’s thing, we have added research:
For example:
Paul Ricoeur and Hermeneutics
You are now doing philosophy. Paul Ricoeur was a hermeneutical philosopher
who formulated a particular method of interpreting written texts. We have
borrowed some of his thinking as an analogy to outline various research startingpoints.
He argued that any written text could be ‘read’ according to three different,
overlapping levels of research, which are:
• Behind the Text
• In/Through the Text
• In Front Of the Text
For example, George Orwell’s1984 could be analyzed in the following way,
For the Text – this involves valuing the kind of research that ‘runs alongside’ the
actual doing of the creative work itself. The value in knowing what is going on in
other related disciplines and viewpoints as the work itself develops. Research ‘for’
creative practice takes account of these other perspectives and what they can
add to ‘your thing’ itself.
These different research starting-points, their particular foci and different
levels of generality start to show that different types of questions are going
on within each. Being clear about the differences between these potential
aspects of your research, using the right research tools within each and seeing
the interconnection between and across them without getting them mixed up,
are all good skills to have. Thinking about the Behind, In/Through, For and In
Front Of elements in turn is also a useful way to clearly structure your research,
understand what each element can potentially bring to your creativity and
which you feel it is best to concentrate upon at any given time.
Putting these four starting points into four boxes (your own creative practice being
the fifth) on a ‘map’ can consolidate the order it can bring. This research map puts
your creative practice at the centre, and asks you to think about how to navigate
across the map to get the kind of ‘better ideas’ that you think might be useful.
But it also suggests that the various research starting-points are not separate
or mutually exclusive. The diagram involves as many arrows as boxes.
• Boxes are about conceptual things – the starting-points and the different levels
of research generality that this implies.
• Arrows are about how these various starting-points link together, because
research inevitably flows from one concern to another, and insights found at
one level will inevitably have consequences for all of the other aspects.
This is why research can sometimes feel really uncomfortable, when everything
feels like it’s connected to everything else and you don’t know where to start. It
may feel uncomfortable, but that is a good thing. It is supposed to feel like that,
at least at the start. If it feels too easy, it is probably because it is not as broad or
deep as it needs to be.
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If your research does feel uncomfortable, try to remember the map as something
you can move around in, looking for the research ‘stop-off points’ as well
as starting-points. The map can also help you to visualize your research as
something that you can approach from lots of directions. This is what maps do.
They show you where things are, but they also show you how to navigate to
get to them. They also give you an over-view of the whole terrain and show you
how everything ‘fits together’, which can be really useful even though you don’t
necessarily want to ‘go there’ right now.
Of the ‘Behind’ aspects leading to innovation, the social context in its broadest
sense can obviously mean all sorts of things. To say anything detailed on this
would require a book in itself, because virtually any aspect of the context that
surrounds you could become relevant for thinking about innovation. Researching
people who have said and done innovative things within your field narrows this
down a little, and such research can lead to innovation in terms of understanding
the contextual features such as history, politics or economics that impacted
upon their lives. Researching the history of your particular field of creative
practice – not just as a survey of its internal features (though this is often
useful), but rather as an exploration of the relationship between the particular
historical context and the way it developed – can be specifically useful for
innovation. Finally the objects, processes, artifacts and other creative outcomes
that come from your particular creative field can be a fruitful kind of ‘Behind’
research. Whatever forms these outcomes take, researching such objects can be
a fruitful way of understanding the contexts behind your creative process and
thus lead you to innovation.
Research ‘In/Through’ Leading to Innovation – is concerned with the specific
insights gained from the actual processes involved in your creativity. Simply put,
innovation can come from this kind of research because you can learn from it as
you are doing it. This is the other meaning of the word practice: what you learn
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from doing something over and over again. Innovations can come from the act
of working with materials, techniques, processes and software which can then
feed back into your broader thinking about how you can develop and improve on
what you do, how and why.
• Which stages of your individual practice do you enjoy and which do you find
burdensome? Make a list.
General
What best gets you ‘into the mood’ for successful creative practice?
Is there a specific time you favour?
Is there a specific place you favour?
Are there specific pieces of equipment that you favour?
Who is most important within each part of the process if it is not you?
What is liable to disrupt your creative practice? What is the biggest barrier?
Research ‘For’ Leading to Innovation – many books concerning research for
creative practice will start with the process itself, for example, the design process.
The talk will immediately be about the ‘search for ideas’, ‘searching for solutions’,
‘searching for understanding’ etc. It will then go on to suggest various techniques
to achieve these ends –‘brainstorming’, ‘objectives trees’, ‘counter-planning’,
‘interaction matrices’ and the like.
These techniques for developing innovations can be useful. But before that
stage there are other issues to address. Research ‘For’ creative innovation can
simply be about the ‘head space’ that many people identify as a necessary
part of their creativity. It can lead to innovation simply by being the time you
give yourself to look around to see what is going on in creative fields that ‘run
alongside’ your work; or remember that good idea you had, the thing you always
meant to chase up; or time to work on how to bring to fruition the thing that
has been on ‘the drawing board’ for a while.
Or it can be about innovation through enabling you to think about those
generic skills that are often necessary for innovation but are not necessary
‘inside’ your creativity as such. Innovation does not always come from doing
something new. It can come from doing the same thing in a better way, or telling
people about it more effectively. So research ‘for’ innovation can be about things
like improved writing skills, better sourcing of materials, improving basic business
acumen or organizing group creativity better. More on that stuff in Chapter 6.
Materials
• Is your relationship to the materials you most often used in your creative
practice (paper, ink, paint, canvas, wood, metal, glass, clay, software, your body
and so on) the best it could be?
• How do you react when faced with using a new material?
• How is your relationship to your materials ‘mediated’ (softened, explained by
others, interfered with) by other things/people? Is this good or bad? If it is bad,
how do you get a better relationship?
Research ‘In Front Of’ Leading to Innovation – creativity is never really a solely
individual exercise. It always depends on other people, and is something which
by its very nature needs to be communicated to others. So knowing about the
people that your creativity is for is necessary if you are going to innovate within
it. For innovation to really work, researching audiences, end-users or customers
is clearly useful to assess their needs, reception of it, understanding etc. So
research ‘In Front Of’ that can lead to innovation by enabling you to be better at
speaking to these people.
This can lead to creative innovation because it asks you to think of:
• Questions concerning how you apply the insights emerging out of practice to
develop better and more effective ways next time – researching technique and
process to innovate new techniques and processes.
• The relationship between developing your practice and broader ideas about
new places to put innovations – researching techniques and process to innovate
in new markets, new forms of dissemination, new collaborations with other
industries.
And this can include a whole range of practical issues.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Tools
What tools do you use in your creative practice?
Which are used most often?
Are these the same ones that you feel are central to your creative practice?
Have you considered (or tried) using other tools?
Are your tools experienced as extensions of your body or as obstacles between
you and your practice?
Processes
• Do you regularly follow the same processes within your creative practice?
• Which stages cannot be left out without the effect being detrimental –
sketches, brainstorming, models, prototypes, computer simulations etc?
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But the link between you and your intended audience is not always direct.
Rather, it is mediated by all manner of ‘gatekeepers’ who may provide
opportunities and constraints as part of their role as cultural intermediaries. So
innovation can also come from researching how these systems work.
For instance:
• How does The Press and TV pick up on stories?
• How do you write a good Press Release?
• What hits the buttons of those who select pieces of culture and business for
exhibition?
• How do you speak to the Arts Council etc?
The Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of Research distinctions we have
considered, and the ways in which they can lead to innovation are not clear-cut
distinctions. These starting-points and routes to innovation can overlap in many
unexpected and reciprocal ways. But this is a way of beginning to put some order
to the different things that can, or need to happen within research.
And that is what the rest of the book is about.
What/Who is Your Research For?
as involving the formation of associations between stimuli and responses which
are characterized by the fact that the elements linked together are not normally
associated. Thus, (it) suggests that divergent (creative) people tend to link stimuli
with highly unlikely responses, whereas in most people any particular stimuli is
usually linked with the response with which it has most frequently been paired
in the past. In other words, highly divergent people are particularly skilful at
linking together, in effective ways, aspects of their environment which, on the
basis of experience, do not normally belong together. In most people, such happy
stimulus-response linkages seldom occur, except perhaps by chance, whereas
they are more or less commonplace among highly creative individuals.
Your creativity can be motivated by a multitude of things. Whichever research
starting-point you feel is most immediately relevant and useful, finding a useful
relationship between these basic motivations and the way you approach your
research is something else that it is good to be clear about.
(from Creativity, by A. J. Cropley)
So consider the extent to which your creativity is motivated by one or more of
the following:
The various answers to ‘What/Who?’ questions have implications for this ‘Why?’
question. In general terms research can be,
• The attempt to say something about the world at large, to the world at large
and the way this informs how and why you develop your creativity.
• The way the specifics of your own creativity are actually panning out in terms
of your overall creative discipline, techniques, business agenda etc, and how you
might want to develop this, or even need to change it as you learn more.
• The meeting point between the first two points. This could be how
understanding the world and developing the interior dynamics of your work
bounce off or mutually influence each other.
• Specific business applications and the management of creative processes that
enables you to develop new products and grow your creative business. This can
sometimes be for quite instrumental reasons. Which might involve:
• Researching other people, such as suppliers, competitors collaborators, business
colleagues and staff, audiences – more on that in Chapter 5.
• Research that critiques what someone else has done, or is a critical response to
creative work already out there, because you feel this will inform your creative
responses…
Descriptive – an investigation into something that just seeks to describe an
aspect of the world as it is. For instance, most surveys, opinion polls and market
research will be descriptive in that it will show percentages of this opinion, that
preference etc. without trying to explain why people think and act as they do. A
lot of commercial and policy-oriented research is like this.
…or lots of other potential variations of these things.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 2 – Behaviourist Psychology
Behaviourist psychology advances…
…a theory of creativity which is of the associative sort. (It)… defines creativity
Why is Your Research?
Explanatory – research that aims to arrive at an explanation that addresses
the why question. Why things are the way they are, why people think and act
the way they do, or why one business process is better than another. Most
academic research will have an element of this because it tends to go beyond
the collection of data to develop an argument or theory.
Exploratory – more open-ended investigations into something new, an aspect
of the world or a new creative process or technique. This kind of research often
develops with no especially fixed agenda other than having a look to see what is
going on. This kind of research tends to look for the new rather than attempting
to describe and/or explain what already is.
Added to this distinction of the types of research, there can be certain time
scales. Research can involve:
A Pilot Stage – a short look at something with a view to developing your
research strategy and methods before you actually embark on the main thing.
The warming up exercise before the match really gets going.
Interim Research Findings – looking at the progress of the research as it
is going along, to check progress, think about emerging trends and findings.
Looking at things at ‘half time’.
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Longitudinal Research – research that carries on over a long period of time,
over and above the first look at something. This means repeating the same
research agenda after a period of time to see how things are changing. Looking
at things during extra time or having a replay.
Exercise
Warning
The Model in Action: Deciding Upon Behind,
In/Through, For and In Front Of
What a Lovely View: The Danger of Solipsism
Exercise
So, with the previous exercise in mind, place yourself at the centre of the
research map.
It’s Your Thing, Do What You Wanna Do
Now ask yourself the following questions:
So, at the very beginning of any thinking you might do about research for
creativity, and whichever starting-point(s) you think best, it is good to ask
yourself these very basic and simple questions:
•
•
•
•
What is my research for?
Who is my research for?
Why is my research?
Is it about knowing more about the world out there? Or is it about the
interior dynamics of me and my work?
• Do I need research to be able to convince someone else about my particular
project or proposal? Or is it about researching bigger questions than that?
• Is it descriptive, explanatory or exploratory? Or a bit of each?
Once you have asked these kinds of questions, you can then start to think
about:
• What different research tools are out there?
• Which research tools are the most appropriate for the kind(s) of research I
want to do?
• How do I design my research to get me to where I want to be?
•
•
•
•
What has my creativity been for in the past few years?
Who has it been for?
Why have I done it this way? Has this been my decision or someone else’s?
What do I want the future of my creativity to be?
So then…
•
•
•
•
In what specific way(s) can research help me to get to these new places?
Which research starting-points do I feel most drawn to?
Which do I feel wary of?
Which seem irrelevant to my concerns and plans?
With these questions and responses in mind, which one of the boxes on the
research map are you now in? – Behind, In/Through, For, In Front Of?
All starting points are reasonable, as are all the ambitions and rationales
behind choosing them. This is just an initial exercise aimed at helping you
clarify where you want to go, and therefore where it is best to start from.
Solipsism (Latin: solus, alone + ipse, self) is the philosophical idea that ‘My
mind is the only thing that I know exists’. Solipsism is an epistemological or
metaphysical position that knowledge of anything outside the mind (one’s
own mind) is unjustified… (It involves the presumption that) my most certain
knowledge is the contents of my own mind — my thoughts, experiences, affects,
etc.
Any of us can get so involved with our own creativity, and generally with our
own view of the world that we can end up mistaking our own personal view of
reality for the real thing. Everybody has the tendency to find evidence for their
own personal view of the world simply from the fact that they have the view
they have.
For instance:
A Short Play about Solipsism
Person 1 – Oh, I see, and then thinking that ‘something else’ would have made
you right all along and everyone else wrong all along, wouldn’t it? I’m going over
here now to talk to Jeff!
Unfortunately, having a view is not the same as having a fully worked
out, well researched and well rounded view. Solipsism is the worst kind of
ignorance, because it is ignorance that stems from believing that one already
knows everything one needs to know. It is ignorance that stems from selfcongratulation and it is therefore very bad.
White is not cold, nor does it go swish-swish. The world is much more
complicated than that, and sorry, but it will never conform to your view of it
just because you have that view.
Say it one more time, the question you ask yourself will determine the
answers you get! We will really drop that one now!
Having made these initial introductory points, the next chapter gets into more
philosophical detail. With the question of how to study white, the quotation
from Mozart and the dangers of solipsism still in mind, let’s turn to thinking
about the way to do thinking. This entails entering the big, mysterious world of
epistemology (it’s not really that mysterious).
Person 1 – How can you be so sure?
Person 2 – Well, I know I’ve been right all along and everybody else wrong all
along, because otherwise I wouldn’t have thought what I think. I would have
thought something else, wouldn’t I?
However, this does brings us to…
Whilst these questions might be useful, you will ultimately have to answer
them yourself, because this depends upon the specific research agenda you
need/want.
As The Isley Brothers once said…
It’s your thing, do what you wanna do. I can’t tell you who to sock it to
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25
Short Play
Who is Nagasena?
Menander – None of these things are the chariot.
King Menander was a Greek King who reigned in the North-East of India
around the first or second centuries BC. He became interested in Buddhism,
and so sought the teachings of a monk called Nagasena.
Nagasena – Then all these separate parts taken together are the chariot?
Menander – What is your name monk?
Nagasena – Then is the chariot something other than the separate parts?
Menander – No, your reverence.
Nagasena – My name is of no importance. It is only a word, only a practical
designation. There is no question of a permanent individual implied in the use of
the word that is my name.
Chapter 3 – Thinking about the
Way to do Thinking: Epistemology
Menander – If there is no permanent individual, who gives you monks your
robes and food, lodging and medicines? And who makes them? Who lives a life
of righteousness, meditation and teaches Nirvana? Who destroys living beings,
steals, fornicates, tells lies, or drinks spirits?… If your fellow monks call you
Nagasena, what then is Nagasena? Would you say that your hair is Negasena?
Or your nails, teeth, skin, or other parts of your body, or the outwards form, or
sensation, or perception, or the psychic constructions, or consciousness? Are any
of these Nagasena? Are all these things together Nagasena? Or anything other
than they?
Nagasena – No.
Menander – Then for all my asking I find no Nagasena. Nagasena is a mere
sound! Surely what your reverence has said is false!
Menander – No.
Nagasena – Then for all my asking, your Majesty, I can find no chariot. The
chariot is a mere sound! What then is the chariot? Surely what your Majesty has
said is false! There is no chariot.
Menander – There is a chariot. It is on account of all these various components,
the pole, axle, wheels and so on, that the vehicle is called a chariot. It’s just a
generally understood term, a practical designation.
Nagasena – Well said your Majesty! You know what the word chariot means.
And it is the same with me. It’s on account of the various components of
my being that I am known by the generally understood term, the practical
designation, Nagasena. And anyway the cells that form the lining of my stomach
will reproduce themselves within 13 weeks, so Nagasena will be made up of
completely different stuff 13 weeks from now! (We made the last bit up. He
didn’t actually say this, because they didn’t know this in the second century BC,
but he would have).
(A version of this story is found in An End to Suffering by P. Mishra)
Nagasena – Your Majesty, how did you come here… on foot, or in a vehicle?
Menander – In a chariot.
Nagasena – Then tell me, what is the chariot? Is the pole the chariot?
Menander – No, your reverence.
You and your creativity are also just generally understood terms, practical
designations. It is on account of the various components coming together that
it becomes what it really is.
So when you do research for it, it is good to know that there are lots and
lots of different ways to tackle any particular question. Because of this, you
have to choose a particular way of approaching it. That is, you have to make an
epistemological choice.
Nagasena – Or the axles, wheels, frame, reins, yoke, spokes or goad?
So choose wisely young Jedi.
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In the previous chapter we began to consider the basic distinction between
Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of research starting-points, and the
Research Map as an initial practical consideration. But all this is underpinning
by philosophical propositions. Whichever research starting-point and underlying
conceptual universe you choose, being conscious that it is a choice of research
outlook, in and of itself, already suggests that other conceptual universes could
be chosen.
Two fundamental points about creativity flow from this:
• These other possible choices could contribute to illuminating research and
innovative breakthroughs. All conceptual universes and research starting-points
have their relative practical merits
• The very act of thinking about thinking, and thus thinking about thinking
differently is creativity and innovation. It is possibly where one of the
mainsprings of creativity actually comes from in the first place
Epistemology
The name of this debate about the relative merits of different conceptual
universes that can underpin research, and consequently the different grounds
for knowledge that they offer is epistemology. The short play at the start of
the chapter asks you to ‘step outside’ of the way you perceive the world as it is
presented to you as a way of finding a more sophisticated sense of perspective
on it. Epistemology is essentially about considering ways of questioning your
questions in the search for better, firmer, more solid grounds upon which to
develop your research.
All this sounds complicated, and sometimes it is. Epistemology often makes
people feel a bit uncomfortable because it re-problematizes what they thought
they could take for granted. It revolves around the basic question how can
we know…? or indeed, can we know anything for sure? Some people believe
that there are universals truths out there that we can discover through using
established research methods which work for all situations. They sometimes get
a bit irritated by epistemological debates. But creativity generally requires an
open and exploratory approach to new ways of thinking and doing. So rather
than holding a sense of trepidation, epistemology is something to be embraced
and enjoyed. It is in and of itself a part of creative thinking, if you get beyond all
the jargon and mystification that is.
C.P. Snow was once famous for talking about ‘two cultures’, the sciences
and the arts, and about the lack of mutual understanding between them. The
development of academic specialisms over the past century or two has meant
that different languages of research have developed, and these languages have
not always been very good at talking to each other. Very, very briefly, this history
has involved:
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• Modern science growing out of the idea that there is one way to do proper
research, through proper unified scientific method based upon certain
epistemological assumptions. And nothing else really counts.
• Some aspects of the social sciences and humanities have signed up to this, but
others have not and are still debating epistemology. This has routinely involved
prolonged debates about what can count as social science research and therefore
as legitimate research methods. Some of which is very useful for creativity.
• Creative disciplines have not been too involved in this debate. Or if they have,
they have tended to use another language. For instance, students of Art and
Design courses often get told to ‘go and do some research’. This can mean
virtually anything, from going to a gallery to talking to your Mum. It is not
always something that is particularly systematic. Nor is it something that always
routinely involves self-reflexive debate about epistemological underpinnings and
consolidated research methods.
Despite this, creative people often have a more immediate and visceral reason
to be doing their own practical research, to inform their work and expand their
creativity. So this chapter is conceived as a space where these different concepts
and languages of research, creativity and innovation can be explored in a way
that overcomes these ‘two (or more) cultures’. When it comes to research,
creativity and innovation, there is no reason why science and technology,
business, the arts and the social sciences cannot learn from each other much
more effectively. The examples and case-studies we include below are designed
to show this potential for cross-fertilisation leading to creativity and innovation.
Epistemology is such a good place to start all this because it involves
recognising the way in which becoming a sophisticated researcher requires
a philosophical breadth to back up the depth of expertise you might have in
something. Getting to know epistemology for doing research and creativity is
like a carpenter getting to know his/her tool box, before getting to know the
wood and doing any cutting or fixing together.
psychologists are concerned with differences between highly creative and highly
divergent individuals in the characteristic ways in which they come to grips with
their environment.
Consequently, as far as cognitive theorists are concerned, creativity represents
not differing systems of associational bonds, but differing ways of getting and
handling information, and different ways of combining data in seeking effective
solutions (different ‘mind styles’ if you like). Hence, the cognitive approach to
creativity asks about the extent to which highly creative people are prepared to
take risks in their thinking, about their willingness to take in large quantities of
information the environment has to offer (rather than restrict themselves to a
narrow, but safe, segment of it), about their capacity for quickly changing their
point of view.
Theory – Basic ideas and concepts shaped into an explanation, prediction,
or basic handle on some aspect of the world. Useful for thinking and turning
information into (albeit temporary) ‘knowledge’.
(from Creativity, by A. J. Cropley)
Objective – They are not a matter of your opinion and how you would like
things to be, objective facts exist out there and are independent of what
anyone thinks. They are the opposite of opinions. But in the arts and humanities
we cannot always be dealing with such hard facts. Truth with a capital T is
sometimes not really that important, because we are often dealing with…
Jargon
Methods – The way one constructs the basic game plan with which to go out
there and collect information. (The term ‘methodology’ is sometimes used, but
this term is more accurately used to describe the study of different methods.
To keep things simple, and to signal a practical focus upon the actual doing of
research, the term ‘methods’ is best here).
Truth – Science is built upon the idea that we can find universally true facts
that are…
Jargon and official terminology is always a problem, but you are likely to come
across it when dealing with epistemology. And some of it is not actually that
complicated.
Without going into massive detail, some useful epistemological terms to think
about are listed below. They form the basis of a professional research language
that can help to frame a research agenda.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 3 – Cognitive Psychology
…cognitive theorists are chiefly concerned with the ways in which people
organize information received from the world. The individual is regarded as
actively at grips with his/her environment, not merely the passive receptor of
whatever it chances to offer him/her. Different people possess differing ways
of ‘taking hold of ’ the external world; they receive information in characteristic
ways, interpret it idiosyncratically, and store it in terms of all the information
processed in the past. Intellectual functioning is thus seen as a highly unified
process so that the attempt to break it down into discrete fragments in the
way stimulus-response (behaviourist) ways is bound to be inadequate. Hence,
in accounting for the appearance or absence of creative thinking, cognitive
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Interpretations – Despite what ‘hard science’ wants to say, Truth with a capital
T does not really exist in the social or cultural world. Obviously there is a ‘real
world’ out there, but the thing we call ‘reality’ in social and cultural life is largely
constructed out of a whole series of social, cultural, economic, historical and
personal processes. This is the social construction of reality position, which
suggests that most views of the world have at least some component of the…
Subjective – It is about what is going on inside your head rather than what
exists out there, independently of you. So for your own research, you need to be
clear about the degree to which you are interested in…
Quantitative or Qualitative Research – Quantitative research is about ‘hard
objective facts’, often about putting a number to something. For instance, 48%
of people think this, or 76% of people rated the event as ‘excellent’. Some
research questions however are about trying to find out the subjective – what
people dream about or the history of their relationship with their dad and how
they feel about that. This entails qualitative research. This is more about ways
of studying the interior perceptions, meanings, motivations and desires of real
people, as they exist for them. It is about a different quality (texture and flavour)
of research, and not so bothered about quantities (numbers). Because these res­
earch trajectories are so fundamentally different, and because research for your
creativity might involve both these kinds of research, you need to be aware of…
Commensurability – The degree to which the research tools you use are
appropriate for the type of research you have in mind. Once our carpenter has
got to know his/her toolbox, there is no way they would try to hammer in a nail
with a screwdriver. Similarly it’s not good to try to research people’s innermost
thinking with a questionnaire.
There is more jargon, but we will come to that later.
Whichever research starting-point you might choose, and whatever motivates
your engagement, there will always be ‘more than one way to skin a cat’. That
is, choosing between Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of research startingpoints will still require you to be clear about the underlying type knowledge you
are after. Back to the need to make the epistemological choices that Nagasena
pointed out to you. So let’s now look at the basic characteristics of some
standard epistemological positions that underpin systematic research.
Mista Know it All: Science and Positivism
In Western society at least, the thing that we call research changed after The
Enlightenment. This started sometimes in the 17th Century, but really got going
in the 18th Century when the approach to research that we now call science
really came to the fore.
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Immediately you might think, ‘I am a creative practitioner and I don’t do
science, so what does that matter’? But that is not the point. The cultural weight
of science, or more accurately scientism has tended to colour all subsequent
epistemological debates. This is because science has become fundamentally
connected to what we now call Reason, as opposed to Metaphysics (superstition,
mysticism, The Spirit). As a creative practitioner, you might be really interested
in superstition, mysticism, and The Spirit. And there is nothing wrong with that.
But if you want to engage in research using those conceptual worlds you will
be up against people who will reject your research because they reject your
very starting-point. Before they have even listened to what your research says
scientism will reject it because of its metaphysical nature. This starts to get us
into the ideological nature of scientism and the politics of knowledge as a facet
of a broader cultural politics, but that debate is for another time. It also begins to
suggest the need for epistemological nervousness, which we discuss towards the
end of this chapter.
Given the rise of science, the predominant epistemological position under­pinning
quantitative research is Positivism, which is defined by the following features:
• A unified method that is applicable to all types of research questions. That is, a
science that involves rigorous methodological principles. These can take various
forms such as straight-forward observational techniques through to more
complex experimental models and other ways of collecting raw data through
observation and measurement. But they are all essentially about collecting…
• Facts-with-a-capital-F. Positivism is about collecting positive knowledge.
Positivism sees it as less than adequate to be basing your research on opinion,
hearsay and other things that are, as they see it, tainted by values.
• So, correspondingly, one of the key slogans of Positivism is the separation of
fact from value. As a result, Positivism is very big on value-freedom, which is the
hallmark of objectivity.
• As a result of the concern with objectivity, Positivism is about measurement
rather than argument. If one is being objective then the ‘facts’ should
(sometimes at least) speak for themselves. This is why the Positivist
epistemology tends to have a very intimate relationship with numbers, the
measurement tool par excellence.
• This has all been motivated by a scientific desire the find causation. That is,
explanations that lay out how one thing causes another. This is seen as good
because it enables things like the separation and control of variables, analysis,
prediction, reproducibility (others can re-do your research and test your findings)
and therefore again Truth-with-a-capital-T, stemming from dealing with the
aforementioned positive facts.
This is all very reasonable, and involves thinking that might help you design some
of your research. Especially if your research is motivated by the need to convince
someone else, you might want to construct some objective knowledge so that
you can ‘prove’ something in a way that does not rely solely upon your own
opinions. Sometimes it is good to let the ‘Facts speak for themselves’ because
it can put you in a much stronger position to make truth-claims about your
research when trying to speak to a potential investor, funder or decision-maker.
Theory
Theories of Creative innovation: No 4 – A Scientist’s View
It seems clear that the creative development of science depends quite generally on
the perception of the irrelevance of an already known set of fundamental differences
and similarities. Psychologically speaking, this is the hardest step of all. But once it
has taken place, it frees the mind to be attentive, alert, aware, and sensitive so it can
discover a new order, and this creates new structures of ideas and concepts
(from On Creativity, by D. Bohm)
•
•
•
•
•
•
As a scientist, Bohm sees creativity as coming from certain inner drives and
impulses:
Puzzle-solving and the idea of ‘getting a kick’ out of finding the answer
The attempt to predict what is going to happen
Something ‘deeper’ to do with uncovering insights into the previously unknown
Originality, and using discoveries and objective knowledge in a new way
Learning from mistakes and just trying something out to see what happens
Seeing new relationships between pre-existing bits of objective knowledge
and how things might fit together in a different way
For Bohm, this creativity, within science and art alike, is about assimilation, and
the feeling of oneness with the world, such that we feel able to live in it and
relate to it. He goes on…
…In order properly to understand the relationship between science and art,
it is necessary to go into certain deeper questions which have to do with what
underlies both these forms of human activity. The best point of departure for
studying these questions is perhaps a consideration of the fact that (wo)man
has a fundamental need to assimilate all his/her experiences… (In) (wo)man’s
natural and social environment, or ideas and feelings, the question of assimilation
is always one of establishing a harmonious ordered totality for structural
relationships… Science was concerned not only with practical problems of
assimilating nature to (wo)man’s physical need to understand the universe (but
also) to assimilate it mentally so that (wo)man could be at home in it… As for art,
it evidently helped (wo)man to assimilate the immediate perceptual aspects of
experience into a total structure of harmony and beauty.
(from On Creativity, by D. Bohm)
So science and art do have some similarities, if we go back far enough.
However, science and scientific culture is based upon the notion that there is an
ordered whole out there, and all we need to do is get better at researching it, so
that one day we will arrive at the ultimate answer, once and for all, and know
everything. But this is an epistemological assumption, and scientists do not have
any proof for this assumption, nor for the idea that science is the best vehicle
to get us there. It is not good to use the very existence of your epistemological
choices to try to justify your epistemological choices!
We told you epistemology can sometimes get a bit complicated.
The downside of Positivism is its tendency to hold itself up as the only way
to really know anything. Positivism tends to criticise other epistemological
positions not so much in terms of what their research says, but in terms of
their epistemological credential to even speak, if they do not measure up to
Positivism’s own standards of scientific rigour. It can be epistemologically quite
self-obsessed, which is why it can sometimes be a little like Stevie Wonder’s
Mista Know-it-All.
Secondly, the desire to ‘prove the Truth’ is not always, and need not necessarily
be, the point of cultural or artistic research. Because epistemological choices
tend to already imply certain methods, it is not always relevant or indeed
possible to apply Positivism to research for creativity. Meanings, internal personal
motivations and histories, interactions between people and all the ‘soft’ stuff
that creative people are often most interested in often has to be left out of
the Positivist idea of research because it cannot ever really be measured with
numbers. All too often one ends up ‘talking at cross-purposes’ with Positivists
(investors, funders and decision-makers), and this is at the heart of the ‘two
cultures’ thing touched upon above.
The Interpretative Tradition
There has been, maybe always, but certainly for a few hundred years now
another basic epistemological tradition made up of various threads. It has
developed sometimes outside of, and sometimes through a direct challenge to
Positivist epistemology.
This is usually referred to as the Interpretative Tradition. Because it is made
up of various threads, it is less easy to sum up this tradition of research in a few
bullet points. But let’s try anyway.
The Interpretative Tradition:
• Does not have any self-referential sense of itself as the only way to do research,
and there is little or no sense of a unified method that fits all occasions.
Choosing the right research tool for the right job and particular time depending
on what it is you are researching, is more of a hallmark of the Interpretative
Tradition.
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• Sees separating Facts from values, and being value-free as a bit of a non-starter.
This is essentially because the Interpretative Tradition sees knowledge as being
conditioned by the social and historical context that we live in. What we call ‘The
Truth’ is always moving around and changing. We used to know that the human
species was created by God in his own image, but now most people at least (just
not George Bush) reckon it is something to do with Natural Selection. So the
Interpretative Tradition is much more relaxed about the idea that all knowledge
is probably a story coloured by the social, historical and cultural context we find
ourselves in.
• Therefore tends to see knowledge as contingent. Like stories, narratives and
debates, knowledge is not fixed for all time. If Positivism is generally about Truthwith-a-capital-T then the Interpretative Tradition is more about truthS, where
only the plural ‘S’ is in capitals. There are many competing ideas about how the
world is. This takes us back to ideology and the politics of knowledge. Who says
what is ‘True’, is partly at least a question of economic and cultural power. But
that still is another debate for another time.
• Is thus much more about argument, debate, and a contest of ideas (more politics
of knowledge) than it is about measurement.
• Tends to also be more relaxed with the idea that we cannot always prove
the relationships between cause and effect, and with the idea that things in
the cultural world don’t necessarily sit in such neat relationships with other
things. The Interpretative Tradition tends to be more relaxed about the idea of
over-determination. That is, lots of things (causes) happen at the same time in
strange, inter-penetrating relationships to produce something (an effect) in the
real human and cultural world. We will come back to this when we look briefly at
dialectics below.
So all in all, the Interpretative Tradition is often more useful for research for
creativity, especially when this involves researching other people as they exist
in their worlds. The Interpretative Tradition shows us that the epistemological
problems arising from Positivism stem from the over-insistence that there is ‘one
best epistemological way’. Their way.
But there isn’t one.
The distinction between Positivism and The Interpretative Tradition is the
fundamental epistemological distinction. It underpins the distinction between
quantitative and qualitative research, which is the fundamental distinction
when we get to actual research methods. However, it needs to be said
somewhere, so we might as well say it here, that not everyone will agree with
the characterisation we have just put forward. We have just been very quickly
through a few hundred years of heavy-duty philosophical debate, so there will
inevitably be some skating over details. Sorry.
Warning
Say No to Reductionism
Despite the epistemological problems associated with Positivism and its overfocus upon supposedly Positive Facts, there is a clear and present danger in
going too far to the other extreme and denying the evident nature of the ‘real
world’ in favour of a partial view. As we saw with the dangers of solipsism, we
are all subject to the tendency that we think we know best, and this is why we
are all always a little bit wrong. Choosing one way of seeing the world means
we have to forego the usefulness of seeing it in other ways.
When we insist too strongly that our own chosen (socially constructed)
way of seeing and therefore understanding the world is the only way, we are in
danger of unnecessarily reducing ways of doing research to a self-limited range of
possibilities.
This is reductionism, and it is never going to be very good for any kind
of research. But it is especially bad for creativity because closing down
possibilities is not going to lead to open exploration nor innovation. And
reductionism can take many forms:
Economism – Too often within cultural policy and planning discussions of the
creative industries and their relationship to wider public culture, economic
impact agendas becomes an overly-privileged concern. Cultural and creative
life is inappropriately reduced to economic measurements (job creation and
business start-up statistics) and purportedly Positive facts about it, which are
at best very rough approximations of what is really going on, and at worst
encourage a wilful misreading.
Gender Essentialism – Whether from patriarchy or feminism, the reduction of
all responses to an argument down to a reaction to the gender of the person
making it is presented as a legitimate way of assessing its worth, when it is not.
Technological Determinism – The idea that it is technology that orders the
whole of society, and as a result the idea that technology always and already
comes first and determines everything else. This is usually wrong because the
technology we get is shaped by all sorts of other economic, political and cultural
factors.
All such forms of reductionism are the enemy of creative thinking and good
research, and should be resisted whenever encountered.
Empiricism, Induction and Deduction
Empiricism is kind-of the public face of The Positivist Tradition. It is an
epistemological position based upon the idea that research can simply be about
using sensory experiences to observe things happening. At its heart this is
common sense. You see something happening over and over again, and you work
out that it is likely to happen again tomorrow. This is the basic way we respond
to the world in our everyday lives, how we ‘research’ the cultural world around us
simply by being part of it and seeing what is going on.
But it is not always that simple.
To do something with these observations – construct a proper theory that you
might want to use to say something that you think other people should listen to,
or predict something about the world, or convince a bank manager to loan you
some money for investment in a new product line – you need to get into some
of the technicalities of how an actual prediction or explanation, that is a theory
can stem from simply observing something happen a few times.
This gets us into induction and deduction. These two philosophical ideas, which
are about how collecting observations can enable you to construct a theory,
involve one of two logical manoeuvres:
• Induction is the most straightforward. It is about constructing an explanation or
prediction that something will happen in the future by collecting observations that
it has happened that way in the past. If you observe the sun rising in the morning
often enough, you can construct a theory that the sun rises every morning.
• Deduction is connected but different. If I observe something happening every
time I enter a particular room, I can predict that that thing will happen to me
again if I enter that room again, without the need to actually enter the room and
observe anything. Deduction is what Sherlock Holmes was good at.
There are pitfalls within deductive logic because people ‘jump to conclusions’ on
the basis of false premises. Deductive logic is based upon syllogisms, but that
starts to get very technical and we don’t really need to get into that.
We mean it!
More important is the famous Problem of Induction.
All this philosophy might be good for impressing people at parties, but it doesn’t
necessarily help you to construct your own structured research in any great
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details. So from now on, we will stop being so philosophical and try to pin things
down a little more in terms of doing something with epistemological concepts.
This will include ideas from both the Positivist and Interpretative Traditions,
because they both hold useful ideas and say things that are practically useful.
If we want to construct a theory based upon induction and the serial collection
of observations, then how many observations are enough to conclusively ‘prove
the point’? Just because you observe something happening at lot does not
actually provide logical proof that it will happen next time. Everything changes.
This can have important practical consequences for the quality of your research
and business innovation plans based upon it. You might observe that the cultural
trend you have spotted is ‘definitely’ happening, and so develop a new product
line and sink all your new investment funds into meeting this new ‘demand’.
But you might have spotted it just as it is changing into something else. So it
is useful to have a way of testing your creative or business hypotheses that is
based upon something a little more solid than just observing what is going on
around you.
This gets us into falsificationism.
The Colour of Swans: Falsificationism
You might not be convinced by what one of the two blind guys said about the
colour of swans, and you might want to do some more proper research to see if
white really is the colour of swans and their swish-swish.
According to induction, if you want to know the colour of swans you need to
go out and collect observation of them. If you notice that every time you see a
swan it is white, you might then construct a theory, based upon induction, that
‘all swans are white’.
But back to the problem of induction. How many swans do you need to
count before you can say that they are all white? You can never prove that all
swans are white simply by observing swans, but you can disprove the theory ‘all
swans are white’ just by observing one black swan. You can never conclusively
prove something, but you can conclusively disprove something with only one
observation that is contrary to your original idea. You can never conclusively
verify but you can conclusively falsify.
And this is where falsificationism comes from. It is a really elegant solution
to the problem of induction, devised by the famous philosopher Karl Popper
who first used the swans thing. It provides firmer epistemological grounds upon
which to build theories of the world and can be invaluable for your research into
creativity and business innovation. As we shall see in Chapter 7, experienced
creative practitioners have various ways of testing their own creative output. For
instance, writers often talk about ‘murdering their darlings’ by editing out of the
novel their favourite characters because they don’t fit. Being one’s own harshest
critic, or asking someone else to be, can be very useful.
Interestingly for creativity and the sometimes unknown and unexpected
sources of inspiration we experience, Popper argued that it did not matter where
scientific hypotheses come from. Their value is assessed according to the extent
to which they stand up to testing. And testing lies in the attempt to disprove
them. It might seem counter-intuitive, but according to this view good research
lies in trying to destroy your own ideas, in ‘testing them to destruction’. If you
can’t, then they are probably good ideas. This enables you to see if your creative
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or business plan really does stand up, or if you are kidding yourself. Which is
always really useful.
Falsificationism is not something that comes very easily to creative practice.
It is not so easy to set out to disprove or ‘destroy’ ideas, plans and work that you
have invested so much of yourself in. But no matter how uncomfortable it is, it is
good for your creative soul.
Game
He has chosen these numbers because they confirm to a particular rule that he
has in mind. And you have to work out what this rule is by asking if another three
number sequences also conform to the rule.
Exercise
Case Study
Call in the Awkward Squad
Test Yourself: Falsificationism for Creative Business
So what three number sequence would you come up with to research what this rule
is?
It is an old proverb, but still a good one…
Yvon Chouinard once wrote
You can learn more from failure than you can from success
Do your testing – testing your own ideas, no matter where they came from, is
often the best way to conduct research for business…
Did you say – 8, 10, 12? The next three even numbers ascending in order of size?
8, 10, 12 does adhere to the rule, but what is the rule?
Am I On the Right Track? Confirmation Bias
We all have a deep-seated need to feel that we have some control over
our immediate environment. To feel a lack of this control in a fundamental,
existential way is very destabilising and scary. So we are often tempted into
the Illusion of Control.
One of the ways this can play itself out is the way we feel the need to
keep hold of our view of reality as the correct one. This is kind-of the interior
philosophical manoeuvres we go through to arrive at and sustain Solipsism. It
appears that people have a hard-wired motivation to seek validation for the
views they already hold.
So we all suffer from Confirmation Bias. And it can be very bad for research
and creativity if we are constantly trying to re-confirm our existing views.
Remember Krishnamurti? The best antidote to Confirmation Bias is to
recognise it for what it is.
To help with this, Mlodinow introduces the following game.
How about 20, 30, 40? Yep, still conforms to the rule, but the rule is not ‘even
numbers ascending in order’.
What about 3, 5, 7? Maybe it is just numbers ascending by a factor of two? Yep 3,
5, 7 conforms, but what is the rule?
Are you trying to choose three numbers that conform to the rule, or three
numbers that test the rule to find out what it is? That is, are you trying to get
the particular answer to this specific question right, when getting it ‘wrong’
so that you could get better insight into what the rule is, the bigger question,
what you are actually researching would be a better strategy? What the rule is!
If you are just trying to get the numbers right instead of trying to find
out what the rule is, it is probably because of the Confirmation Bias. You are
experiencing the need to get things ‘right’.
(The rule is the simplest one available, three ascending numbers. No evens or
odds or factors of 2. But that doesn’t really matter. The point is the need to try
to disprove yourself so that you can get the answer right).
This proverb implies a falsificationist position, in that learning from failure
is akin to testing to destruction the things (concepts, theories, practices and
techniques) you thought were your way forward.
And you can easily get help with this kind of research. A research technique
that chimes with falsificationism is to deliberately seek out people you know
are going to be difficult to convince, The Awkward Squad. And there is never a
shortage of awkward people!
These are the people who just love asking those really difficult, Exocet
questions. ‘Why are you doing it like that?’; ‘Why is it blue, and not green?’;
‘What is that character for?’ You know the ones.
If you have answers that convince both you and them, then you are probably
onto something. Whilst it doesn’t really have to be as pompous as the Dragon’s
Den thing, it won’t be comfortable, and it might get really irritating. But it will
probably be really useful.
Chouinard is the guy who set up Patagonia, the outdoor clothing firm. A very
successful business as well as a very eco-credible label that seems to stand for
something beyond its own profit motive. So maybe we should listen to him
some more:
…Testing is an integral part of the Patagonia industrial design process,
and it needs to be included in every part of the process. It involves testing
competitors’ products, ‘quick and dirty’ testing of new ideas to see if they are
worth pursuing, fabric testing, ‘living’ with the new product to judge how ‘hot’
the sales may be, testing production samples for function and durability, etc.
and test marketing a product to see if people will buy it
(From Let My People Go Surfing, by Y. Chouinard)
We will hear more from Chouinard later.
He gives you three numbers – 2, 4, 6
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35
Stuck in the Middle with You: Paradigms Can Be
Good and Bad
Karl Popper’s work on falsificationism was the beginning of what some people
now refer to as post-Positivism, where epistemological debate started to move
away from the naïve Positivism described above. Another key milestone within
this development is the work of Thomas Kuhn, whose discussion of paradigms
became central to current epistemological debate.
A paradigm is made up of the shared assumptions that a particular research
community gathers around. It tends to include a definition (tight or loose) of
what count as good questions to be asking right now, and therefore what counts
as good answers. It is the shared assumptions that are current within a particular
discipline, the research zeitgeist of the day. Paradigms can be a good thing, but
they can also be a bad thing. They can lead to you getting stuck within one
particular position that then precludes you thinking in other ways.
Quotation
• Encourage the sharing of the knowledge generated within a particular field of
research. This sharing is ‘oxygen’ of the paradigm. This also includes creating the
social spaces for practitioners within a particular field to congregate in a broader
sense, for example when you attend a conference, trade show, private view or
festival.
• Provide the shared rituals of initiation into a particular creative discipline – the
qualifications, memberships, accolades etc.
Paradigms also tend to encourage ‘revolutions’ whereby people carve out a
creative place on the edge of the accepted way of doing things by opening up
new possibilities. This seems to be especially the case within creative disciplines.
This can be good fun, and lead to fruitful forms of creativity and innovation
that develop out of a critique of what went before. For instance, a history of
Avant Garde art movements throughout the 20th Century could be couched in
a history of ‘paradigmatic reactions’ – how Fauvism and Cubism reacted to the
‘paradigm’ of The Salon, how Dada and Surrealism reacted to Naturalism, how
Expressionism reacted to all this by rejecting everything that went before, etc.
etc. It is very useful for creativity to know what you are not, so that you can
know what you are.
A paradigm is defined by Thomas Kuhn as follows:
However, paradigms can be bad because they:
Close historical investigation of a given speciality at a given time discloses a set of
recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual,
observational and instrumental applications. These are the community’s
paradigm, revealed in its textbooks, lectures and laboratory exercises. By
studying them and by practicing with them, the members of the corresponding
community learn their trade… discover what isolatable elements, explicit or
implicit, the members of that community may have abstracted from their global
paradigm and deployed as rules in their research. Anyone who has attempted to
describe or analyse the evolution of a particular scientific (research) tradition will
necessarily have sought accepted principles and rules of this sort
(from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T. Kuhn)
Creative disciplines, whether they are aware of it or not, also have paradigmatic
assumptions underpinning them.
Paradigms can be good in that they:
• Indicate current best practice and what ‘counts’ as important research, current
trends, ‘cutting edge’ etc. within your chosen creative field. It provides readymade knowledge of what are the acceptable tools, concepts, current debates,
urgent next issues etc. that need to be researched.
Warning
You Should Worry About Groupthink
Mutualism – A social-psycholoigcal dynamic gets set up which says ‘I will
agree with you if you will agree with me’ – be careful of other people and this
kind of ‘getting into bed with someone’. Read Knots by R. D. Laing to see how
this works in minute detail.
Ivan Janis coined the term Groupthink and Wikipedia defines it as follows:
Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize
conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating
ideas. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints
outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this
may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid
embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause
groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside,
for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. The term is frequently used pejoratively,
with hindsight.
Suggestibility – People tend to have all sorts of non-rational reasons for
allowing groups to suggest silly things to them, because they want to belong,
they fancy each other, they always assume the other person knows more etc. –
be careful of yourself if you are becoming too suggestible, pliable etc.
The Feeling of Invincibile Power – People like being in groups because it gives
them the sense of power that comes from having reinforcements (in both
senses of the word). This can lead to shouting, bombast and bullying your
point through – be careful of being in a group if it is getting to be ‘too correct’
all the time.
It suggests that we do things when we are in groups that we would not do as
individuals, which can be highly irrational.
Sigmund Freud looked at the interior psycho-dynamics of the group-mind,
why people often went for it and its potential for irrationality. He highlighted
the following processes, which can be taken as a check-list for resisting
groupthink:
• Impose ‘rules’ on research and creativity that can easily lead to an agenda that
is too ‘closed off’. They can encourage the researcher (creative practitioner) to
believe there really is ‘one best way’ to do research (creative practice), leading to
a rather arrogant belief that other research can be dismissed as already wrong
simply because of its paradigmatic starting point.
• Can discourage cross-disciplinary research and foreclose on such potential dialogue
with someone else from a different paradigm. If you are both too wedded to your
paradigmatic position you will just end up speaking different languages, at crosspurposes and maybe not at all. This entails too high an ‘opportunity cost’ (discussed
below), which is the cost incurred by pursuing one research direction and therefore
having to dismiss others that could be equally fruitful.
• Require ‘revolutions’ to carve out a creative place that doesn’t conform to the
accepted way of doing things. This can be wasteful and time consuming in terms
of constantly debunking everything that went before. It can also be wasteful and
time consuming to be arguing about basic concepts and tools. Carpenters tend
not to have debates about hammers and screwdrivers when they are making
tables.
• Can encourage a ‘group mindedness’ whereby people get together and mutually
reinforce each other’s partial view of the world, leading to a kind-of irrationality
and/or creative short sightedness.
As in,
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Paradigms and Opportunity Costs
Diagram
Quotation
Economists use the concept of ’opportunity cost’ to highlight that there is an
extra cost of investing in one thing that stems from not therefore being able
to invest in something else, and so having to forego that opportunity. In a
similar way, there is a creative opportunity cost associated with choosing to do
something in a particular way because you cannot therefore do it another way.
You have inevitably closed off another opportunity.
Being too wedded to a paradigm, whether you are aware of it or not can
encourage a high opportunity cost.
In Steps in the Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson, who might possible have
been the most intelligent man to ever live, has articulated this kind of thinking
in the following way: Because of the basic rules of grammar and syntax (a very
broad and powerful paradigm), if I choose to now write down the letter ‘F’, I have
already, by that very act closed down my options for the next letter, because
only certain letters can follow an ‘F’. And if I choose to write the letter ‘R’ next,
then my choice for the next letter is even more limited, it is going to have to be
a vowel, and there are only five of them to choose from!
This is only a little game, but it does elucidate something more central to
research for creativity and innovation. Every time you make a choice you are in
danger of closing down the range of options you can choose for your next move,
and then closing down even further the next set of options, and so on…
Which Way Are You Going?
Avoiding Paradigms in Creative Business
The bad bit of paradigms, the opportunity cost they sometimes entail and the
problems of groupthink can all mean that it is very easy to find yourself going
in the wrong direction. This might not be too much of a problem at first, but the
further you go the bigger the problem will become. You could end up hopelessly
lost.
Because the world is changing, we can never assume that the way we have done
things in the past is adequate for the future. We (at Patagonia) evaluate ideas of
the moment for improving business processes – from MRP (materials resource
plan), to just-in-time, to quick response, to self-managed teams – if we think these
approaches may result in a better product delivered on time at a reasonable cost.
(from Against Method by P. Feyerabend)
(from Let My People Go Surfing, by Y. Chouinard)
Mr. Blue Sky: Epistemological Anarchism
So, two things:
• You need to be sure your basic starting-point and general direction are right. If
you are going in slightly the wrong direction with your research, it might not
matter at first, but the more you go into it the further you will be off course.
• Avoiding too strong a link to any one paradigm and always having an awareness
of the potential to borrow ideas from other disciplines can be a good compass to
avoid the consequences of these wrong directions, the antidote to opportunity
costs and the ‘refresh button’ on your potential for innovation.
So be self-aware of the existence of the paradigm you are currently in, and of its
impact upon the way you do things. Paradigms can help, but at best probably
only for a while. As we will see in various places below, there is a complex and
intimate relationship between problems and solutions. All too easily the
(creative) thing that you think is part of the solution can flip over to become
part of the problem. If your paradigm encourages too strong a conformity to
some spurious notion of the standard way of doing things, it is unlikely to be
good for fruitful research and creative innovation for very long. It will certainly
work against innovation eventually.
Whilst you might be able to falsify a swan, and there is more than one way to
skin a cat, it is also sometimes good to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
It is good to have a clear and precise idea about what and why you are
researching, and for whom. But it is also good to be alive to what the weird
and unusual can bring, and to be open and eclectic within your research and
creativity.
Along with Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend is usually held up as
the third key representative of epistemological discussions that started to open
things up in the 1960s and signalled the end of naïve Positivism. He advocates
an anarchistic approach to epistemological issues which involves taking research
methods, findings, directions, inspirations, insights and rabbits from anywhere
and everywhere. Feyerabend’s slogan for research is anything goes, because
to do otherwise is to accept the stultifying dead-hand of official, authorised
(paradigmatic) and supposedly credible approaches to doing research. If August
Comte, who is the poster-boy of Positivism was Mista Know It All, then Paul
Feyerabend is Mr Blue Sky, advocating much more ‘blue sky thinking’ for research.
Quotation
Thinkpiece
From The Wildtrack to The Decisive Moment (This was originally Michael
Pinchbeck’s idea, but he said we could borrow it)
Film-makers always record the background noise of any shot they make,
even if they don’t really intend to use it in the finished film, because they
might just need it later. They call this the Wildtrack.
When it comes to research for creative practice, the idea of the Wildtrack
is a useful analogy. Whilst research often needs to be planned and carried
out in a structured way, it can equally be about useful insights and ideas that
come seemingly from nowhere. They can come from a conversation, from
overhearing someone else’s conversation, from just picking up the newspaper,
remembering something you had forgotten, from a random image in the
street. Even if you don’t intend to use it, it can be useful to keep listening to
and recording your own Wildtrack.
Which brings us to the decisive moment, a phrase first coined by the
photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. This refers to the precise moment when
the image was right and the photograph was captured. Listening to the
Wildtrack and taking advantage of the opportunities it can give you entails
being skilful in recognising the useful bits within it, as distinct from the
background noise. When the decisive moment arrives, you need to be ready
and do something to make the connection to your more structured research
agenda, whether it is contact with someone new, a new idea, or a new process.
Weirdly, this may mean allowing research to happen to you as much as
trying to make it happen. It is easy to ‘plan out’ innovation if you stick too
rigidly to original plans and fail to spot new opportunities.
Dialectical Logic
Feyerabend writes:
History generally, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in
content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle then even the
best historian and the best methodologist can imagine. History is full of accidents
and conjectures and curious juxtapositions of events, and it demonstrates to
us the complexity of human change and (its) unpredictable character …Are we
really to believe that the naïve and single-minded rules which methodologists
take as their guide are capable of accounting for such a maze of interactions?…
Therefore…
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…anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is
certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science.
At first sight dialectics can appear very weird and slightly unnatural. It is a
discussion that does not often show up in the more orthodox discussions of
research and business.
We cannot prove it, but we think this is partly to do with the generally cultural
hangover of living in a Western scientific culture. Eastern philosophy and culture,
especially Hinduism and Buddhism seem to think dialectically much more easily.
Dialectical thinking can potentially be very useful for creativity and innovation
because it is fundamentally about grasping movement and change, which is
kind-of what it is all about! So even though it can appear weird, abstract and
counter-intuitive, give it a chance.
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The place to start with dialectics is to recognise that it is a different form of
logic. Since the ancient Greeks, we in the West have based the vast majority
of our thinking upon Formal Logic, the type of thinking that we are all familiar
with when we say that someone is being logical, arguments that seem internally
consistent. The type-of-thinking that Mr. Spock is into. There are three laws of
Formal Logic:
The Law of Identity – a thing (a thought, argument or proposition) has a fixed
identity and it equals its own thing-ness.
The Law of Non-Contradiction – a thing’s identity cannot be something else.
The Law of the Excluded Middle – a thing must be either one thing or the
other, it cannot be both at the same time.
And there is no doubt that we sometimes need this type of internally consistent
logical thinking. But this does not necessarily mean it is the only route to logical
thinking.
The essential character of the shirt was its stripey-ness and this was a result of
the interpenetration of opposites, the blue and the white.
Its basic characteristic was a result of the relationship between its
non-blueness and its non-whiteness as much as the blue and white. The
movement from blue to non-blue, from white to non-white is what made it
what it fundamentally was, striped. Whether it was fundamentally blue or
fundamentally white could never have been answered.
Sometimes you can understand things better by understanding what they
are not. We told you dialectics is a bit weird.
Thinkpiece
Two Rivers and One Body: Researching Movement
So What?
It is all very well going on about shirts and rivers, but how can this dialectical
stuff help in doing creative research? What good is all this dialectical philosophy?
Creative practice is best if it is aware of its own evolution, of its own
movement and change. And this is the key point about dialectics. Recognising
the interpenetration of opposites and things as being in constant flux can help
you to grasp how new things emerge out of older versions of themselves as a
result of internal processes. Things might change a little, then a little more in
terms of the internal quantities, but not really change their basic nature. But
eventually this series of small incremental changes culminate in a fundamental
change in quality, it becomes something completely different.
• Does the inspiration behind your work come from inside you as a specific person,
or does it come from your experiences of the world outside and beyond you?
• Is your creativity ‘hardwired’ into your personality, or does it come from the
conversations you have had with other people?
• Does it come from shared ideas of how things should look, be put together and
work which stem from the particular context you are working in now, or does it
come from resonances and memories of when you were a child?
• Is your creative business about what you do, or what your customers want you
to do? One or the other!
• Are you successful now? If so, is this a result of where you are now? Or perhaps
it is a result of all the experiences you had when you were not so successful? Is
your success due to your non-success?
Applying this kind of dialectical thinking to the creative process raises the
following kinds of questions:
Rivers are often used as metaphors in dialectical philosophy. One proverb
about rivers and dialectics, from Herodotus reminds us that,
…you can never step into the same river twice
Dialectical logic is different from these laws of Formal Logic because it suggests
that things:
• Do not really have fixed identities, they come from somewhere and they go
somewhere else, that is they evolve
• Things are best understood in and through their contradictions. Sometimes the
best way to understand something is to see it in its relationship with what it is
not, through what is called the interpenetration of opposites.
• Because things are always changing, they are always more than one thing at any
one time, they are in flux
Thinkpiece
Do You Like My Shirt? The Interpenetration of Opposites
I used to have a blue and white striped shirt. The blue stripes and the white
stripes were the same thickness, so they were the same distance apart. I could
never work out if it was a blue shirt with white stripes, or a white shirt with
blue stripes.
But this is the wrong question. And finding the right question is key to good
research as often as finding the right answer. If I had carried on researching
whether my shirt was fundamentally blue with white adornment, or
fundamentally white with blue adornment, I would have got precisely nowhere.
Whilst the whole river, its basic shape and course remains fairly constant for
a while, it is also always changing because it is always flowing. Rivers are not
ponds. So whilst you can step into the ‘same’ river again, the ‘same’ river is also
a ‘different’ river.
In another river, this time a little faster flowing, the water rushes over a rock.
As the water rushes over it, it causes a ‘standing wave’. The water is so fast
that the wave looks as if it is standing still. It is always there in its basic shape.
But at the same time it is always different, always moving and made up of
different water from higher up the river.
It is always the same and always at the same time different. Always standing
still and at the same time always moving.
Your body is made up of a certain structure. But as Nagasena never knew,
your cells are constantly re-producing themselves. We have heard various
theories on this, but we are told that the cells that line your stomach take the
longest to re-produce, 13 weeks. So 13 weeks from now, you will still be you,
but you will also be made out of completely different stuff.
You are the same, but after every 13 weeks you are a completely different
person.
Because…
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• Is your creative work about you, or is it about the critique of what someone else
has done before you that you are responding to? Is it about now, or is it about
the things that you are not yet, but would like to see, have and experience?
Which actually is you, just not yet.
• What is your creative network? Is it something that has come about because
you have done things for someone else? Or because they have done things for
you? Or does it come from you doing things for them because they have done
things for you because you have done things for them? And anyway, lots of
other people have been involved and no-one can remember any more, you all
just live like that now?
And the best dialectical question of all for a creative person:
But it doesn’t always have to be this upsetting. Understanding change
through dialectics can also be used to think about good things, helping you to
understand and get a grip on yourself and your creativity as a constant process
of change. It is a good way to grasp how things evolve out of themselves, how
things emerge, develop and grow.
This dimension of change is another important facet of having a proper
stab at answering the dialectically oriented questions, asked above about your
creative journey which Mr. Spock would find so difficult to understand.
The Uncanny Valley, discussed in Chapter 6 is also a bit like this.
Maybe go back to them again and look at how things have changed for you,
from one thing into the other?
• What do you do? Is it this, or is it that?
According to Formal Logic the answer to each of these questions has to be one
or the other, it cannot be both at the same time otherwise you are just confused,
and not logical.
So answer now. Quickly! You don’t have to really, but Mr. Spock would want
you to.
Thinkpiece
How Things Have Changed
Most proper Shakespearian tragedies have a main character who already has
within him, usually him, the seeds of his own downfall. King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, Hamlet etc. It is not so much that some external event comes along
to mess things up, rather that the behaviour that they have always exhibited
eventually leads to the trouble when it really gets going.
As we all already know…
Love will tear us apart again
So hopefully the limitations of Formal Logic and the usefulness of dialectical
thinking for creativity and innovation is a bit clearer. It allows you to think
about things as a moving set of interpenetrating creative relationships between
things that may at first sight seem like opposites, but which we know within
our creative minds are often just facets of the same, inter-connected ways of
thinking and living. This is probably what innovation is.
Something like dialectics is the underlying logic needed for innovative lateral
thinking and finding ‘killer application’ that we discuss in chapters 5, 6 and 7.
Quantum Physics
There is an intimate relationship between dialectics and the thinking behind
quantum physics. There is also a strong relationship between this and the politics
of knowledge that we keep putting off for another time. In their book The
Quantum Society, Zohar and Marshall discuss a newly developing epistemology
related to quantum physics. They contrast the contours of this holistic
epistemology with the more mainstream, mechanistic epistemology prevalent
within Western society. They argue that our Western epistemological perceptions
of social and cultural reality are mechanistic because there is:
The thing that was once the solution changes to become the problem.
This is an example of how change happens as far as dialectics is concerned.
The thing that drives the change from A over to B is already within A all the
time. In more technical language, the initial thing (A) is the thesis, the thing
that is already within A and is it’s opposite (not-A) is the anti-thesis. The
interpenetration of these opposites causes change to happen from within,
which eventually means we arrive at B, the synthesis.
For instance, Love (thesis), due to its internal dynamics, will tear us (the
interpenetration of opposites – anti-thesis), so that we end up apart (an
entirely new and different state of affairs – synthesis).
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upon breaking down social, economic and cultural life into its constituent parts
understood in isolation from each other. And this includes the social and cultural
lives of real people.
• The ‘…modern cult of the expert’ and the increasingly prevalent ‘detached
individual who is very knowledgeable about isolated bits of information or
experience but ignorant of the whole of which these bits are a part’. It is the
whole and not the isolated bits that makes creativity and culture what it actually
is and the place where creative innovation comes from.
• A situation whereby ‘mechanism stresses a single point of view’. A mechanistic
epistemology only looks at things in one way and cultural institutional self­
interest often works to impose a single epistemological stance, such as economic
reductionism which leads to an institutionalised epistemological solipsism.
So we are not actually putting off the politics of knowledge that much any
more. But another key reason to bring up this quantum/dialectical thinking as
an epistemology that can underpin practical routes to creative innovation is this:
It shows in a deep sense that holistic relationships are important, and breaking
things into isolated bits is often destructive. When it comes to discussing how
mutually collaborative creative spaces can be better for innovation as compared
to mechanistically oriented and rigidly managed systems in Chapter 6, this type
of thinking will re-appear.
Quotation
Zohar and Marshall argue that the mechanistic epistemology is problematic
because it does not adequately
…give any account of where life and consciousness belong in the universe… (and
so) leaves human beings with no sense of our place in the scheme of things. (It)…
denies the reality and importance of relationships, establishing a precedent for
conflict and confrontation and the pursuit of limited self-interest. As a model,
mechanism cannot account for why people ever act on behalf of others, nor for
any sort of social cohesion’
assumptions that competition between ‘isolated parts’ is the ‘reality’ of our
social and economic organisation.
The contours of the quantum epistemology are generally about trying
to capture the holism of social and cultural interdependency, and the interpenetrating social and cultural bonds that a mechanistic epistemology is not
geared up for. Such a holistic epistemology asks questions about the whole, like a
‘gardener’, rather than planning to tinker with (cultural or economic) components
in isolation from each other like a ‘car mechanic’. The politics of knowledge that
we keep putting off for another time is found in the quantum epistemology in
that it asks questions that go beyond the individual-collective dichotomy, and the
privatised version of the cultural economy that tend to flow from that.
The types of questions you ask yourself will go a long way to determining the
answers to arrive at!
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 5 – The Quantum Tradition
We need to evolve a new alternative, a third way that mediates between the
self-centredness and fragmentation of extreme individualism and the imposed
communality of extreme collectivism…
…We can think of society as a milling crowd, millions of individuals each going his
or her own way and managing somehow, to co-ordinate sometimes. This is the
Western way. We can think of society as a disciplined army, each member a soldier
marching in tight, well-ordered step. Individual differences are suppressed for the
sake of the uniform performance. This is now a discredited Collectivist way. Or,
we can think of society as a free-form dance company, each member a soloist in
his or her own right but moving creatively in harmony with the others…
(from The Quantum Society, by D. Zohar and I. Marshall)
Phenomenology and Existentialism
(from The Quantum Society, by D. Zohar and I. Marshall)
• An over-emphasis upon technocratic and external target-orientations within
cultural life. There is a tendency towards self-validating business models and
organisational shapes that model themselves upon machines.
• For example, there is an over-emphasis upon rigid bureaucratic organisation that
stress hierarchy and a focus upon the ‘…ever-descending audit mentality based
upon the universalisation of statistical measures…’ for instance money, as the
only meaningful measurement tool.
• A focus upon ‘… isolated, separated and interchangeable parts which highlights
the engineering approach inherent within the mechanistic epistemology. Part of
the politics of the knowledge that we keep putting off is found in its insistence
In contrast to this mechanistic epistemology, Zohar and Marshall highlight
the contours of a newly emerging pattern of cultural relationships which is
characterised by the possibility of a ‘new emphasis on unity and integration…
a whole new framework for understanding and fulfilling our potential as social
(cultural) beings’.
The creativity, innovation and viable business strategies that come from Peerto-Peer production, the Open Source Movement and We-Think, which we discuss
in Chapter 6, are a case in point and contrast starkly with the mechanistic
At the most subjective end of the epistemological spectrum is phenomenology.
This is an epistemological position that focuses upon consciousness and
perception. It is the perceptions of phenomena as they appear to us as
individuals, as distinct from the idea of the real world out there that is
phenomenology’s focus. As we will see in the next chapter, it forms the
epistemological basis for specific research methods that try to engage with
people’s beliefs, assumptions and expectations as they articulate them for
themselves within the context of their own lives.
But phenomenological epistemology is in no way an exact science precisely
because it tries to get to the heart of ways in which individuals experience the
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world in their own terms. When we try to understand other peoples’ perceptions,
we soon realise that we can never be sure about them, will probably never really
be able to share and mutually understand them in a complete way. We can only
approximate them within our discussions and attempts to articulate them. Max
Weber, who is big in the historical development of the Interpretative Tradition
of epistemology, although not an out-and-out phenomenologist, called this
verstehen, because he was German. Verstehen is one of those words for which
we do not have a direct equivalent in English. The closest we can come up with is
interpretative understanding.
However, if we apply this epistemology to our own reflective creative
practice and become the object of our own research, which research for creative
innovation often is, we can see that there are some important resonances
between phenomenology and the individual creative act. Both are very much
about understanding the subjective aspects of life.
Phenomenology, along with the related world of Existentialism also focuses
our attention upon the choices that we can make as to what our perceptions
are to be, as a never ending series of movable possibilities. These choices need
not be tied to anything in the world in any really fundamental way. This then
highlights a greater self-awareness as to the Existential choices being made,
or that are capable of being made. This in turn raises all sorts of political and
ethical dimensions and issues concerning personal tastes and sensibilities. This
brings us to big questions of ethics and authenticity. Again there are very close
relationships between this epistemology for studying individual choice and the
creative act.
We say more about the specifics of the ethical dimensions to research
and innovation in Chapter 6, but for now it is good to recognise that
Phenomenological and Existential epistemology can be an established basis for
researching your creative self and who you are to be in the future. Standing as
they do at the subjective end of epistemological discussions, Phenomenology
and Existentialism are potentially part of the epistemological underpinnings for
a truly open approach to creativity, the basis for reflective practice discussed
through reference to the work of Gray and Malins in the next chapter.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No 6 – The Phenomenological Tradition
…modern psychology and phenomenology use the term ‘perceptive ambiguity’,
which indicates the availability of new cognitive positions (creative perceptions)
that fall short of conventional epistemological stances and that allow the
observer to conceive the world in a fresh dynamic of potentiality before the
fixative process of habit and familiarity comes into play
(from The Open Work, by U. Eco)
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Epistemological Openness;
Be a Little Bit Nervous
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 7 – The Eastern Tradition
Another of the useful aspects of Phenomenological or Existential ways of
thinking lies in appreciating the value of a greater degree of epistemological
openness when doing research. And being epistemologically open, in the way we
are using it here, is connected to a sense of epistemological ‘nervousness’. Which
is a good thing.
We have borrowed this notion of ‘nervousness’ from Peter Berger and his
book The Social Construction of Reality. In this book he talks about ‘cognitive
nervousness’, by which he means the disjuncture between the experience of
something and the lack of any deeper meaning of that thing, which often
pervades contemporary culture.
We think something similar happens, or at least should do, within good
research. It is all well and good deciding upon a clear research starting-point,
finding a good epistemological position, constructing tight research methods and
pursuing them professionally. But don’t run away with the idea that this will get
you to some kind of universal truth that will:
• Last for ever and be the only time you will need to look at this research question
• Be accepted by everyone else just because you have done the research
really well
Cognitive nervousness, when you don’t really know what things mean is not
good, and is ‘dissonant’. But when it comes to epistemology, it can be healthy
to be a little nervous, to have an open hesitancy about any research. It is healthy
to have the kind of nervousness that comes from knowing the epistemological
limitations of any research position. Epistemological nervousness is good for the
creative soul and helps you to avoid making over-reaching statements and over
ambitious creative business decisions based upon it.
…creative thinking is the infinite movement of thought, emotion and action. That
is, when thought… is unimpeded in its movement, is not compelled or influenced
or bound by an idea (e.g. positivism’s unity of method) and does not proceed
from the background of tradition or habit (e.g. a paradigm), then that movement
is creative. … so long as thought is circumscribed, held by fixed idea, or merely
adjusts itself to a background or condition and, therefore, becomes limited, such
thought is not creative… creative movement of thought never seeks a result or
comes to a culmination, because result or culmination is always the outcome of
alternate cessation and movement, whereas if there is no search for a result, but
only continual movement of thought, then there is creative thinking.
(from To Be a True Human Being, in Total Freedom by Krishnamurti)
What this means in more normal language is that good research is connected to
creativity because both are ultimately about the free and open flow of ideas. And
this is connected to innovation because that is also about the free and open flow
of ideas.
We will come back to this in the Chapters 5, 6 and 7. But before we do that,
let’s try to pin down in more detail how you might put one or more of these
epistemological positions into operation. That is, let’s consider the in’s and out’s
of actual research methods useful for creativity and innovation.
It involves being open to:
• The constant movement of things
• The difference between how things seem on the basis of your research and their
real nature
• The temporary nature of any plans you might make based upon that research
• The inevitable incompleteness of any knowledge and, most fundamentally
• The fact that you yourself as a creative person engaged in research are an ongoing project
These can all be a very useful for sustaining the act of being creative and
innovative.
Even though it doesn’t always feel like that.
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Story
Having to Tell Off Carol
Kurt Lewin once wrote,
There is nothing so practical as a good theory
Chapter 4 – Different Methods:
Which Tools to Use, Why, When
and How
46
I used to have to tell off my friend Carol. She was always saying that she was
interested in practice, in doing stuff, in working with other people, so she didn’t
have much time for research, for theory.
She did do good work. But I had to tell her off, because there is a better
relationship between theory and practice than that.
I didn’t tell her off in a really angry way, we were only joking. But
nevertheless researching Behind, In/Though, For or In Front Of your creative
practice allows you to develop good theory, which allows you to develop better
practice. And developing better practice will allow you to stand back from the
details and see things from the outside: that is better theory. Sometimes Carol,
there can be very useful dialectical dynamic between theory and practice.
One of the keys to sustaining this inter-relationship between what you are
doing in practice and what you need to know more about in theory is knowing
how to skilfully use the various tools out there for your own active research.
The different methods that Mozart talked about (defining, crystalizing and
enlarging creative practice) for researching creativity are the vital link between
theory and practice.
47
After all the philosophical debate in the last chapter, we want this chapter to be
more practical. We want it to be about putting concrete research methods at
the centre of your creativity so that they can contribute to your creative journey.
Knowing about concrete research methods can contribute to this journey by being:
• Part of the way you can read your c reative map and make decisions about
different ways to navigate.
• Part of your creative fuel to enable you to travel around this map. The research
map explored in Chapter 2 has arrows in it, indicating movement. Specific
research methods can form the vehicles allowing such movement.
• In part your creative passport to enable you to enter new and undiscovered
stop-offs and destinations as you make your journey.
The nature of the global cultural economy and the ever-present change and
comp­­­etition it brings suggests that building regular research into your creativity
and innovation plan is not an optional extra. It is not a chore that has to be
gone through at some time outside of the main business of creative practice. It
is the creativity.
You should find time for more reading Carol!
Most of the discrete research methods we will talk about in this chapter come
from the social and cultural sciences. This is because the social and cultural
sciences have done the most to devise tight methods with which to research
what is going on in the society, economy and culture around you, or to get inside
the heads of the people who make up that society, economy and culture. The
Arts have obviously contributed to this, and there are lots of variations specific
to the Arts that connect to certain research methods that we will not touch
upon below. But as with the previous chapter, what we want to draw out in this
chapter are the basic contours of well established research methods. How you
use them in concrete detail will be up to you at the end of the day, because it is
still your thing.
The practical benefits of research methods mean they can help:
• Follow up on the epistemological discussions so that you can pin down a well
crafted programme of research that is commensurate
• With your exploratory journey into any and all of the aspects of research you
might have thought about whilst reading so far
• Put into action the different research starting-points discussed above and
obtain the different types of knowledge this might involve depending upon the
What? Who? and Why? questions
48
Reflective Practice- Based Research Methods
for Art and Design
Although science and social sciences have had established research methods
for the past 150 years or so, Arts and Design disciplines have not consolidated
core research methods within their disciplines to the same degree. So when it
comes to specific research methods appropriate for Art and Design, there is still
an emerging debate about which research methods can be developed or made
appropriate for the central element of practice.
Bringing together elements of research and practice in a more consolidated
way is what Gray and Malin, in their book Visualizing Research mean by the term
‘reflective practitioner’. They point out that one of the key differences between
research within the sciences and/or social sciences on the one hand, and
research in/through creative practice on the other, is the way that the creative
practitioner can often be the object of their own research (what it is about),
as much as the person who is doing it. Because the personal and subjective is
often central to creative practice, this kind of research chimes strongly with a
phenomenological epistemology.
Gray and Malins suggest that because the interior meanings and perceptions
of the practitioner sometimes is the research for the reflective practitioner, the
relationship between research and practice has a highly multi-faceted character.
The reflective practitioner’s role can be one or more of the following:
• A generator of the thing that is being researched in/through the creative
action itself
• A self-observer through reflection back on creative action, which is
simultaneously in creative action, and through creative discussion with others
• An observer of the practice of others as the research into the broader context
of practice and the gaining other perspectives
• A co-researcher, facilitator and research manager of collaborative research
These complicated inter-relationships between reflection and practice, interior
meanings/motivations and the creative acts that result from them mean that a
new epistemological debate about new methods for practice-based research is
emerging.
Quotation
This practice-based approach to research naturally prompts us critically to
consider and evaluate methods used in practice as to their appropriateness as
robust and rigorous methods for accessible and disciplined inquiry…
…To date, there is no definitive published single source on research methods
for artists and designers. Research methods development relies on researchers
adding further detail and modifying as a method is tried and evaluated…
…There are many parallels between the construction of an art/design work
and the construction of a research argument, not least in the way that the form
is proposed, critiqued, deconstructed, remodelled and resolved. Much of this
process is evaluative and analytical, reflective and deconstructive, creative
and synthetic. As practitioners we engage in these activities constantly and
most of the time unconsciously. As reflective researchers we must make these
activities explicit and accessible… Art and Design research is a rapidly evolving
activity. With each successful completion of a research degree along with a
new contribution to knowledge it is likely that new and alternative research
methodologies are proposed and validated.
(from Visualizing Research, by C. Gray and J. Malins)
You might not be interested in this methodological debate as such. Nevertheless,
this new field of epistemological and methodological debates suggests that
research methods appropriate for your creative practice might also include
research on how you research. This can become a particular component of your
thinking about how you do thinking in general terms, and your research in/
through the creative practice itself in the more detailed sense. An important
consequence of this is the need for evaluation, analysis and assessment of
the ‘results’ of your research about how you do research. This can be key for
reflective practice in that it helps you to be more aware of why your practice is
the way it is, how it can be different and maybe better. This therefore becomes
a specific case in point of the more general ideas within research Behind, In/
Through and For your practice as introduced in Chapter 2.
In normal language, all this stuff shows the value of being constantly selfreflective back onto how you do what you do in practice, so as to be able to
articulate it more clearly to yourself and thus maybe do it better.
Even this very brief, initial look at different research methods shows that
a whole host of things might be needed if good research, leading to useful
knowledge, leading the creative innovation is to be forthcoming. Knowing about
different research methods for different research jobs enables you to make
informed choices about which one to choose.
Commensurability
When trying to decide upon a specific research method, this is the place to start.
As briefly mentioned above, commensurability is a fancy way of discussing the
fit between the motivations behind your research agenda, the epistemological
basis you are coming from, the detailed nature of the information you are trying
to find, and the research methods you therefore adopt. And remember, in parallel
to the key epistemological distinction between the Positivist and Interpretative
Traditions, the key distinction when it comes to research methods is the one
between quantitative and qualitative methods.
For instance:
• If you want to ask a large number of people some fairly simple questions to
do with what they think about an aspect of the world, so that you can write
a report on current trends to convince a funder/investor to finance your
proposed project, then get into quantitative research methods. This will entail
designing a questionnaire to cover lots of people, and if properly constructed
and coded you will be able to generate statistical data, percentages etc. Using
such methods can help to keep your research ‘real’ in that it can say something
about the world beyond your opinions or ideas of how it should be.
• However, if you want to know what these people really think and why they
think as they do because you want this to inform a documentary film, or
community art project, or some really good marketing, it will be pretty
pointless asking them ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions. So you will probably need to
interview some of them to focus upon what they really believe, in the terms
that they themselves think about it. This will entail getting into the different
types of qualitative research methods.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 8 – Humanist Psychology
There are various ways of defining creativity… let me present the elements which,
for me, are part of the creative process, and then attempt a definition.
In the first place, for me as a scientist, there must be something observable,
some product of creation. Though my fantasies may be extremely novel, they
cannot usefully be defined as creative unless they eventuate in some observable
product – unless they are symbolized in words, or written in a poem, or translated
into a work of art or fashioned into an invention.
These products must be novel constructions. This novelty grows out of the
unique qualities of the individual in his/her interaction with the materials of
experience. Creativity always has the stamp of the individual upon its product,
but the product is not the individual, not his/her materials, but partakes of the
relationships between the two.
Creativity is not, in my judgement, restricted to some particular content. I
am assuming that there is no fundamental difference in the creative process
as it is evidenced in painting a picture, composing a symphony, devising new
instruments of killing, developing a scientific theory, discovering new procedures
in human relationships or creating new formings of one’s own personality as in
psychotherapy.
My definition, then, of the creative process is that it is the emergence in action of
a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the
one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his/her life on the
other.
49
(from Towards a Theory of Creativity, by C. Rogers)
Nuts and Bolts, and also Brass Tacks
With the above discussion in mind, let’s now turn to some of the discrete tools
with which to put research into practice, the nuts and bolts of actual research
methods. This also really takes us away from the philosophical debates of the
previous chapters and gets us down to brass tacks – the why and how involved in
the craft of doing research for creative innovation.
Is It Big Enough? – make sure it is designed from the beginning to collect all the
information you need. It will be very difficult to go back again afterwards. Think
about what, in an ideal world the findings of the questionnaire would enable you
to ‘prove’ so that you can make the argument you want to make, and then ask
those questions.
Is It Small Enough? – keep it as short as possible. Most people will not actually
want to do your questionnaire.
This is where it gets really practical.
What’s My Motivation? – sometimes it can be a good idea to give people some
small rewards for filling in your questionnaire, in technical terms this is called
incentivising.
Questionnaire Design
Keep It Simple – stick to simple straightforward language, no jargon, no fuzzy
concepts, no big, long questions.
Questionnaires are the basic tool of quantitative research. They are for finding
out what other people think and so will usually get used within research ‘Behind’
and ‘In Front Of’ starting-points. Questionnaires tend to be used for descriptive
research of the world ‘out there’.
The basic craft of questionnaire design involves the following key points:
Introduce Yourself – Write a short introduction to the questionnaire to tell
people who you are, why you are doing the survey and to assure them about
confidentiality.
Got Any Filters? – think about filtering. For instance, where you have asked a
‘yes’ or ‘no’ question and the reply has been ‘yes’, design things to get them to
carry on because you want more information on that. But if they have replied
‘no’, direct them to a question further down the questionnaire after the ‘yes’
section has finished. Otherwise they are being asked to answer questions that
they have already told you are not relevant to them, and this gets irritating and
looks unprofessional.
Rating and Scaling – think about ratings and scalings. This is the way to get a
numerical value next to an opinion.
Rating asks people to rate how ‘important’ or ‘difficult’ or ‘successful’ something
has been. For instance, you ask them to choose between saying if something is
‘very important’ or ‘fairly important’ or ‘not very important’ or’ irrelevant’.
Scaling asks people to put things on a scale. That is, you ask them to rank things
in order of importance by putting a ‘1’ next to the most important, a ‘2’ next to
the next most important and so on.
By allowing a number to be attached to an opinion, you avoid getting lots of
answers that are a few sentences of dialogue. And this is good because such
information can be very difficult and cumbersome to deal with when it comes
to showing aggregated finding (averages, general spread of opinion, percentages
etc). Rating and scaling allows for better coding.
Coding – when questionnaires are analysed, some version of SPSS (Statistical
Package for the Social Science) will probably be used. This is the industry
standard software for survey analysis. To do this some kind of ‘data management’
file is created, which is the file that tells the software what a particular number
means in terms of the response to each question. For instance, the data
management file will tell the software that for Answer 1, the presence of a ‘1’
means ‘female’, and ‘2’ means ‘male’. Then there is some kind of ‘data file’, which
contains all the actual answers for each completed questionnaire. This is then
read by the data management file.
The more times you can get a clearly coded answer the better as far as
questionnaire design goes. Questions that involve rating and scaling allow the
data to be read more effectively and statistical findings generated. This is better
than dealing with 500 opinions that kind-of say the same thing but in slightly
different ways.
Who Do You Get In Touch With? – making sure that you have a representative
sample for your questionnaire is important. If you are researching the population
as a whole, then you will need 50% males and 50% female, and a good spread of
ages, ethnicities etc. But sometimes you will be researching a particular section
of society, so you don’t need to have a general sample, but a more precise one.
Just so long as you are comfortable that your sample is representative.
Call Me, Write to Me, or Just Talk To Me – once you have designed your
questionnaire you need to decide how you are going to get it to the people
whose answers you want. This can be face to face, by (e)mail or by phone.
This largely depends upon how big a survey you want it to be. If you want it
to be a really big survey, (say above 500, which is small for professional market
research but big for most purposes) then a postal (email) campaign is probably
best. The problem with this strategy is that the average return rate for postal
50
surveys is around 20%. So you can spend a lot of time and energy organising
a relevant address book, for little reward. If it is less than 500, think about a
telephone strategy. This is obviously time consuming, and depends upon getting
people’s phone numbers, but it has the advantage of letting you know where
you are up to in terms of numbers of responses all the time. So you can just stop
when you have enough. Or sometimes, if your questionnaire is fairly short and
sweet you could go to the event itself, or catch the users of your service, venues
etc. and ask to go through it with them there and then. This starts to become a
structure interview, which we will talk about more below.
Keep an Eye on Things – it is good to keep an eye on the findings as you go
along. If everyone is giving you very similar responses after you have completed
a reasonable amount of questionnaires, you can see that there is little point
carrying on just to re-prove the obvious again and again. This is another reason
why telephone surveys can be good because you can keep an eye on things all
the time.
Stages – you can think about stages within a survey. This can involve a pilot
phase where you try out your questionnaire a few times to check it. This has the
advantage of allowing you to tweak things before you have gone too far. You
might also think about the possibility of an interim analysis, where you look at
the findings at an intermediate stage to check progress and look at emerging
themes, especially if you want to report back to someone else.
Users and Non-Users – an important issue to be aware of when using
questionnaire-based research methods within the cultural and creative sector is
the distinction between users and non-users.
Some people are just interested in the arts and culture, they are users. And
some are just not, they are non-users. What this can mean is that surveys on
the arts and culture can very easily become unintentionally biased towards the
opinions of users.
Because users are already interested, they will already be interested in replying
to your questionnaire. And because non-users are not, they will not, if you see
what we mean.
This does not always matter. You might just want to evaluate your project
by getting the opinions of those who came to it. But it might do, if your
research wants to measure a broader spectrum of opinion. So you might need
to deliberately seek out the opinion of non-users. This however is notoriously
difficult because they tend to be difficult to identify, reach and then get
interested enough to sit still long enough.
New Software and On-Line Quantitative Research – Developed in recent
years, there are now a whole host of new data analysis software packages and
on-line survey services out there which can take a lot of the hassle out of doing
questionnaires and other kinds of quantitative research. This starts to get rather
specialised now however, so we will leave you to explore that world for yourself.
51
Warning
The Social Uncertainty Principle
In the 1930’s a series of research programmes were started at the General
Electric’s factory at Hawthorne in the USA. These Hawthorne Studies, as they
became known, gave rise to The Hawthorne Effect which involved researchers
realising that, because they were seen as representatives of management, the
act of actually talking to the workers meant that the research process itself
was changing the perceptions of the workers being researched.
David Orne, another famous sociologist (they all have funny names)
demonstrated this again in the 1960s by showing that when people were
stopped in the street and asked questions, they often gave an ‘answer’ that
they thought they should give, because it was ‘respectable’ or ‘acceptable’
rather than what they really thought.
The common point here is how the act of researching something can change
the nature of the thing you are researching. This is one of the fundamental and
perennial problems with researching anything that involves people, because
people are complicated. But even within the strange world of sub-atomic
physics, Werner Heisenberg encountered a similar problem. He referred to this
as The Uncertainty Principle.
Remember epistemological nervousness from the previous chapter?
• Are you attaching too much Truth-with-a-Capital-T to your research?
• Are you therefore suggesting that other people should also see it as Truthwith-a-Capital-T too strongly?
• Is this appropriate? Does this bring too heavy an opportunity cost?
• Have you really tested your research to destruction enough?
When it comes to the practical activities of doing quantitative research, given
its underlying Positivist epistemology, it can easily feel very safe and ‘real’.
After all, this is not your opinion. You have gone out there and really asked lots
of other people what they think, so it must be right. Right?
Maybe not. This can sometimes encourage people to put too many creative
business ‘eggs’ in one ‘basket’ that has not, and probably cannot ever be,
proven to be really True-with-a-Capital-T. It is good to be nervous sometime
because people don’t always tell you what they really think!
they all have in common is the way they provide a research space so that the
person being researched can articulate what they really think in a way that
makes sense to them, rather than following the research agenda, mental boxes,
priorities and issues set by someone else outside of their own lives.
Quantitative research for creativity is good for covering the basic opinions
of large numbers of people, it has breadth. But it is not good at really getting
inside peoples heads to find out what they really, really think about art, culture,
your work, the information you might need for a documentary film or what they
really think about your product. Because it has breadth, it tends to lack depth.
Qualitative research for creative practice can never cover as much ground
as quantitative research. It is just far too time consuming to be interviewing
people in such large numbers. Qualitative research does not have breadth but
it more than makes up for that by having depth. Qualitative research takes far
fewer people, but researches them in much more detail to get inside their heads,
and this can bring the really useful information you need to develop new and
innovative creative ideas.
But it doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. Often professional researchers will
start with quantitative methods to get a spread of opinion and draw out some
interesting themes, and then switch to qualitative to go into them in more detail.
Qualitative research methods come in lots of varieties, with lots of different
names and different slants.
Interviewing
A basic tool that is somewhere between quantitative and qualitative research
is interviewing. Sometimes this can be as simple as talking to someone, and
faithfully recording what they say to you. But there are more developed and
professional techniques for this kind of research.
Doing professional interviews can involve different structures
Structured – sticking to a pre-arranged script that you use for each and every
interview. This is only a little different from the face to face way of carrying out a
questionnaire based survey.
Qualitative Research Methods
Semi-structured – having a script with you, that you keep returning to so as to
maintain some semblance of repeatability across all the interviews you do with
various people, but also allowing space for the interviewee to go off on tangents
or wandering away from your point. Remember you are trying to get them to tell
you what they really think in the terms that make sense to them.
Because quantitative research methods are sometimes incommensurable with
getting at what people really think, one might need to turn to more qualitative
research methods. Related back to the Interpretative Tradition as they are,
qualitative research methods can take many different forms. But the thing that
Open-ended – completely open, with no script to structure the agenda of the
interview. That comes solely from the person being interviewed.
Being good at interviewing people also requires a certain level of commitment
to the craft of research:
52
• You still need to think about getting a representative sample if you are
intending to use your research to make those sort of claims for it afterwards
• Writing up findings straight away whilst it is fresh in your mind
• Be as ‘objective’ and faithful as possible to what they said, not how you wanted
it to be
• Accept negative, difficult or contrary ideas and opinions
• Even if you do not necessarily need a representative sample, still make sure you
interview a proper cross-section of the group, population, customers you are
interested in. It can include your mates, but it shouldn’t be just your mates.
• Be aware that they might not be saying what they want to say, because it
might feel embarrassing, non-respectable or silly to them
• Assure them about confidentiality and other points concerning research ethics,
discussed in Chapter 6.
In a more general sense, be aware that your very presence will have an impact
upon the people you are interviewing, and take control as far as possible of what
that impact is going to be. For instance:
• Don’t come across as representing authority if you are trying to get kids to tell
you what they really think about authority
• Don’t dress or talk in a way that is going to piss people of because they see you
as being ‘posh’ or ‘snooty’
• Don’t try to ‘sell them your product’ when you are doing market research with
them
• Tell them what you are doing and why before you start so that they don’t
mistrust you from the off
• Try as far as possible to speak their ‘language’.
Sometimes there is just no way around these things. To get good depth from
interviewing you might sometimes need to get someone else to do the
interviewing for you. Someone who can more easily connect with the people
being interviewed.
• Young/aged people to interview young/aged people
• Men/women to interview men/women
• People of whatever racial, ethnic, cultural or religious background to interview
people from that racial, ethnic, cultural or religious background.
If you want the depth dimension you might need to recruit people to be your
undercover agents, sometimes known as field workers.
Ethnography
• Ethno… – the native, the ethnic, the things that make people as they are
• …ography – measuring
Ethnographic research methods are towards the phenomenological end of the
epistemological spectrum. It is about the search for the interior stuff that makes
people what they are in their own terms, things like:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Perceptions
Meanings
Motivations
Aspirations
Expectations
Imagination
Memories
Personal relationships
There are lots of variations of ethnographic approaches. One of the most
historically well established and developed comes from cultural anthropology.
Although anthropology came from the rather patronising, Euro-centric and
patriarchal 19th Century idea that people from a certain cultural and scientific
background (usually white, Western men) could study people from a completely
different cultural and scientific background (native cultures in ‘primitive’
societies) it has however become much more sophisticated since then. It is
fundamentally based upon the idea that people from one social and cultural
background are in an advantageous position to study other societies and cultures
precisely because they are not immersed within the thing they are studying.
Remember, the last animals to discover water will be fish, precisely because they
are in it all the time. Being able to stand back from the details of living that
cultural life and see things that those who are immersed within it find difficult to
see, can be a very useful research method.
A particular technique for this kind of research is participant observation.
As we saw above, there are problems associated with trying to do straight
forward interview-based research by just going to ask total strangers what they
think. Remember The Hawthorne Effect, The Social ‘Uncertainty Principle’ and
epistemological nervousness in general? It is not always easy to know what the
best questions are, and people will not always tell you what they really think
anyway.
Participant observation researchers try to get around this by immersing
themselves into the group they are researching, to become a part of the group
before they research it. This enables them to research the group from the inside
more effectively. They are able to understand the cultural universe of the people
they are interested in more effectively by observing people’s actual lives as they
are living them and not interrupt it by asking direct questions. By becoming part
of the group, anthropologically oriented researchers are less visibly ‘parachuted
53
in’ from the outside and their relative invisibility enables more authentic
research.
This research technique is not just about Westerners studying ‘primitive
tribes’ any more. Really interesting anthropological research has been done by
Japanese people studying aspects of Western societies. Many creative professions
routinely use this kind of research, although they often don’t call it participant
observation:
• The artist in residence goes to live within a community to understand it before
beginning to work with it
• The documentary film-makers tries to understand the group (s)he wants to
work with by getting them to be part of the production
• Method actors ‘gets’ the role by becoming it, by living in the context of the
character they are to play
However…
Warning
This kind of research can be useful for creative innovation where the focus is
upon working with other parts of the community or learning about overseas
business cultures within the global economy. It can also contribute to personal
exploration and the development of techniques for your practice itself through
learning about the interior dynamics of other creative people. It can also provide
very useful background and contextual research. So it can be a useful research
method for each of the Behind, In/Through, For and In Front Of starting-points.
• It needs to say something. Go right back to the beginning and Paul Ricoeur’s
idea of ‘the text’. Any audio-visual material you use for research needs to be
‘read as a text’ if it is to say something.
• It needs to be able to say things to other people, not just you.
• It needs to be commensurate, credible, representative, and defendable as
rigorous and planned research.
It is not easy to get right, and personally we would only use it as a complimentary
addition to the words within a piece of research. Remember, it is research, not
a photographic exhibition we are talking about here. If you want to be on an
exhibition, then call it that and don’t confuse people by making research claims
that your use of the audio-visual material cannot follow through on.
But sometimes, using audio-visual material can lead to absolutely fantastic
research.
We want you all to put this book down now, and go out to get a copy of
A Seventh Man, by John Berger and Jean Mohr to see this.
Audio -Visual Methods
We are very sorry, but we need to use a cliché: a picture tells a thousand words.
Taking a picture, or some music or some other artefact made by the group you
want to research, or using these kinds of artefacts to say something about the
research you have done with them can add nuance, subtly, pathos, beauty and
loving insight to a piece of research that it is difficult to get through words alone,
and impossible to get from a bar chart or graph.
However, when it comes to audio-visual material and its relationship to research
methods, we need to make a basic distinction before we can go any further.
Semiotics
Now you are back, and continuing the theme of linking research methods to
audio-visual material, all products of culture convey meanings through their
shape, size, colour, form, materials and so on, over and above the content of
what they are designed to say. Semiotics sees all aspects of a society’s material
and visual culture as therefore being open to ‘reading’, in the same way that
more orthodox texts can be read. This is because all such cultural artifacts are
part of a broad process of cultural communication. This suggests that everything
carries meaning and there can be no ‘ground zero’ of cultural meaninglessness. In
common with some aspects of the use of Audio-Visual materials as the object of
research, semiotics is concern with questions such as:
Who Do You Think You Are?
Audio-visual material can be related to doing research as:
There two problems associated with participant observation.
Problem 1 – It is very easy to not really, fully engage with the cultural reality
of the group you are researching. There are natural tendencies to resist
becoming part of the group’s culture by keep hold of your own mental and
cultural universe. This can lead to making judgements about what is going on
which can get in the way. You have to know who you are and who you are not,
and if you have not been accepted by the group as part of the group, then any
such research can be flawed. In this case you have become a non-participating
observer.
Problem 2 – It is very easy to become engrossed in the novelty and beauty
of the group you are researching. This can mean you give up any distance you
once had that could have helped you to see what is going on within the group.
This can mean you are unable to make any useful statements or conclusions
from the research because you are less able to ‘stand back’. In this case you
have become a non-observing participant.
So here, as with so many things, maintaining a skilful balance between being
part the group you want to research on the one hand, and keeping a good
distance to enable observation on the other, is needed.
You need to become one of the ‘trees’, but not so much of a tree that you
cannot see the rest of the ‘wood’ for them. Knowing who you are, when and
why, and adopting these various personas as needed is part of being good at
participant observation.
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The Object of Research – that is, audio-visual material can be what you take as
a particular manifestation of the world, and then study it. Audio-visual material
is researched as a concrete manifestation of the meanings, motivations and
aspirations of the people who created it. For instance, the formal techniques
within the History of Art involve this approach
The Vehicle for Research – audio-visual research can be part of the way
your research is framed, articulated and presented back to the world. This
involves research in/through the making of audio-visual material as a way
of disseminating what you have researched. Documentary film-making is an
example of this.
The Culmination of Collaborative Research – the audio-visual material
created in partnership with the subjects of your research. This can be presented
as a record of the creative and/or research process itself. This may include a
combination of the previous two points. Collaborative arts projects working with
community groups are an example of this approach.
But using audio-visual material for research, rather than for the creative practice
itself, is not an easy option. If you decide to use audio-visual material it still
needs to connect to the professional practice of research as we have discussed it
up to this point. That is,
•
•
•
•
What do the objects of culture mean and say?
What message do they carry beyond themselves as objects?
Is there a concerted visual language at work?
What do these meanings tell us about the people who produced them?
They might not call it this, but actually many archeologists adopt a research
position very similar to this. It is also very similar to the branch of anthropology
called visual anthropology. Alfred Gell’s book Art and Agency is a good
introduction to this.
Semiotics and the use of audio-visual material in general is connected to the
general thrust of (visual) anthropology because they share common concerns with:
• How bits of material culture (objects, fashions) are produced by different groups
for different reasons to articulate deeper meanings
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• How they are exchanged and used in different groups, again for lots of different
reasons that can uncover deeper meanings
So semiotics, within the broader context of anthropologically oriented research
can be a useful research method for creative work that is attempting to uncover
what people and communities are really thinking as it is articulated through their
own material and visual culture. It can be a ‘way into’ understanding a social
group or culture through its own cultural production. And this understanding can
greatly improve the practice of working with such groups in concrete ways.
Quotation
Theory
Yesterday: Historicism and Archives
The biographical method can be defined as one which…
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 9 – Freudian Psychology
It is always good to know history. It is useful to know about:
…presents the experiences and definitions held by one person, one group or one
organisation as this person, group or organisation interprets those experiences.
Life history materials include any record or document including the case histories
of social agencies, that throw light on the subjective behaviour of individuals
or groups. These may range from letters to autobiographies, from newspaper
accounts to court records.
Should we not look at the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in
childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his/her
play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative
writer, in that (s)he creates a world of his/her own or, rather, rearranges the
things of his/her world in a new way which pleases him/her? It would be wrong
to think (s)he does not take the world seriously; on the contrary, (s)he takes his/
her play very seriously and (s)he expands large amounts of emotion on it. The
opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion
with which (s)he cathects his/her world of play, the child distinguishes it quite
well from reality; and (s)he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the
tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates
the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play. (S)he creates a world
of phantasy which (s)he takes very seriously – that is, which (s)he invests with a
large amount of emotion – while separating it sharply from reality… The unreality
of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for
the technique of his/her art; for many things which, if they were real, could give
no enjoyment, can do so in the world of phantasy, and many excitements which,
in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the
hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.
There is another consideration for the sake of which we will dwell a moment
longer on the contrast between reality and play. When a child has grown up and
ceased to play, and after (s)he has been labouring for decades to envisage the
realities of life with proper seriousness, (s)he may one day find him/herself in a
mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality.
As an adult (s)he can look back on the intense seriousness with which (s)he once
carried in his/her games in childhood; and, by equating his/her ostensibly serious
occupation of today with his/her childhood games, (s)he can throw off the heavy
burden imposed on him/her by life and win the high yield of pleasure
afforded by humour.
As people grow up, then, they cease to play and they seem to give up the
yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands
the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a (wo)man than to
give up a pleasure which (s)he has once experienced. Actually, we never give up
anything; we only exchange one thing for another.
The Biographical Method
(from The Research Act by N. Denzin)
In recent years the biographical method has perhaps been less used in social
science research. Within creative practice it is probably used all the time, but not
necessarily recognised as a discrete and credible research method in and of itself.
So it is useful to say a few words about the biographical method as a particular
way of doing research and collecting ‘data’.
Reflecting back upon our biography is probably something that we all do all
the time. But as a creative person this is perhaps more intimately tied to your
work than it is for most people – recording and collecting memories, thoughts,
insights, plans, aspirations and inspirations wherever they come from.
The biographical method can obviously entail researching yourself by
keeping some form of diary. But it can be equally useful research to get other
people to keep a diary too. This still fits into qualitative research in general and
ethnographic approaches in particular because it is still about getting people to
articulate their own views, opinions, attitudes and interior monologues in their
own terms. They can structure, record and present all this in a way that makes
sense to them, and so it is another way to get at the depth of research into how
people live and think.
Therefore we can imagine…
•
•
•
•
•
•
A diary
A personal log-book
A reflexive journal
A sketch book
A blog
An archive
…as places where the collection of research data can happen.
(from Creative Writers and Day-dreaming, by S. Freud)
• The wider history of the society you live within and the way economic, social
and political factors have impacted upon you and your work – mostly Research
Behind
• The specific history of your creative discipline or genre, and/or what the history
of other disciplines can tell you; the history of (your) art – mostly Research In/
Through and For
Knowing history in general terms helps in understanding things in general terms.
Knowing specifics history of your creative field helps you to know the details
of where it came from and where it might therefore be going. This is because
history is about understanding the present, where we, you, they came from. And
because history is about the present, history is about the future! The future of
where we, you, they, are all going. Because of this, it might be about the future
of your creativity and lead you to innovation, which you need to know about.
(Within the idea that history is about the future, we see another example of
dialectical thinking).
Archives can be a very useful and powerful source of research data. And this
then immediately implies the need to keep your own archive of work up to date.
Reflecting back upon your own history after you have gone so far down the
line can be a vital part of research for developing your creativity and innovative
future.
Research and the Web
This might be as good a place as any to mention the web and its role in
research. The relationship between the web and research is increasingly like the
relationship between gravity and human beings. It is so fundamental that it does
not really need to be talked about.
However, the role of the web in research does perhaps need a little more caution
than that:
• The web has little in the way of quality control other than on sites such
as Wikipedia, which seem able to ‘police’ themselves. So caution as to the
credibility of ‘research’ based purely on web searching is needed.
• The web can be very good for the collection of information, but information is
not the same as knowledge. Something has to be done with information to turn
it into knowledge (theory, synthesis, testing etc.).
As part of a discussion of creative networks, Benkler in The Wealth of Networks
talks about the ‘information economy environment’ as the social and cultural
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57
space whereby people share time and effort to ensure a quality and synthesis
of information that can create knowledge. This mutually created and tested
knowledge can be more useful for getting you to innovation than pieces of freefloating information which can often have a very high flaky quotient. The Open
Source Movement is an example of this, and is something we will come back to
in Chapter 6.
This tends to suggest that researching the web is best when it is researching
what other professional researchers and potential collaborators out there are
doing. Theodore Roszak has talked about the cult of information and has showed
us how an obsession with collecting free-floating bits of it is not the same as
research for the development of innovative knowledge. Information unsupported
by background ideas of what to do with it is not always a good thing, because it
can lead you down blind alleys and dead ends.
The line from the first angle measures the general direction towards the point
we are interested in; the second line is drawn and where it crosses the first it pinpoints where the point is; the third line confirms the accuracy of lines 1 and 2.
The place where these three lines of direction cross each other shows the point
for sure.
The idea of triangulation is useful for other kinds of research too. The idea
of researching a particular topic from one angle by using one set of techniques
can give us a certain insight; looking at things from a second angle by using a
different method can help to pin down any findings; the third angle by using
yet another method can really pin down the point. Triangulation gives you more
assurance about your research findings. If your research has been triangulated
and the three different methods are confirming each other, then you can
probably rely upon it.
Which is partly why…
So, in terms of researching from different angles, a fairly standard way would be to:
Three is the Magic Number: Triangulation
Three is the magic number for several reasons. One of them is because of
triangulation. Triangulation is a map-making and surveying technique that
enables a particular point in space to be accurately fixed. It entails measuring
the same things from three different angles. In its surveying context, it involves
choosing three different angles from which to survey.
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• Look at the secondary literature and previous research
• Carry out broad-brush survey research
• Conduct more in-depth interviews with another set of people.
But you could perhaps imagine other, more imaginative ways to triangulate your
research for creativity. It would depend very much on what the actual content of
your research is.
Quotation
(from The Research Act by N. Denzin)
This has been a short and quite brief introduction to the underlying logic of
some concrete methods that might help you to carry out your research. If you
look hard enough, you will come across lots of variations on these methods,
with lots of fancy terminology. But the choice between quantitative and
qualitative research methods in the context of commensurability, set against
epistemological choices and the basic motivations within your research is the
key thing here.
Having explored both the philosophy and methods for research that might
help you with your creativity, let’s now turn to how new ideas, techniques and
processes might flow from research towards practical application.
And Wikipedia says:
That is, to innovation.
Triangulation
Unfortunately, no single method ever adequately solves the problem of rival
interpretations… Because each method reveals different aspects of empirical
reality, multiple methods of observation must be employed. This is termed
triangulation… multiple methods should be used in every investigation.
In the social sciences triangulation is often used to indicate that more than one
method is used in a study with a view to double (or triple) checking results. This is
also called ‘cross examination’. The idea is that one can be more confident with a
result if different methods lead to the same result. If an investigator uses only one
method, the temptation is strong to believe in the findings. If an investigator uses
two methods, the results may well clash. By using three methods to get at the
answer to one question, the hope is that a) two of the three will produce similar
answers, or b) if three clashing answers are produced, the investigator knows that
the question needs to be reframed, methods reconsidered, or both.
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Story
‘Oh, By the Way…’: A Story About Sex and Drugs – by Paul Coe
Dr. Paul Coe is an organic chemist who worked in Pharmaceutical Research and
Development for the Nottingham-based Boots Company.
Chapter 5 – The Flow of Ideas:
Creative Business Innovation
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In 1985, at their R&D lab in Kent, Pfizer were thinking about developing a drug to
treat hypertension (high blood pressure). The size of the market associated with
this life-threatening condition was (and is) vast. There were already products
on the market, but a new one with improved activity would enhance treatment
and be highly valuable to the company. In particular, the scientists had become
aware of recent biochemical research into hypertension and thought it might fit
in with some of their own chemical research. They set to work on it and in time a
promising drug candidate emerged. A preliminary clinical trial was arranged but
the results were rather disappointing in respect to lowering blood pressure. So
another trial using higher dosages was carried out in an attempt to improve the
activity of the drug, whilst keeping an eye on any emerging side-effects as the
dosages were increased. When the physician rang the development office with
the progress report on the progress, he uttered the immortal words ‘… Oh, and by
the way’.
For some unexpected reason the men taking part in the trials had experienced
a much more pleasurable sensation than those predicted. Given this, the trial
indicated an unexpected potential application, useful not just for the men on
the trial. These results were interesting, but how should the project proceed?
After all, everything was geared towards the dynamics of a relatively secure and
predictable hypertension drug market. Would the other application for this new
drug find a suitable therapeutic category? And what was the size of the market
for something that could do this? Was there even a market out there?
Not withstanding these imponderables, the work was re-directed and
eventually Viagra was successfully launched.
There are many failed attempts at drug discovery, it is just that this one had a
happy ending (in both senses). In this case research into a product designed for
one known application found another in an entirely new area because of entirely
peripheral and wholly unexpected observations. Being prepared to re-adjust to
unexpected observations and re-order applications was the thing that brought
these happy endings to fruition. No-one had set out to develop a drug to help
men keep it up all night, but it works anyway! A great innovation.
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Mr. Big Stuff: Applied Science and Innovation
Theory
Science is very big stuff today because a whole business economy has grown
up behind applied science which is geared towards finding market applications.
This applied science is to a large extent the outcome of a selection process
that business economics makes. You could make a convincing argument that
the intimate relationship between research, business economics, potential
applications and thus the innovations that actually get developed has been the
main driver behind the last 300 years of history in Western societies, that is the
Industrial Revolution and thus to a large extent the whole world. So it is big stuff.
But the central idea of application is also key to connecting research for
creativity to ideas about innovation for creative business. As creative people, we
all have new ideas, new inspirations and new aspirations all the time. How you
bring these ideas to fruition needs to similarly include researching applications as
much as researching the new ideas themselves.
Theories of Creativity: No 10 – A More Social View
(from We -Think: Mass Innovation not Mass Production, by C. Leadbetter)
Research In Front Of Your Business Plan – who are your customers today?
Who are they going to be tomorrow? Have you tried to falsify your business
plan with these audiences? Has it been tested by the awkward squad? What are
they all telling you about your innovation needs?
Creative Industries and Innovation
but, also…
Planning the why of your business so as to build innovation into the what and
the how can enable you to have…
However, parallels with the big science approach to research and innovation only
takes us so far when our concern is with the creative industries, because:
Quotation
An Innovation Plan
You have to choose such relationships carefully. The first thing we look for in a
supplier or a contractor is the quality of their work. If the standards aren’t high
already, we don’t delude ourselves into thinking they’ll be raised for us…
In Innovation Nation, John Kao lays out some reasons why keeping a constant
innovation agenda at the centre of business planning is an important facet.
Some of his arguments hark back to the famous economic philosopher
Joseph Schumpeter and his notion of creative destruction. Creative destruction
highlights how being able to ‘kill’, or in a more benign way leaving behind your
‘normal’ creative routine is necessary to keep the creativity fresh. But in recent
years the space for ‘pure research’, which big business and Universities used to
allow for pure research not necessarily tied to immediate business application,
seems to have been eroded. This institutional context means that an innovative
mindset can get left behind as an ‘accountancy’ or ‘target-hitting’ onus is placed
upon things. This tends to demand more immediate concerns with commercial
‘bottom lines’ from the outset. Keogh bemoans the loss of this ‘pure research’
space, and thinks it is bad for business, because it is bad for innovation.
Within big business, lots of debate is about where innovation comes
from, how it can be brought about and ‘managed’. This can be to do with
the ‘hardware’ of a particular industry – the technology, the machinery, the
processes and the designs involved in making something in a new and better
way. Or innovation can be more to do with the ‘software’ – changes in the way
organisations are organised, managers manage, communicators communicate
etc. which can lead to new and better ways of doing essentially the same thing.
Although it might not always necessarily seem like it when cash-flow is
not great, working in a small creative company or a more fluid network-based
project can be good for creative innovation precisely because it does not suffer
from this over-institutionalisation and its short-sighted, overly instrumental
• The structure of the creative industries sector is different from most other
industries. One aspect of this is the high percentage of micro-businesses (less
the 5 people) and individual sole-traders in the creative industries. It is unlikely
that many creative industry companies would have the large dedicated R&D unit
in the way big science has. The creative industries do not in the main do their
own pure science nor invent their own technologies.
• For the creative industries informal networks often take the place of the
dedicated R&D unit within large firms, and provide the innovation spaces that
can be a consequence of cross-disciplinary and collaborative working/learning.
• Individual creative companies often work through very flexible processes, and
where successful often benefit from economies of speed and cross-disciplines.
Successful creative companies seem to be good at taking on board research,
innovations and technologies from other industrial arenas, often developed for
entirely different reasons, and turning them to their own innovative ends.
For creative networks to be good at finding innovative applications the flow of
ideas is a key factor. There is no point in having creative networks for the sake
of them, and creative networks are only as good as the activities that people
use them for. But when they are good, they can be very good for research and
innovation.
In reality, creativity has always been a highly collaborative, cumulative and social
activity in which people with different skills, points of view and insights, share and
develop ideas together. At root most creativity is collaborative. It is not usually
the product of a flash of insight from a lone individual. The web gives us a new
way to organize and expand this collaborative activity… (which) could make
innovation and creativity a mass activity that engages millions of people… Our
preoccupation in the century to come will be how to create and sustain a mass
innovation economy in which the central issue will be how more people can
collaborate more effectively in creating new ideas.
(from Let My People Go Surfing, by Y. Chouinard)
Why is Your Business Plan?
Looking briefly at the nature of innovation for creativity brings us to the
question of why is your business plan? We have not spelt this question wrong. We
do not mean what is your business plan, we mean why?
We have made some broad comments about the potential relationships
between different types of research and different routes to innovation in
previous chapters. When getting down to the details of your business and
its planning, these broad questions can sometimes become crystallized into
more specific questions about research and innovation. The questions useful
for developing your basic business plan can also be questions useful for your
innovation plan.
Research ‘Behind’ Your Business Plan – what is the context of your chosen
industry? What is the current state of play within it, and perhaps more
importantly what is its future? So, in what ways can you build innovation into
your plan for the next few years?
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Research In/Through Your Business Plan – what paradigm is your creative
business within? Are you sufficiently aware of it? Is it the right one? Is it about
to go through a ‘scientific revolution’? So what new techniques, processes are
you going to have to learn next?
Research For Your Business Plan – what are your business competitors
doing, or planning to do? What are your potential creative collaborators doing,
or planning to do? What can your suppliers do for your innovation? What
potentially fruitful areas of business collaboration can you identify that will help
with your innovation plan over the next few years?
management. When it comes to research and innovation, you can have
advantages over the big business if you put yourself in a position to grasp the
potential advantages of economies of speed.
So how do you put yourself in a position to grasp economies of speed?
Borrowing some ideas from Kao, it is useful to:
• Balance pure research (exploratory, Research Behind and For) with the applied
(more instrumental and descriptive aspects of Research In/Through and In Front
Of). Don’t always go for a repetition of practice, the quick or the immediately
obvious. Your creativity will need soul food, and pure research can be a good
source of that.
• Keep an openness to your research and innovation plan. Think seriously about
the mutual learning and development that networks can bring. Collaboration can
bring innovation through mutual creativity that working alone can never bring.
As we will explore in detail below, various forms of network orientations are often
much more innovative than a closed-ness encouraged by over-competition.
• Seek ways of working that brings two or more previously unconnected branches
of creativity, business, research and networks together. Kao calls this kind of
brokering for innovation ‘platform providing’. Make being a platform provider, or
at least being a platform participant, part of your research and innovation plan.
• Finally, when it comes to research and innovation for your creativity, ask yourself
what you really need. As in…
Do You Need a Discovery,
an Invention or an Innovation?
In the context of research for creative business, Chouinard makes a useful
distinction between:
Discovery – finding something entirely new about the world that leads to new
ideas and sets up the possibility of an invention.
Invention – making something work from scratch through finding these
new discoveries and following this through to new ways of doing things, new
processes, new mechanical/technological stuff.
Innovation – re-conceptualising the links between the way you currently
do things, how they can be done differently and what is already out there
elsewhere. In essence spotting new relationships between current problems and
already existing solutions so that they can mutually inform each other.
As we have already mentioned, the creative industry sector tends to be made up
of small firms, individuals and networks-based projects. You are not big, so it is
probably better if your research for innovation it is not big either, because it is:
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• Slow
• Expensive
• Of unknown practical benefit when you first start out on it
It requires a lot of time, energy and investment to make an invention. Big
corporations can benefit from inventions because of high barriers to entry. Often
because the investment and set-up costs of moving into innovative markets are
so high, it puts people off. So they have time to make money on the basis of
their invention. Without these barriers to entry however, it is easy to find that
after years of work and investment into innovation, a lot of people will be doing
the same thing as you within a few months. Even with Intellectual Property
protection, they will move into this market if the barriers to entry are low and it
is lucrative enough.
So rather than being based upon invention, it is sometimes better for creative
business to look for innovations, by finding ways to solve a problem with the
tools that are already around. This means that being good at researching what is
going on around you can be as important as being good at working everything
out for yourself. If you are seeking to invent entirely new tools, maybe you are
making things a little too complicated for yourself, especially if they already exist
in a slightly different form out there.
Innovation can come from:
• A new application for established knowledge – much quicker
• The use of ‘intermediate technology’, which can be the use of tools, software,
equipment etc in a new way – much cheaper than trying newly invented tools,
software, equipment
• Finding collaborative spaces with various people who already have the
complimentary knowledge and skills that can lead you to innovation – you don’t
need to learn every new skill, process or technique out there, and you can get
a very clear idea of the practical benefits of these new skills, knowledge and
techniques right from the outset.
Case Study
Use a Pencil Comrade
Problems, Solutions and Killer Applications
This brings us to the strange, dialectical inter-play between problems and
solutions, and the way that researching the potential inter-play between them
can be fundamental to the logic of innovation. For instance:
• People routinely mistake problems for solutions and vice versa. Going back to
the ‘normal way’ of doing things when under pressure is a common example
of mistaking the behaviour that is the problem as the solution. Seeing change
and new ideas as a threat to the normal way of doing things is an example of
mistaking the innovative solution for the problem.
• The way things are normally done might not be perceived of as a problem until
a new and better way is identified. It is the new ‘solution’ coming along which
helps to identify that there is a ‘problem’.
• A ‘solution’ might be out there, but is unaware of its solution-ness. It is a freefloating answer in search of a question. Only when someone comes along with
the place to use it as an answer does it become apparent that it is the ‘solution’.
Scientific research is sometimes described as puzzle or problem-solving
behaviour. This might be good for research and innovation for creative business.
But it might be equally useful to engage in solution-searching behaviour first. This
is because the solution might already exist somewhere. You just need to find it.
Recognising this complicated relationship between problems and solutions
can help you innovate by seeing the new idea as a solution in search of your
problem. You are providing the problem here not the solution! This kind of
innovation is about re-thinking new ideas as an opportunity in search of an
application. Which brings us to the killer application, another key concept for
understanding innovation. The person who is good at innovation is often the one
who sees the creative way of simply putting problems and solutions together in
a way that completes the circle. Nothing actually ‘new’ need be discovered or
invented to get you to a killer application.
There is a story (which is not actually true but it makes a good point) from the
Cold War and the Space Race between USA and USSR:
NASA spent lots and lots of time and energy, involving lots and lots of
scientific research and technological invention developing a pen that would
write in zero-gravity, for astronauts to use whilst in outer space.
And the Russians used a pencil!
The common pencil becomes an innovation because it has a new ‘killer
application’. Heavy duty invention of something new was not needed.
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The secret behind successful killer applications takes us back to the application
bit, rather than the discovery/invention of something new bit. So maybe use your
research time and energy to find out what is already out there, rather than trying
to do it on your own. Find out what the rest of the creative network is up to and
how they can help you. Find out how you can help them, and use a pencil rather
than one of those complicated NASA space pens wherever possible.
Step outside the question and ask it differently, so that you can see it more
effectively. Use lateral thinking.
Game
Case Study
Would You Like to Step Outside With Me
Where is the Love? Probably the Best Killer Application in the World
Lateral thinking games can help you to step outside of the question as it is first
presented to you.
When micro-biologists were first researching genetic modification techniques,
it is unlikely that they had the problem of unexploded landmines at the
forefront of their thinking.
A truly great innovation stemming from a killer application. A Healing
Application! Planting flowers to prevent kids from getting blown up! It doesn’t
get any more beautiful than that.
But the initial science (solution) was from one world, the detecting of land
mines (problem) was from a completely unconnected world. The innovation
came from putting the two things together. Sometimes when you put 2 and 2
together you get much more than 4!
But nevertheless:
So are there innovations from killer applications out there for you?
For instance:
Take all the numbers between 1 and 100 – and add them all together.
Flower Power Takes on Land Mines
What is the answer? You have 30 seconds to work it out! And no calculators!
Taking the first number, 1 and adding it to the last number 100 makes 101.
Adding 2 and 99, also to makes 101, as does 3 added to 98.
So within the question there are 50 pairs of 101s.
101x 50 = 5050. Very quick and very easy, if you see the question differently.
As with all lateral thinking exercises, rather than trying to work out the answer
with the tools given to you by the question, in this case simple addition, you
can see how to use the much more efficient method of multiplication.
A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that
could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use
within a few years. “We are really excited about this, even though it’s early days.
It has considerable potential,” Simon Oestergaard, chief executive of developing
company Aresa Biodetection, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. The
genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come
in contact with nitrogen dioxide evaporating from explosives buried in soil. Within
three to six weeks from being sowed over landmine-infested areas, the small
plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red when close to a land mine.
(from Wired Magazine at www.wired.com)
• Do you have a problem in search of a solution?
• Or maybe you have a solution in search of a problem?
• Maybe you should be researching people who know how to put these
together?
• Maybe you should be researching other killer applications within your field to
see what lessons they hold.
Market Research
Most of what we have said in this chapter so far has been about the relationship
between research and the innovative use of new ideas for developing aspects
to your creativity. But clearly, once you have done this and are ready, you will
need to tell everyone else what you have and what you can do for them. Your
ideas need to flow out, as well as flow within if your research is to take you to
sustainable innovation.
So, in its broadest sense market research is a key component of any innovation
plan. It will be really useful to research what other people are thinking and doing.
It will also be useful to know how other people such as customers, collaborators
and audiences are receiving your ideas. So this implies a whole new area of
potential research which fits squarely within the In Front Of research startingpoint.
It is sometimes useful to think about the various stages of business. This
reminds you that you will potentially be working with lots of other people. And
each one of these people, including suppliers and customers can be a source of
research and innovation.
The stages involved in business can be laid out as follows:
Origination – the ‘light bulb’ moment, the original creative idea which will form
the basis of the creative business. This can involve working with collaborators
and other like-minded people or companies.
Research and Development – project planning, proto-typing or piloting
something through a development stage. This can involve working with all sorts
of experts who can advise on feasibility, technical know-how etc.
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Production – making it ‘work’ and producing it so that you can take it to market.
This could be a product that you then get manufactured, a service that you get
ready to deliver or a project or event that goes public. This is likely to involve
working with all sorts of service providers and suppliers of all sorts of things that
support your work.
Marketing and Distribution – telling everyone else what you have and what
you can do for them. Again this involves working with service providers and
suppliers.
Customers and Consumption – getting it to the customer and taking care of
them. Working with the customer.
So, even this very brief sketch of the Value Production Chain and the stages
within business shows that lots of other people are probably going to be
involved. Listening to them can be a good source of research and innovation for
your company.
Market research can be broken down into several elements:
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What your suppliers can do for you
What your competitors are doing
What your collaborators are doing
What your customers, or potential customers are doing, or thinking, or thinking
of doing
• What your company personality is and how it is presenting itself to the world
Researching Your Suppliers
It can be good to see your suppliers and service providers as people to be
researched. They may know of much better and more efficient ways to do the
things you do. Innovation can come from:
• Listening to advice and know-how other than the know-how you are buying
• Buying a different service or component from them
• Asking them to innovate for/with you by asking them different questions
Supplier Led Innovation
What is Supplier Led Innovation?
Supplier-led innovation (also known as supplier innovation and supply chain
innovation) is the sourcing of novel ideas from a company’s supply chain.
For example, rather than buy components ‘off the shelf ’, an automotive
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Expert Contribution
Researching your Competitors – by Carla Martinho
Carla Martinho is the Programme Manager for The Creative Launchpad Business
Support Programme, a Tribal Group Project.
Facts and Figures
Just about every business development book, course or advisor will tell you
that, as a business, you need to do a competitor analysis – and they are right.
For typical examples try:
(press release from NESTA, July 2008)
Case Study
• http://www.moneyinstructor.com/art/marketingplan-competition.asp
• http://www.robert-mckinney.com/CompetitiveAnalysisTable.Xls
A good competitor analysis identifies who your competitors are and makes a
comparison, broken down by:
The Genius Harold Leffler
When I had my blacksmiths shop, I contracted out the tooling of our climbing
gear, and some of the production, to Harold Leffler’s machine shop in Burbank.
Leffler was a draftsman and tool and die maker with fifty years’ hands-on
experience. We called him the genius as often as we called him Harold. He was
so good at his craft that he received requests from aircraft companies around the
country to bid on their projects, even though he ran a small shop.
Harold used to joke about blueprints he received from engineers; they were
so overdesigned that the cost to produce them would be ten or twenty times
higher than necessary, and in many cases they would be impossible to make at all.
Because I had no training in engineering but did know what I wanted a carabiner
or ice screw to do, I would show up with a simple sketch or a carved wooden
model, or just an idea in my head, and we would work together to come up with a
design that was feasible.
(from Let My People Go Surfing, by Y. Chouinard)
Case Study
Researching Your Competitors
manufacturer may ask for innovation from suppliers in order to produce
equipment that is unique or more advanced, or processes that are more efficient.
So what’s the problem?
Because suppliers are largely judged by how cheap they are for supplying existing
products rather than what value they can deliver through innovation, they are too
rarely empowered, resourced or expected to innovate. This can also be true in the
public sector as a result of procurement practices and the hurdles that suppliers
encounter in marketing to this customer.
What’s the answer?
If the UK can show the way to a different dynamic where suppliers have more
influence over the relationship with customers, this would liberate much
innovative thinking to our economy.
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how much they charge
what services or products they offer
their target customers
how they market themselves
how customers access their service or product
how they are perceived externally by their customers and within the sector by
their industry peers.
Put simplistically, this process allows a business to examine the competition
and use the results to replicate what the competition does well, improve on
what the competition does badly and, importantly, differentiate their business
from the other players in the market.
Your competitor analysis can go into as much detail as you need, looking at
everything from other businesses mission and vision and their development
strategies down to who they buy their supplies from. But the key to a
successful competitor analysis is to look dispassionately at your own business
measured by the same criteria.
Ultimately a really good competitor analysis should tell you more about
your own business than it does about anyone else’s. It can yield unexpected
results, including:
No other sector works as collaboratively as the creative industries and
identifying which perceived competitors to work with can often provide both
businesses with extra capacity, a wider pool of skills and resources and that
competitive edge over other businesses.
Hearts and Minds
The bit that most business books and courses forget to address when looking
at competition is the idea that businesses don’t operate in an industry-specific
vacuum. As issues of globalisation, developments in technology, increased
consumer choice and increased consumer apathy impact on the environment
in which businesses operate, a competitor analysis needs to reflect this
complexity. No business is competing only with their direct competitors. The
real competition is anything else that might claim the pound in your client or
customers pocket.
If you are a portrait photographer, your main source of competition is not
other photographers but the rise of the affordable digital camera. If you are a
web designer, your main competition is the growing number of Dreamweaver
courses available. If you are a designer-maker of women’s jewellery, your
competition is anything which makes your client look good, feel better or just
feel more creative and special than she did before she parted with her money.
That could be anything from a new hair cut to a creative textile workshop.
The best way to identify who else is competing for your customer’s money
is to work out what emotional triggers or needs your product or service meets.
Car adverts rarely mention the technical stuff. They sell on the basis that the
car will make you look successful and irresistible to women, keep your family
safe, or make you feel as though you own the road. And it obviously works
otherwise the roads would be full of people driving second-hand Rover Metros.
Even business to business, these triggers can be deal-makers. A client buying
print design is not just buying leaflets. They may be buying a credible image
for the company by using a cutting-edge design company. They may be buying
peace of mind and time-saving by using a company who can provide a full
design, print and delivery service.
How easy is it for your customers to find out about what you do, access
it, buy it and to pay you for what you do? Lowest cost is sometimes a factor
but rarely the deciding one. The whole package offered from start to finish is.
So look at who else is likely to make your potential customers part with their
cash, what this competition really offers their clients, and how you can use this
to inform you how to make them want to come to you instead.
• identifying products, services or organisations that complement what you do
• opportunities for collaboration, growth or diversification.
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Researching Your Collaborators
There are different types of resource one can draw upon for creative business.
These potential resources and ways to access them can be broken down as
follows:
Human Capital – the resources you as an individual have access to simply on
the basis of your own knowledge, training, education, experiences.
Physical Capital – the resources you have access to on the basis of owning
equipment, hardware, buildings etc.
Financial Capital – money in the bank and other financial assets for investment.
Over and above these resources, there is:
So, emergent behaviour can provide useful lessons for research and innovative
practice within creative business, because:
More/Different is Better for Research – The livelier and more diverse your
creative network, the more often you will get to hear about new ideas and
possibilities from a broader range of creative disciplines. It can get a little boring
when everyone already knows what everyone already knows. Broadening your
creative networks can help turn your whole world into your R&D lab.
Ignorance is a Useful Signpost – One of the key reasons ignorance is useful
is that it can show you very quickly and immediately what the gaps in your
knowledge are. So if you take your ignorance seriously and grasp it as an
opportunity when it becomes apparent to you, it can direct your research
agenda into useful areas such as recognising problems as problems, solutions as
solutions and how to put them together.
Social Capital – access to a resource that comes from having contacts, knowing
people, developing working relationships and collaborations.
Knowing the amount of human, physical and financial capital you have is
usually pretty obvious, and doesn’t really need much research. But finding out
and developing your stock of social capital is much more of an unknown quantity,
requiring much more research. Researching what other people around you are
doing and what they and you can offer each other can be very important.
When researching this, and subsequently sustaining a flow of ideas between
you and potential collaborators, it is useful to think about emergent behaviour
for research and innovation.
According to Emergence by Steve Johnson, the hallmarks of emergent
behaviour are:
Encourage Randomness in Your Research – This is fundamentally about
stumbling across new ideas, killer applications and collaborations. It is intimately
connected with showing you your ignorance and how/why you can/should do
something about it, as above.
More is Different – the more micro-difference involved in a creative network,
the livelier they will be.
Researching Your Neighbours – Paying attention to your neighbours is the
general social context within which all emergent behaviour occurs. But don’t just
research them, let them research you too. Like a lot of really good things, it needs
to be mutual if it is really going to work.
Ignorance is Useful – you never know what you need to know, because de
facto, you do not know about it yet.
Encourage Random Encounters – without random encounters you will not
stumble over new ideas, new collaborators and new innovative possibilities so
often.
Researching the Patterns in the Signs – Researching killer applications,
innovations rather then discoveries and generally doing something with
ignorance and randomness will entail standing back from the details and looking
sideways as well as forwards. Researching the creative garden around you as well
as digging ever deeper into your small bit of it so as to spot similar patterns
within what other people are doing is the mind-set that is needed for good
innovation and finding killer applications.
Warning
Researching Your Customers
Seeing Pretty Patterns
Obviously another key part of market research for creative business is research
into what the customer really thinks of you, your company and your stuff. This
is why market research is much more than simple marketing, as in trying to sell
something.
Good market research, like good social and anthropological research comes
from getting to know your customers properly, understanding things in the
way that they understand it themselves. At best, it entails asking them to be
a genuine and on-going part of your creative project/business and using their
input to continue developing your creativity. That is, good customer research is
about more then just getting to understand them until they have bought your
product or service.
Recent research (Chouinard 2005) suggests that only 14% of Americans get
in touch with a company if they are not happy with it. The number is as little as
8% in Europe. And in Japan it is only 4%. However, other research suggests that
if customers have a problem with a company, 66% never buy from them again.
They just don’t tell you about it or about why.
So you need to research them in some way.
Uncomfortable though it might be, it is useful to research what is wrong
about you and what you are doing, rather than just focus upon what is right
about you. Remember, you can learn more from failure than success if you have
good falsificationist research methods and strategies to cope with the findings.
It is human nature to look for patterns and to assign them meaning when we find
them… (Kahneman and Tversky) dubbed these shortcuts heuristics. In general,
heuristics are useful, but just as our manner of processing optical information
sometimes leads to optical illusions, so heuristics sometimes lead to systematic
error.
(from The Drunkards Walk by L. Mlodinow)
As we saw when considering emergent behaviour, it is good to look for
patterns in the signs because it can show us similar themes and trajectories
that we share with other areas of research.
But there can be dangers in over-doing this.
A heuristic is a kind-of conceptual or mental template that we can apply to
things – a kind of pattern we can use to make sense of the messy world out
there. The danger comes in using the template too strongly to ‘chop up’ the
world so that it fits the artificial heuristic more neatly. Think about the best
relationship between carts and horses here.
The real world is usually much more random than that, but we seem to be
hardwired to seek patterns rather than see randomness.
For instance, I used to sometimes think that when I thought about an old
film I had not seen in ages, that it would appear on TV sometime over the next
few days. This has happened to me several times. The first time I didn’t take
any notice – it was just a coincidence. But then it happened again and again
over the next few years. Maybe there is some spooky thing going on where I
could predict the future TV schedule!
Of course, there is a fundamental problem with this – I did not remember
the hundreds and hundreds of times over this period when I had thought of an
old film and it had NOT appear of TV over the next few days.
I had only remembered the bit of pattern that I had remembered, not
the whole thing. And it is all too easy to do this in situations where it really
matters. To think we have spotted a pattern in our research, when it is really
just what we would expect from a normal random distribution of events.
In a way very similar to the more background idea of paradigms, heuristics
can be good because they can help order our thinking. But they can be bad if
we over-do them and start to mistake them for the real thing.
Look for Patterns in the Signs – it is useful to recognise that you and potential
collaborators may be working on similar issues, even though the overt content of
each creative project might at first appear very different.
Pay Attention to Your Neighbours – paying attention to the microcommunications coming from your neighbours encourages joint understanding
and mutual growth.
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Expert Contribution
Creativity, Innovation and Research for the Market: It’s an Emotional
Experience – by Francine Pickering
Francine Pickering is a Chartered Marketer working as a marketing consultant
with small and growing businesses in the East Midlands.
Innovation! It’s about bright ideas, new to the world, something exciting that
people have never seen before. Everyone wants something innovative – right?
But is a bright idea enough to make an innovation successful? Not if it bombs
when you take it to market. (As I was thinking just the other day as I donned
my tissue-dispenser hat in case I got a bout of the sniffles.) Rather, successful
innovation comes from a sound understanding of a market – and a creative
response to that market’s needs and wants.
What do you need to know for successful innovation?
Hard information – numbers, demographics, spending power – are important
in understanding whether the market will be a profitable one. But they are not
enough to identify a need for innovation, or to determine what that innovation
might be. For that, an understanding of ‘softer’ issues is important and there
are many questions to ask.
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What drives those customers?
What motivates them?
How do they see themselves?
How do they want to see themselves reflected in the things they own and use?
How do they want others to see them?
And how do they believe the things they own and use reinforce that
perception?
• What are the desires they want to achieve or the problems they need to solve?
• What are their ambitions?
• What are their frustrations?
As Tom Peters has been known to say, ‘Innovation comes from pissed-off
people’.
Although people like to believe that they make rational decisions when they
buy, the truth is that they more often make their decisions on an irrational,
emotional basis. And then post-justify their decision on the basis of logic – the
latest, coolest gadget really is so useful, never mind that you just had to buy
one before all your friends did. So understanding your customers’ emotional
and psychological motivation is the first step to identifying an innovative way
of addressing them.
Innovation requires a creative response to market needs. If you simply
research the market by asking people what they want, the likelihood is
they will respond with something they already know about, something
that is already within their frame of reference. They will seldom give you an
innovative answer. Ask questions that enquire into their problems or dreams,
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questions that provoke an emotional reaction, (frustration, joy, excitement, a
sense of relief?) and you can gain insights into what they really want or need.
And then you are better placed to develop a creative, innovative approach to
meeting that want or need.
Of course, it helps if that innovation can then be logically post-justified.
Clearly an innovation needs to be tested to ensure it meets practical customer
requirements, otherwise initial excitement in a new product will only turn to
disillusionment. If it does work though, you have a winning combination and
customers who become raving fans because they believe you share their values.
This two-pronged approach to market research for innovation can prove
significant from a competitive standpoint, especially if the innovation is not
one that can be protected in law. An innovation based purely in technology
could be protected through patents; a clear competitive advantage.
But innovation exists in other spheres, in processes and services, in taking
ideas from one area of life and applying them to another, even in paring down
technology to a simpler format. Here it’s less easy to gain legal protection for
an innovation. Guarding against copycats requires the innovation be difficult
to replicate through other means. And an emotional resonance between the
values of the customer and the values of a brand is hard to break. A product or
service that customers love will attract a level of loyalty that differentiates it
from the competition. Even when technically an innovation is easy to copy, the
emotional engagement of your customers is very difficult to replicate.
That emotional engagement between a customer and a brand creates a
framework within which future innovation can take place, something to build
on and extend customer loyalty. In this way, understanding the customer gives
a context to continuous innovation though a creative response to the market.
A focus on the customer’s needs moves innovation away from the occasional
creation of one-off bright ideas and into the realms of a business strategy
based on a long-term responsiveness to the customer, so as to maintain
competitive advantage and build a successful creative business.
Quotation
Market Research as Talking: Talking as Market Research – by Debbie Bryan
Debbie Bryan is an applied artist who designs and makes lambs-wool felted
accessories and hand-cast resin fashion pieces.
Talking to other creatives who are already selling to your market can give
you confidence when making decisions about how to sell your work. But
nothing beats talking to customers yourself. A conversation with buyers,
scary as it sounds, really helps establish good relationships, build customer
loyalty and more importantly, repeat orders… I focus on a buyer’s response
to my collection, which informs my creative and business choices. I also think
collaboration with other designers, which can lead to new products and
creative progression, is an essential part of creative business innovation.
Researching Your Company Personality
Exercise
A big part of the way the market perceives you and your company is your
organisational or company personality. This is the image or reputation of your
company. It is connected to, but broader than any specific logos, advertising or
other public communications it might make. Because the creative industries
are often made up of very small companies and/or sole traders, your company
personality is often pretty much you yourself, your ‘performance’ (in both senses
of the word) in talking to clients, customers or collaborators, and how you
appear to them.
But it can come from other things. We don’t want to imply that there is any
‘one best way’ of presenting your company personality, just that the following
are factors you need to be aware of:
Who Do You Think You Are Again?
Your place – your building, your address, the interior design of your office, the
fact that you don’t have an office but work wifi. Working without an office
can be an increasingly funky, interesting and cheap way of running a creative
company whilst also having great contact with the creative network around you.
So long as that is the company personality you think is best for you, you might
not need an impressive office to impress clients. You see? No implications about
‘one best way’.
Your product – this kind-of speaks for itself. If what you do and sell is very
tightly linked to a particular product, then clearly your company personality will
be too.
Your service – very similar to the previous point in some ways, but different in
others. Providing a service is different from a product because there is usually
more of an inter-personal and emotional aspect to it. So ways of being, talking
and looking will figure up more in this aspect of company personality.
Your staff – if you have staff they will form a big part of your company
personality. The way they answer the phone, deal with people, get back to
clients (or not) etc. The customer will not make fine distinction in terms of your
company personality just because (s)he is dealing with temporary staff, it will
still have an effect.
Imagine your company is a person.
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Is it male or female?
How old is it?
Where does it buy its clothes from?
What newspaper does it read?
Does it drive a car?
Is its favourite meal fish and chips or a Moroccan Lamb Tagine?
How much does it drink in the average week?
Where did it go on its last holiday?
Now you know what you want your company personality to be, research your
market to find out how other people see it.
And then of course there is your Brand. This is one way of summing up all of
what we have said. The problem with the idea of ‘The Brand’ is that the term has
been so over-used, and in some uses contaminated with bullshit, that it is now
a problematic term for a lot of people. That gets us into the politics (economics)
of knowledge being put off for another time. But there is a relationship between
The Brand and the Uncanny Valley.
Up to this point we have looked at what the different grounds for doing
research can be, how to pin down research activity within specific methods
and ways in which research can lead to creative innovations. But these new
and innovative ideas and ways of working will probably entail all sorts of other
changes as a consequence. They might require you to think, work, manage and
get organised differently. This is especially the case if the innovative ideas are
really to be fully developed and grown into something that you can protect, not
get sued for, sustain and grow. So in the next chapter we turn to some of the
associated skills involved in research and innovation for creative business.
You will have a company personality whatever you do. Even if you ignore the
fact of company personality you will have a company personality, one that will
probably be slightly schizophrenic. So it is probably best to research it as part
of the general market research every so often, so you know what it is, where it
comes from and make sure it is the one you want. It is a part of the broader idea
of market research to know and therefore control better the factors impacting
upon how you appear to the market out there, in terms of all the ways your
company is presented to the world.
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Chapter 6 – The Rules and
Peculiarities of Various Instruments:
Professional Skills for Creative
Research and Innovation
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Proverb
We can’t go on together with suspicious minds
(Elvis Presley)
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Expert Contribution
They do say that you should be careful what you wish for, because it might just
happen. And if it does happen, it is good to be ready.
So, having looked at some of the philosophy and methods for research, and
begun to relate these ideas to creative business innovation, we now come to
some of the associated skills that run alongside research and innovation. The
common thread across all these skills is the way they can help in dealing with
the consequences of your research, your innovations and changes to the context
of your creativity. Indeed, it is important to note that some of the organisational
skills discussed below can actually be the business innovation itself, if they
contribute to finding different and better ways of doing what you do and how.
So there are ethical, legal, managerial and organisational questions to consider
when taking research into innovation, into managing and running a creative
business, or just yourself. And as Elvis teaches us, it will be difficult to go on
together if you get things wrong.
Pigeons, Dogs, Torture and Prison: Research Ethics for Creative Practice and
Business Innovation – by Dr. Adam Barnard
Adam Barnard teaches ethics, values and philosophy at Nottingham Trent
University. He wants ideas to become dangerous again.
But whatever, all these studies do raise questions about the ethics of research.
Research Ethics Behind – ethics are socially agreed sets of rules about what
we think of as acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. They change over
time and can form the basis for sets of guidelines to regulate professional
activities or bodies. Research ethics normally involve the protection of the
participants of the research or offer a framework for its general conduct. For
example, research in the National Health Service is governed by Laws and
Ethics Committees. This requires the submission of a 128 Document to go
with research proposals. Creative practitioners will not usually fall foul of these
committees, but being reasonable and sensible is a useful outlook to adopt, set
against these general ideas of shared ethical behaviour.
What should I be doing and why?
Don’t kill anyone, do useful stuff.
Killer Pigeons and Electric Dogs.
B.F. Skinner a behavioural psychologist describes how, in Project Pigeon he
developed a programme to train pigeons to guide Pelican Missiles during
the Second World War. The flight of the killer pigeons suggests the disregard
people can have for animals. Most people would be distressed at the thought
of programmes designed to create self-exploding pigeons, torpedo dolphins or
monkey astronauts that gives no consideration for rights of the animal. Also
Seligman gave dogs electric shocks. He then let some escape and some not. He
found the dogs couldn’t escape because they had learned ‘helplessness’ and
become passive victims, such that they made no effort to avoid their torture.
These pieces of well known and well regarded research suggest some of the
difficulties in using animals as the subjects of research. They can’t complain,
protest, withdraw from the experiment or necessarily understand what’s
going on. But these types of research activity are not confined to animal
experiments.
Stanley Milgram’s (1963) conformity experiments required human
participants to think they had killed other human beings by administering
electric shocks. Separated from the victim and obeying orders from an
experimenter, Milgram found participants would administer ‘lethal’ levels to an
unseen victim, even when the victim would plead for them to stop. Milgram
was exploring how people conformed to the orders from someone in authority
and felt separated from the effects of these orders. Zimbardo set up a ‘mock
prison’ at Stanford University where ‘arrested’ inmates were governed by
‘guards’. The study had to be abandoned after six days because the ‘guards’
brutalised the ‘inmates’ so much.
In the narrow confines of research ethics, one view suggests such studies
were ethically sound because they went through various ethics committees
(beware of committees). More reasoned judgement suggests a number of
severe ethical objections to Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s research. These include:
Research Ethics
First, going back to the initial question of research, we need to consider research
ethics. Ethics is a key part of any research, but it is an especially important factor
when the research involves the real lives of other people.
In terms of general concepts of ethics, there are many different ethical
theories and viewpoints out there – Utilitarianism, Negative Utilitarianism,
Kantian Ethics, Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Environmental Ethics, various religionbased ethical principles and so on. A surprising number have been discussed in
relation to creative practice and they share common concerns, such as:
• What is it to be ethical in relation to your creative practice?
• Are some forms of creative practice unethical, and if so why?
• Does being ethical flow from the nature of the person or the nature of the
practice, or what gets produced?
• Are your own individual ethical, social or religious beliefs enough of a basis for
you to be ethical, or does it need to be more of a shared agreement than that?
We do not have any off-the-peg answers. You will need to think about that for
yourself, because constantly thinking about these things and yourself is possibly
the best basis for any ethics.
What we do have, from Adam Barnard is an introduction to some of the more
specific and detailed issues concerning the relationship between ethics and doing
research made relevant for creative practice.
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Another view suggests that the results are so illuminating that the distress
caused is justified by the outcome. It is an interesting question as to how
individuals would react to the self-knowledge that you can so easily become a
psychotic torturer.
The deception of the participants in the research
The distress caused to the participants or ‘inmates’
The possible long term consequences upon those taking part
The failure to explain the ‘right to withdrawal’ from the research
Research Ethics In/Through – there are a range of ethical guidelines that
govern the detailed practice of research, such as:
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The Social Research Association’s Ethical Guidelines
The British Psychological Society’s Code of Conduct
The British Sociological Association’s Statement of Ethical Practice
The British Society of Criminology’s Ethical Policy
The Political Studies Association’s Guidelines for Good Professional Conduct
JUC’s Social Work Education Committee’s Code of Ethics for Social Work and
Social Care Research.
The British Psychological Society has a code of ethics based on four principles:
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Respect
Competence
Responsibility
Integrity.
It recognises obligations to set and uphold the highest standards of
professionalism within research. It aims to promote ethical behaviour, attitudes
and judgements on the part of psychologists by being mindful of the need to
protect the public by expressing clear ethical principles, values and standards.
It aims to promote such standards through education and consultation, and
implement methods to help researchers monitor their professional behaviour
and attitudes. It also investigates complaints concerning unethical research,
and sometimes takes corrective action when appropriate.
This is all very well for psychologists but what does it mean in practice for
those people wanting to do research in the creative industries?
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Guidance on research ethics normally includes:
• Consent – ensuring that people actively agreed to participate, that they have
not been deceived or coerced, that they are not too young or in some other
way unable to give consent
• Withdrawal – ensuring that people know they can withdraw from the research
at any stage
• Confidentiality – ensuring that any information stemming from the research is
kept confidential, that findings are anonymised (it doesn’t say anything about
specific individuals) and that information is destroyed or at least kept secure
once the research has finished
• Harm – ensuring the protection of the people participating in the research
from physical or mental harm to themselves, or from harming other people as
a result of the research process
• Debriefing – ensuring that the research process and any consequence of it has
been discussed with the participants, that any help they might need as a result
of being involved in it is offered, any concerns, stress or worries are overcome
and the research findings are revealed to them.
Research Ethics For – what type of research is it? Doing desk-based research,
using other secondary, already published sources or other material in the
public domain means you’re largely clear of ethical considerations.
Things get trickier if you are collecting original stuff or working with
people, talking to them, watching them, reporting on them, or dealing with
organisations or agencies that might have reasons to keep certain creative
or business things confidential. Ethics in ‘research for’ becomes an important
issue if you are collecting and/or analysing primary, unpublished data from/
about identifiable people (either in laboratory or in non-laboratory settings),
or collecting and analysing data on their behaviour in situations where they
might reasonably expect privacy.
Things get trickier still if you’re doing this kind of work with kids or young
people under 18 years of age, with adults who are infirm or physically disabled,
adults who are resident in social care or medical establishments, adults in the
custody of the criminal justice system or people who may not be able to give
valid consent to take part in the research because they suffer from cognitive
impairment of either a temporary or permanent nature.
It gets even trickier still if the research brings a significant risk of causing
physical harm or emotional distress to participants.
Research that may lead to disclosures about actual or potential abuse or
harm to children, disclosures of criminal activity, or disclosures of other forms
of harm is a big no-no.
In short, if you are reasonable about who and what you are asking, observing
or recording and they’ve agreed, and you’ve given some thought to the
potential problems, then you should be OK. But you do need to be careful and
think about it first. Would you like it?
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Research Ethics In Front Of – so you might want to think about these
questions before conducting the research:
• First, an honest appraisal as to whether there are any ethical risks, and if so
does the proposed research activity need ethical approval?
• Can you provide information about the ethical quality of the proposed
research activity?
• If so, what ethical issues are raised by the proposed research, and therefore
how will you address them?
• Did you get consent from participants? For example, a signed consent form.
• How will you ensure confidentiality, security and retention of research data?
Will all the information be kept confidential or left on a laptop on a train?
• Are they going to remain anonymous?
• Are you doing on-line and internet research, and if so are there any specific
problems associated with this? If there are, what are you going to do about
them?
• Will you let the participants have a copy of the research?
• Are you sure that the participants know that they can withdraw at any time or
have their data, responses, pictures withdrawn from the research?
• What kind of ‘de-brief’ have you got planned?
Do you think there are these kinds of ethical issues with the research? If you
are not sure, then there probably are some.
Finally, try to make sure you haven’t electrocuted, blown-up, terrorised,
tortured or killed anyone? That’s definitely out.
Finally, finally it is good to be a good person. There are wider issues related
to ethical research that include the political, economic, cultural, social and
environmental contexts in which research is conducted, and why research
is conducted. Maybe ethical research is ultimately about generating new
knowledge about the world which is in the general benefit of person-kind,
progressive and emancipatory in its aims and actually tries to change things
for the better.
or psychological self-destruction. Yet how is it possible to make the necessary
discrimination such that we may encourage a constructive creativity and not a
destructive one?
The distinction cannot be made by examining the product. The very essence
of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge
it… Nor is it of any help to examine the purposes of the individual participating
in the creative process. Many, perhaps most, of the creations and discoveries
which have proved to have great social value have been motivated by purposes
having more to do with personal interests than wider social value; while on
the other hand history records a somewhat sorry outcome for many of those
creations (various Utopias, Prohibitions etc.) which had as their avowed purpose
the achievement of a social good. No, we must face the fact that the individual
creates primarily because it is satisfying to him/her, because this behaviour is felt
to be self-actualising and we get nowhere by trying to differentiate ‘good’ and
‘bad’ purposes in the creative process.
Must we then give over any attempt to discriminate between creativity which
is potentially constructive, and that which is potentially destructive? I do not
believe this pessimistic conclusion is justified… It has been found that when
the individual is ‘open’ to all his/her experiences then his/her behaviour will be
creative, and his/her creativity may be trusted to be essentially constructive.
The differentiation may be put very briefly as follows. To the extent that the
individual is denying to awareness (or repressing, if you prefer that term) large
areas of his/her experience, then his/her creative formings may be pathological
or socially evil, or both. To the degree to which the individual is open to all
aspects of his/her experience and has available to his/her awareness all the varied
sensings and perceivings which are going on within his/her organism, then the
novel products of his/her interaction with his/her environment will tend to be
constructive both for him/herself and others.
(from Towards a Theory of Creativity, by C. Rogers)
Case Study
But there are no laws about this unfortunately, so that’s up to you.
Ethical Research for Creative Business: Encouraging the Local Ecology
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 11 – An Ethical Note
Yvon Chouinard declares his intent to support the local. Their research into
new processes and product development clearly sits within broader ethical
business context:
Let us now attempt to deal directly with this puzzling issue of the social value of
a creative act. Presumably few of us are interested in facilitating creativity which
is solely destructive. We do not wish, knowingly, to lend our efforts to developing
individuals whose creative genius works itself out in new and better ways of
robbing, exploiting, torturing, killing other individuals; or developing forms of
political organization or art forms which lead humanity into paths of physical
Our present mode of production includes buying organic cotton in Turkey,
shipping the bales to Thailand to be processed into fabric, shipping the fabric to
Texas to be cut, to Mexico to be sewn, on to our warehouse in Reno, then to our
stores and dealers, and finally to our customers’ homes. Shipping costs may soon
start to outstrip the cost of material and labour. We must begin to find a way to
produce our goods locally…
My company, Patagonia. Inc. is an experiment. It exists to put into action those
recommendations that all the doomsday books on the health of our home planet
say we must do immediately to avoid the certain destruction of nature and the
collapse of civilisation.
(from Let My People Go Surfing, by Y.Chouinard)
Intellectual Property and Innovation
Expert Contribution
No Thanks Baz!: Legal Advice for Research and Innovation –
An interview with John Buckby
John Buckby is a musician and intellectual property lawyer at Berryman,
who works with the creative industries to help them protect and develop
their ideas.
Authors (A) – One cannot copyright an idea. So when one is researching a new
idea before it gets applied, is there anything one should bear in mind when it
comes to Intellectual Property (IP) issues?
John Buckby (JB) – An idea can be protected by copyright, but only in very
rare circumstances (which can be comfortably ignored for our purposes here).
Generally, copyright only protects the expressions of ideas. As soon as an idea
is recorded in some tangible form, such as by writing down original words, or
recording notes of an original melody, copyright comes into being automatically.
No further steps or formal registration are needed.
Until you have created a tangible expression of your idea, you don’t have
any protection. So be careful about humming that killer new melody to a rival
producer before you record it…and think twice before telling another writer
about your brilliant plot for a book or film which you haven’t yet started. If
you’re nervous about people copying your idea – don’t tell them about it. At
least, not until you have turned it into a work which you can wave around and
say ‘this is mine’!
…It is worth pointing out that if another person creates a work that is identical
or substantially similar to yours, but they did so independently, without having
seen your work, you cannot claim any copyright protection. You’ll just have
to console yourself with the cold comfort that your work can’t have been that
original after all!
Copyright applies to musical, artistic, literary, dramatic works, databases
and typographical arrangements. It provides no protection for business ideas,
inventions, ideas for academic research, ideas for board games, the plot for an
as-yet unwritten book, trade names, nor any other ideas which do not fit in to
the limited categories described above. For such ideas, it is worth looking into
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the other rights recognised in IP law. These include patents, trade marks, and
design rights. Rights also exist in confidential information, either contractually
or under general law.
A patent is one of the most significant IP rights available. It gives an inventor
a monopoly on an invention for up to 20 years. However, the patent application
process can be costly and time-consuming. To be successful, your invention must
satisfy certain conditions, including that it is novel at the time of application.
As soon as an invention has been made available or disclosed to the public
– anywhere in the world – it will be considered ‘available to the public’ and
therefore no longer novel. Consequently, it is very important for inventors to keep
their ideas out of the public domain during the research and development phase.
If the invention leaks out and becomes public knowledge, even to a small extent,
it will no longer qualify for patent protection and the inventor loses that valuable
right to exclusivity.
As an inventor, you should therefore resist the temptation to write about your
idea in a trade journal and avoid talking about it to anyone else…
A – When one has developed a new idea, innovation etc. and one wants to
pitch it to a client or investor, what would you say about the advisability of
confidentiality agreements?
JB – Confidentiality agreements can create an obligation of confidentiality where
none would otherwise exist under law. They can also reinforce and expand upon
an existing legal obligation of confidentiality. A confidentiality agreement (or
‘non-disclosure agreement’) is a contract which identifies certain information
as confidential, and which obliges the parties who sign it to take certain
precautions, or to follow a certain procedure, in relation to that information. If
a party uses the information in a way that breaches this contract, or otherwise
allows the information to leak out without authorisation, they can be sued for
any financial loss caused by that failure.
Confidentiality agreements enable businesses to disclose sensitive information
to each other (such as prices, customer details, or an idea for a new business
venture), and to explore the potential for co-operation and collaboration
in progressing the commercial potential of such ideas within a ‘safety net’ of
confidentiality. They are also extremely useful documents for inventors. As
mentioned above, once an idea is in the public domain, it can no longer be
patented. Inventors should therefore have a signed confidentiality agreement in
place before disclosing details of an unpatented invention to other parties.
There is usually no need to use a confidentiality agreement in respect of
copyrighted works or original designs, because ownership and protection arise
automatically in these instances, and do not require any further action to achieve
protection.
A – Lots of creative innovation comes from collaboration across different
disciplines. When groups are working together in this, often free-form way,
what advice would you give them as a lawyer in terms of being clear about
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who ‘owns’ the research?
JB – ‘Research’ is a broad umbrella term capable of describing a number of
different enterprises, some of which may give rise to ownership, and some not.
Certainly, the concrete results that arise out of research can give rise to ownership
issues. For instance, if a number of parties have written articles jointly in relation
to the research, the ownership of the copyright in these works would be shared.
Any know-how, or other useful practical knowledge yielded by the research can
be protected and ‘owned’ as confidential information. In addition, a patentable
invention may emerge out of the research. These are all potentially valuable
‘fruits’ of research which can be owned and protected.
The parties should develop an awareness of the types of ownership which arise
from their particular collaboration, in order that their negotiations can focus
on these areas. The individual inputs and expectations of the parties involved
should be discussed at the very start of the process, so that the parties can reach
agreement about how the varying contributions (whether financial, creative,
practical or otherwise) will affect ownership of the resulting work or discoveries.
This principle of ‘work it out in advance’ applies to all creative endeavours,
whether joint inventors, business partners, joint authors or bands (where they
may be four or more people vying for their contribution to be represented). A
lawyer will encourage the parties to discuss their expectations at the start of the
relationship, in order to come to an arrangement with which all are content…
If you can’t afford to see a lawyer, try to agree in advance a mechanism which
can decide how ownership of any resulting works will be allocated, and how the
parties will work together in relation to the research and the practical aspects
of shared ownership. Once you have come to an agreement on the processes
involved, set it all down in writing and distribute it to each other, by email or
in a letter. If there is likely to be any money involved, bite the bullet and see a
lawyer…
a kind of enforced liberalism, which says: ‘if you choose to adapt or improve this
work, you leave the usual rights of ownership at the front door. This creation stays
free’. This approach prevents the dissemination of the work being obstructed
by the grubby mitts of individual gain. The focus is on the development of the
work itself, rather than the benefits of the personalities involved in making it…
A copyleft licence creates a ‘free workshop’ in which the work can evolve and
improve through the efforts of the swarm of contributors, without getting tied up
or tugged back by self-motivating concepts of ownership.
This kind of arrangement seems best suited to non-artistic, functional works,
where the contributions of numerous parties can make a positive long-term
impact on that functionality, rather than working against each other stylistically.
It would therefore work in relation to ‘remixing’ and evolving medicine,
engineering, software and the like. As for art or music, I’m not sure – do I really
want to hear the soulful sounds of Barry from down the road practising his new
guitar over the top of my track? Er, no thanks Baz.
(This is an edited version of the interview with John Buckby. The long version
can be downloaded from www.thebroadsheet.org)
Knowledge Cannot be Un - Invented
Because knowledge cannot be un-invented we all have responsibilities to each
other to be careful. It is not true when people say ‘All is fair in love and war’, if
you hurt people you hurt them.
Nor is it good enough when people say ‘business is business’ as some sort
of catch-all excuse for doing whatever nasty thing they want. Business is not
exempt from wider social and ethical responsibilities, even though sometimes
people try to claim it is. Nor does art or any other kind of creativity come with
some kind of ‘artistic license’ that exempts it from wider social responsibilities.
For example:
• Alfred Nobel’s research led to the invention of dynamite, which made him very
rich but did not make him happy. It improved the efficiency of killing. Does the
Nobel Peace Prize make up for it?
• Robert Oppenheimer’s research led to the invention of the Atomic Bomb.
Whatever your position on the (de)merits of this as a piece of technology, be
careful what you develop as you might need to take responsibility for it. And by
then it might be too late.
A – What do you think of the Copyleft movement? Some people see this as a
form of legal protection that is more amenable to these open ways of working
around collaboration and innovating new ideas?
JB – The ‘point’ of intellectual property law is to promote innovation in society,
by giving those who create new works a period of exclusivity over the use of their
creations. This gives creators an opportunity to exploit their work and generate
belated compensation for the unpaid time spent developing the idea in the first
place. Copyright (and all other intellectual property rights) operates on the
presumption that the contributors to a work will wish to hold on to the ownership
as far as possible. Copyleft is a type of licensing arrangement which takes a
different, more open-source approach to issues of ownership.
Under a copyleft licence arrangement, the creator of a work allows others to
use and adapt that work, on the proviso that any contributions they make will be
passed on to the next contributor with the same freedoms. Improvements made
in the course of each individual contribution will not give rise to ownership and
the contributor will not be able to sell what (s)he has made out of the work. It is
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More currently:
• Naomi Klein has shown how ‘disaster capitalism’ works to make money from
creating and maintaining a (real or imagined) sense of risk, vulnerability and fear,
and/or cash in when something bad does happen.
• Most TV ads are designed to create unhappiness, insecurity, and a sense of failure
based upon not having whatever is being advertised. Is your washing white? Is
it really white? If not then you are a bad mother and your husband is going to
leave you!
• And finally, the arms trade today…
Business is not just business. So research for business is not always just research
for business. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is not just a horror story. It is
also an allegorical warning about how your inventions can come to have power
over you.
The Uncanny Valley
Another reason for being careful about what you research and develop is the
dangers of the Uncanny Valley. Sigmund Freud referred to the uncanny as the
‘un-homely’, as something out of place.
In a more specific sense, the Uncanny Valley refers to the revulsion, disjuncture
or rift we experience between the hyper-realism of, for instance, the digital
imagery within a computer game on the one hand, and the experience of this
‘realism’ as something we know instinctively is not real on the other.
Quotation
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of
humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion
among human observers. The ‘valley’ in question is a dip in a proposed graph
of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness. It was
introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 and has been linked
to Ernst Jentsch’s concept of ‘the uncanny’ identified in a 1906 essay, ‘On the
Psychology of the Uncanny’ Jentsch’s conception is famously elaborated upon by
Sigmund Frued a 1919 essay, simply entitled ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche).
A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation such as with the films
The Polar Express and Beowulf.
We can draw a graph of the Uncanny Valley.
In the wider cultural world, think about status symbols for a moment. None of
us want to be perceived as too geeky for very long and we use fashion stuff to
present a ‘self’ to the world so that others will see us as OK kind of people who
‘get it’. But there is only so far you can go with this. It is not a never-ending
ladder to ‘better’ status. The percentage of people we impress when we get into
more and more specific labels designed to ‘increase’ our status is actually an
ever-decreasing circle. And if we overdo it, it can flip over the edge very quickly
and people start to see us as a bit of a wanker. As with a lot of these things, the
behaviour, activity, strategy that was initially part of the solution becomes part
of the problem.
So we can see a sense of innovative ‘progress towards something’ can
easily reach the ‘too much stage’ and it becomes over-stated and experienced
negatively. It is good to make ‘progress towards something’ within research
geared towards innovation. But if we over-reach the claims we make, if it gets
too pat, too ordered a representation of the messy world out there, it can easily
be rejected by those around us as too clean, too ‘perfect’. Again, too much of
what used to be the solution becomes part of the problem. This can happen
in lots of places, when pitching an idea and making too many claims, when
designing an interior that is so perfect no-one can live in it, when writing prose
that is so ‘purple’ that the death scene becomes funny. Nervousness of the
uncanny can be a useful self-corrective in lots of ways.
Managing the Flow of Ideas
We now come to those professional skills associated with finding the right
organisational structure for the flow of ideas leading to innovation, and the
corresponding ‘management’ of that flow.
A lot of what we have said so far, in this and previous chapters implies
research and innovation comes from two inter-related things:
• Developing new ideas
• Talking to each other
As we discussed in Chapter 5 getting new ideas to flow is often central to
innovation. And you are going to need new 200 ideas!
Professor Oliver Gassmann of St. Galen University reckons there are 2,000
ideas behind every 10 business innovations. So presumably that means you
are going to need 200 ideas for each of your own business innovations. We can
perhaps be a bit sceptical of such a measurement-oriented piece of research that
seems to take no account of the quality of the ideas. However, this research does
throw up some interesting points.
Professor Gassmann thinks he can ‘tell’ an innovative company, because:
• When you walk through the door and the first thing you see is an organisational
chart detailing responsibilities, roles and a division of labour, it is unlikely to be a
very innovative place.
• They have an ‘innovative culture’ where ideas flow easily across a very flat
hierarchy, or flow horizontally.
• They are places where temporary ‘failure’ is not something people are afraid of.
Their mottos tend to be versions of ‘fail earlier, succeed sooner’.
• They are systems that open their processes to the outside via partnerships and
external sources of ideas and knowledge.
According to Professor Gassmann, being like this can lower the costs of research
for innovation by between 60% and 90%.
Managing Your Innovation
But becoming this kind of innovative organisation raises the question of
management. And historically, many medium-sized or large companies have
not had an innovative culture because they have not been very good at this.
Ideas have not flowed very well because of management. The very idea of
management has always been underpinned, to a greater or lesser degree, by
the separation of conception from execution. That is, some people (managers)
do all the thinking, planning and having of ideas (conception), and other people
(workers) do all the work (execution). This separation of conception from
execution is the central facet that often really messes up the flow of new ideas,
and therefore innovation within organisations (public and private sector).
This is not so much of a problem if you are running a business that just
wants to do the same routine thing over and over again. But if you want to run
a creative business that is operating in the ever changing environment of the
innovation economy, needs to be responsive to the global cultural economy,
that survives upon its ability to come up with creative business innovations
and benefits from economies of speed, then such a style of management can
be disastrous.
This is one of the main reasons to avoid suspicious minds. Trying, as far as
possible to create a working environment in which all parties feel connected, feel
that they are meaningfully contributing, that they are valued and able to express
themselves because the organisational space is creative and innovative is, in and
of itself, good for creativity and innovation. As Elvis teaches us, trust is a better
basis for creativity than suspicion. Contemporary human-centred approaches to
management and organisations (called various names) have tried to devise ideas
of management that encourage this and the flow of ideas for innovation. Such
approaches try to encourage:
• A greater sense of motivation, common purpose, commitment and team work
• A better sense of two-way communication between management and staff so
that ideas can flow ‘up’ as well as ‘down’
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• Internal systems and processes that help the work to proceed rather than
hinder it
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No 12 – The Managerial View
Of course, this kind of management is found in some industries and workplaces
far more often than in others. Lots of people, indeed the majority still suffer from
management rather than benefit from it, and experience work as something
negative. However, that gets us into another dimension of the politics of
knowledge that we keep putting off until another time.
In terms of managing the way a team works towards organizing the flow of ideas
for innovation, Tom Kelley, in his book The Art of Innovation describes the five
steps he uses:
Understand – understanding the market, the client, the technology and the
perceived constraints on the problem at hand. Later in a project, they often
challenge those constraints, but it’s important to understand perceptions.
Observe – observing real people in real-life situations to find out what makes
them tick. What confuses them, what they like, what they hate, where their
latent needs are addressed by current products and services.
Our ‘secret formula’ to (manage innovation) is actually not very formulaic. It is a
blend of methodologies, work practices, culture and infra-structure. Methodology
alone is not enough. For example… prototyping is both a step in the innovation
process and a philosophy about moving continuously forward, even when some
variables are still undefined. And brainstorming is not just a valuable creative
tool at the fuzzy front end of products. It’s also a pervasive cultural influence
for making sure that individuals don’t waste too much energy spinning their
wheels on a tough problem when the collective wisdom of the team can get them
‘unstuck’ in less than an hour. Success depends on what you do and how you do it.
(from The Art of Innovation, by T. Kelley)
Thinkpiece
Visualize – visualizing new-to-the-world concepts and the customers who will
use them. For new product categories they sometimes visualize the customers
experience by using composite characters and storyboard-illustrated scenarios.
Innovate to Regenerate: Some Lessons on Innovation from Big Corporations
– by Annie Dickinson
Annie Dickinson makes up one half of Evolver Talent. For the past 11 years
Annie has delivered targeted consultancy support to international businesses
as a strategist and business coach.
Evaluate and Refine – evaluating and refining the prototypes in a series of quick
iterations. They try not to get too attached to the first few prototypes, because
they know they’ll change. No idea is so good that it can’t be improved upon, and
they plan a series of improvements.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple
came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not
about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you
get it.
Implement – implementation of the new concept for commercialization. This
phase is often the longest and most technically challenging in the developmental
process.
(Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc.)
As a manager, it is part of the job to deal with the other people in the team. The
quality and texture of relationships are important because this will impact upon
the flow of ideas and the degree to which processes of innovation can work. If
you want other people to contribute to the flow of ideas and generally be there,
then it is your responsibility as a manager to create the right conditions for this
to happen. If you don’t, your business will miss out on the ideas and potential
innovations. Francine Pickering showed above how innovation sometimes comes
from pissed-off customers, but it doesn’t come from pissed-off colleagues.
How long can you depend on your market evolving in ways you can predict?
What will you do when your customers suddenly begin to make new choices?
Smart leaders know that we operate in an environment of confusion and
uncertainty, the future being unpredictable – change could happen in an instant.
They have their antennae facing out – looking for ideas, listening to different
viewpoints, and encouraging their organisations to value curiosity over expertise.
When innovation is absent it invariably centres on a failure to challenge our
corporate sacred cows – the assumptions we make about who we are and what
we are here for…
Failure – In the 80’s, IBM’s focus on developing, selling and servicing the best
mainframe computers in the world prevented the company recognising the
potential of Microsoft’s new operating system. It led to the creation of a business
that would dominate computing for at least two decades, and IBM’s near-death
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experience of the early 90’s. When innovation thrives it often reflects a culture
that is confident about its ability to manage uncertainty and change, and enables
people to make their own choices about how they do their business…
Success – What makes real high flyers stand out from the rest? A recent study
of exceptional leaders at IBM provides clues. Here is one leader’s response to
the challenge of delivering billion dollar projects in times of market change and
unpredictability.
I don’t know exactly how we will achieve this, but what I do know is that together,
we (I and the client) have everything we will need.
Attitude generates results. Typically, organisations that excel at innovation have
a leadership demonstrating, in all they do, the value of ideas, that they come
from anyone and any place, and actively encouraging people to engage with
the business and to build their talent base. In most companies innovation occurs
only in small pockets. Either, you see a team dedicated for the task or, a number
of individuals with an unusually well-developed sense of their own place and
purpose not to be constrained by their organisation’s operating norms – but this
can be an uncomfortable place to be!
Innovation Norms – The CEO of a client company launched an innovation
challenge, inviting teams across the organisation to compete in creating a fiveyear vision for the business. The winning team were widely praised, and their
vision published. But, when the team leader credited a consultancy for a key idea
he used to engage his team in the visioning process, fireworks began! A corporate
taboo had emerged. This leader now began filtering the ideas he brought to the
business, no longer sharing all his ideas with senior colleagues. Beware – natural
innovators will gather ideas from everywhere, ignoring norms.
Business Innovation at its Best, and Simplest – How do we build an innovation
culture?
The Complex Route – focus energy and resources to explain, define and analyse
innovation. Design structures to support organisational ‘seed-beds’ of innovation,
and processes to ensure it happens. Remember, this will tend to turn innovation
into a process – and probably alienate your natural innovators. It’s likely to be
expensive, complex to implement and slow.
Build the Culture – What is the status quo? Do you know your organisation’s
‘corporate religion’, its guiding values, personality traits, and assumptions?
What truths does it hold about its purpose, customers, and priorities? What
story describes the company’s journey, its metaphor and archetypes? How is it
experienced by customers, employees or public? Which structures and processes
inhibit innovation? When is innovation at its best? When you understand what
makes your organisation live and breathe, you begin to see how it encourages
innovation, and the obstacles it raises up. Once you know your own sacred cows,
you can challenge the ones that actually inhibit innovation and growth, without
threatening those that make your company successful.
Ricardo Semler (CEO of one of South America’s fastest growing companies)
has an unusual strategy for checking management norms. If an executive is
unable to provide convincing reasons for a decision when asked the question
‘Why?’ three times, then the decision is shelved.
Tools and Opportunities for Growth – Pour resources (time, money, attention)
into encouraging your people to raise their game, understand themselves,
explore other perspectives, find new ways to deliver results. That’s why we
created Evolver Talent – to open our research and experience to organisations,
and help them to build innovation into the bedrock of their operations.
When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re
nuts.
(Larry Ellison, CEO – Oracle Corporation)
Work With Resistance – It’s nothing to do with lack of commitment, loyalty
or vision. Resistance is natural, a human trait we all share to some degree, a
discomfort with anything that upsets our personal status quo. By definition,
innovation upsets the status quo! So accept resistance, expect it and become
curious about it. Being curious about resistance will harvest diamonds in the dust.
With curiosity you will find out what people believe is the cost of change. You
will discover obstacles you need to navigate in order to deliver the changes you’ve
envisioned. And you will have everything you need to know to win support and
take people with you on your journey into the future. Innovation works best in
businesses where it’s woven into the fabric of the leadership psyche, where the
business is clear and confident about its place in the world, where there is clarity
about current business priorities, and where people are encouraged to explore
the boundaries, question norms, and develop their own talent portfolio.
The Simple Route
Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.
• Build a Culture – that encourages and supports innovation
• Create Tools and Opportunities – for people across the business to grow their
talent, demonstrate their intellectual agility, emotional flexibility, insight and
perspective
• Accept Resistance – it’s normal!
(Michael Porter, Harvard Professor of Strategy)
85
Exercise
Different Maps, Same Territory – by Adrian Reynolds
Adrian is the other half of Evolver Talent. Adrian combines award-winning
copywriting with a specialism in micro-scale consultancy, working with
perception and creativity with individuals.
We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them.
(Albert Einstein)
Knowing that we’ve got habitual patterns of thought, and that these maintain
the problems we perceive, is one thing. Doing something about it is another. This
exercise is designed to help shift what goes on in the way you think, so that you
can access different modes of cognition. It’s an exercise for doing, not just for
reading.
Pair up with someone – take it in turns to describe what you see, hear and feel as
you walk around for 5-10 minutes. Restrict your comments to sensory experience
– notice if and when you shift from direct sensory reference to conclusions drawn
from it.
Compare what you noticed – what patterns did you experience? For instance,
did you experience similarity (e.g. ‘there are three chairs against a wall’),
difference (‘there are three chairs pointing away from each other’), size, colour,
texture, sound, light and shade, movement…?
Draw up a list – what patterns you both experienced, and which were unique
to you.
Try on the filters – consider how someone else experienced things differently
to you. For instance, find out what it’s like to be a person who notices ‘pairs of
things’ if you would typically notice ‘something on its own’. If your typical pattern
is to comment to yourself about what other people might be like, try out what
happens if you put your attention on the physical environment.
What does it feel like? – what does it feel like to be experiencing things in this
way? When you experience life like this, what do you now notice when you think
about something that you tend to represent as a problem?
The last phase – trying on someone else’s perceptual filters when you consider
a problem of your own – that can prove revelatory. Even a small shift in the data
coming in through your senses as you arrange it in different patterns can have big
implications for the way you think and feel. And the greater the flexibility you
have in that respect, the more creative you will become.
Try to be Rational
Beyond the specifics of management, there are broader issues concerning
the way organizations are set up if the flow of ideas is to be stimulated and
sustained. In the sections to come we will explore some alternative ideas
about organizational structures that may offer alternatives to traditional, and
sometimes simply unquestioned, hierarchical organizational forms.
But first, try to be rational.
The famous sociologist Max Weber makes a distinction between different ways
of being ‘rational’ with(in) organizations. On the one hand he talks about formal
rationality. On the other hand, he talks about substantive rationality.
Formal rationality is all about universal means, about trying to devise such
universal means to meet all ends. And this kind of thinking is found in most
traditional public and private sector organizations. Setting up an organizational
system that is applied universally to whatever it is the organization is trying
to do is often the reason why they are very far from innovative. They tend to
become incapable of referring to anything other than themselves and their
already established systems.
Warning
Personnel Office – Yes sir, we need you to fill them in so that we can have our
records up to date before you start work.
Newly appointed member of staff – But I have to start some work tomorrow
and get something ready for the Copenhagen thing. People are expecting it. And I
can’t get all the information to you by then, I don’t have enough time.
Personnel Office – We need the information from you so that we can keep our
records up to date, so that you can start work.
Newly appointed member of staff (getting a little irritated) – Yes, I know. You
have told me that. But filling in all these forms you keep sending me is getting
to be like having a part-time job. And I already have a job. The one you just
appointed me to and expect me to start tomorrow.
Personnel Office – I’m sorry sir, but our systems need to be up-dated, so we need
you to fill in the forms to keep our records up to date.
Newly appointed member of staff (getting a little bit more irritated) – Yes, I
know you need to keep your records up to date. I am not complaining about that.
I am complaining about the fact that it now seems to be my responsibility to keep
your records up to date. It seems to me that keeping the records up to date has
become more important than actually doing the job, which by the way I need to
start tomorrow because other people are expecting it.
Don’t be Such a Tautology
A tautology can be defined as follows:
In colloquial terms a logical tautology can be defined as a series of statements
that comprise an argument, whereby the statements are constructed in such a
way that the truth of the proposition is guaranteed. Consequently the statement
conveys no useful information regardless of its length or complexity. Thus, for a
simple example, the statement ‘If you can’t find something (that you lost), you
are not looking in the right place’ is tautological. It is true, but conveys no useful
information… Any argument containing a tautological statement is thus flawed
logically and must be considered erroneous.
For instance…
A Short Play
Personnel Office – Well, you see sir, the way the system works means that we
need to get this information from you, which we then need to pass on to payroll
and the pensions department before you start work. So we need to keep all this
information on file.
Newly appointed member of staff (now a little angry) – And now you are
talking about the system as if it is part of the explanation, when actually it is the
original problem. You are talking about the system as if it has been handed down
by God or something, and cannot be made just a little bit flexible. You are talking
about the system as if it is a ready-made and universal justification of itself. Your
logic is completely circular. Don’t you realise how tautological you are being?
You’re driving me mad!
Personnel Office – I am sorry sir, but we need…
Newly appointed member of staff – I’ll just fill in the forms.
Just Fill in the Forms
Newly appointed member of staff – Hello, I am ringing about all the forms you
keep sending me to fill in. There seems to be an awful lot of them. Apparently I
cannot start the work until you have them all.
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(The newly appointed member of staff trudges down the corridor with a slightly
dazed look on his face. The Copenhagen thing, which up until then had had an air
of excitement to it, now seemed like a scary thing which he will have to write on
the plane going over there. He just hopes he can do it OK. He has started to be a
87
Closed and Open Innovation Paradigms
little suspicious of some of the things he has been told by his new manager. Then
he starts to think about his holidays, but it is only February.)
In his book Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough makes a distinction between the
‘closed innovation paradigm’ and the ‘open innovation paradigm’ (paradigms can
be good and bad).
The closed innovation paradigm is a way of thinking about business and
innovation that is fundamentally based upon competition and therefore
probably characterizes the norm in our society. Innovation is all supposed to
come from within the firmly closed boundaries of the company. It is supposed to
come from ‘vertical integration’ – the chain of vertical communication from the
top, through the various departments of the firm, down through R&D and out
through commercialization, marketing and distribution.
The closed innovation paradigm is characterized by the following corporate
assumptions (or misapprehensions):
So, the system stays very neat and tidy and the forms get filled in, but:
• The Copenhagen thing is not as good as it could have been – not great for
creativity or innovation.
• Suspicion as to the real values and interests of the company start, and become,
the seeds of ritualism and a ‘doing just enough to get by’ attitude – not great
for commitment.
• The new member of staff is pissed-off and has been irritated by a colleague
even before his first day at work. The personnel office sees the new member of
staff as a troublemaker – not great for team morale.
Sometimes the formally rational system is part of the problem and not part
of the solution, and in the ever-changing creative business environment where
organizations often rely on being flexible and quick to respond, it is often the
enemy of innovation.
The problem with formal rationality is that all too often it ends in a situation
whereby the means (the organizational system and procedures) become
ends in themselves, and as such are slavishly followed to the detriment of
everything else.
In contrast to formal rationality, substantive rationality is a way of thinking
that is much more focussed upon the ultimate goals of the organization.
Remember what Krishnamurti said? Adherence to a universal ‘one best way’
is not a good place to be in if you want creativity and innovation. Substantive
rationality is a way of thinking about organization that lets the ultimate goals
or ends determine the means (particular system or process) that you use to get
there. Because of this it tends to be much happier with using different, mixed
and sometimes temporary organizational set-ups to do specific things at specific
times. In a very similar way to the idea of commensurability within research
methods, substantive rationality is about choosing the particular organisational
tools for a particular job, and not about the obsession with the universal ‘one
best way’ idea characteristic of formal rationality.
A common saying, which has actually caused an awful lot of trouble over
the years is the ends justify the means. In the case of substantive rationality, it is
better to view things from the other direction, and say the means animate the
ends. If innovation is about the flow of ideas, organizing things in such a way
as to encourage this flow and movement is going to be a key business skill for
managing innovation. Substantive rationality is useful because it puts the horse
back in front of the cart, which is always good for getting things moving.
For example…
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•
•
•
•
•
•
The smartest people in our field already work for us.
To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it and ship it ourselves.
If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market first.
The company that gets an innovation to market first will win.
If you create the most and best ideas in the industry, you will win.
We should control our Intellectual Property, so that our competitors don’t profit
from them.
them. Creative rewards, interest, meanings and values are often more important,
and an open innovation paradigm lends itself to an organisational culture that is
better able to allow this, because…
• If the organizational culture parallels the closed-ness of the management
and organizational processes, there will be less breathing space for research.
Creativity, innovation and the flow of ideas will then be a flow out of the
company as people seek creative and innovative spaces elsewhere.
These points have potential relevance for organizing creativity and innovation
in any industry. But the creative industries are based to a greater degree upon
the collaboration, flexibility and innovation that brings economies of speed
rather than economies of scale. The creative industries also generally have lower
barriers to entry so people can ‘go it alone’ quite easily at relatively low costs.
Many people in the creative industries resist business growth purely in terms of
numbers of employees because they intuitively feel this is not the kind of place
they want to work. The development of spin-off companies within the creative
industries is much more of the norm, and therefore creative industry companies
tend to be small and occupy creative networks rather than coalesce into big
organizations. Given all this, the potential problems associated with trying to
apply a closed innovation paradigm can be that much more acute for pursuing
innovation within a creative business.
Warning
The Hot-Hand Fallacy
We all like to think we are really, really good at what we do. Especially when
we are enjoying some success and things are going well for a change. We like
to think it is down to us being ‘good’ – creative, intelligent, skilful.
Obviously these things will be a factor, but it might also be that luck and
chance are equally important. We are never as good, nor as bad as we think
we are. Statistically, if you took all the thousands of people you have known
since you started school, there will be at least one who has enjoyed great
success due pretty much to luck, and someone else who has had no success
whatsoever, even though they are really talented and hardworking.
Academics call the mistaken impression that a random streak (of success) is due
to extraordinary performance the hot-hand fallacy… In all aspects of our lives we
encounter streaks and other peculiar patterns of success and failure. Sometimes
success predominates, sometimes failure. Either way it is important in our lives
to take the long view and understand that streaks and other patterns that don’t
appear random can indeed happen by pure chance.
(from The Drunkards Walk, by L. Mlodinow)
The open innovation paradigm is characterized by the following assumptions:
In contrast to this, the open innovation paradigm sees this approach as
‘knowledge hoarding’, as unnecessarily tight and closed, as overly competitive
and therefore a mind set that misses innovative opportunities that can come
from collaboration. In a very strong parallel to the downside of formal rationality
in general, if the established company system and culture is too closed it can
become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
This can be for a variety of reasons:
• If a system is overly closed it encourages an inward-looking focus upon R&D that
can miss the innovations that have already happened out there. This encourages
a focus upon new invention when an innovation (solution looking for a problem)
already exists. As we have mentioned elsewhere, this can be unnecessarily slow
and expensive.
• Because communications resulting from the web are now much easier and
quicker, other firms will probably be thinking about being more open, so an
insistence of closed-ness can easily become the reason you are becoming less
competitive, because of your focus on being too competitive.
• Workers have more mobility and no longer believe in, nor want, a job for life.
Within this is an increased willingness of people ‘to go it alone’ and develop
there own spin-off companies based upon innovations that could have stayed
within your firm if it had been less tightly controlling because of its closed-ness.
People are motivated to work for a variety of reasons, and money is only one of
• Not all the smart people work for us. We need to work with smart people from
outside our company as well as inside.
• Whilst internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of the potential market
value, external R&D can create significant additions to that value.
• We don’t have to originate the research in order to profit from it.
• Building better, more collaborative business models is better than getting to
market first.
• If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will ‘win’, maybe
because everyone has ‘won’.
• We should profit from others’ use of our Intellectual Property, and we should buy
others’ Intellectual Property whenever it advances our own business models.
The open innovation paradigm sees working with others outside of the tightly
defined boundaries of the firm, and being less hung-up about the details of
day-to-day competition as a useful component to developing better and more
innovative businesses.
Epistemological nervousness and creative humility can be a useful component
of your research and creativity. And anyway, it will probably help in being more
ethical and graceful. And also anyway, remembering that you are not as ‘good’
as you think helps to remind you when you have a hang-over that you are not
as ‘bad’ either.
It has taken big-up management theories of creativity and innovation until
2006 to fully recognize this alternative, collaborative, cross-boundary way
of working towards mutually beneficial innovation. All this time, creative
networks have tended to just live and work like this without any management
guru telling us what a good idea it was! If you have lived and worked within a
creative network over the past ten years, you might ask: what is so new about
this open innovation paradigm? And you would have a point. But at least the
open innovation paradigm blows the gaff that the traditional macho-man-insuit-paradigm of innovation for business is not all that the hype claims it to be.
Maybe Alan Sugar and his Dragon’s Den friends will catch up with us one day.
89
Case Study
An Open Innovation Fieldtrip: Working With The Do Boys
…the Do Boys have included adventure ‘capitalist’ Rick Ridgeway, now vicepresident of marketing and environment at Patagonia, and NBC anchorman
Tom Brokaw. In an interview for Life Magazine, Tom told about his first lesson in
climbing on ice… (My toughest climb was) probably when my friends, including
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and I did Kautz Glacier on Mount Rainier. I
had never really done ice climbing before, and they gave me a 30-second lesson
in crampons and ice-axe use. At one point, we were going across a very steep
patch of black ice, and if you slipped, you would’ve gone about 1,000 feet… It’s
been helpful to me to be (Yvon’s) friend…. He makes me think about things in a
new way’.
This looks something like open innovation because:
• It is not easy to tell where the formal organisation starts and ends, what is
internal or external R&D or who is at work or at play etc.
• It is about the climbing first, then the market for climbing gear, then the
business itself – in that order.
• There is a more organic relationship between the creators and the product,
because the product is more of an expression of what the creators really are,
rather than being what they do for a job.
• The relationships between ‘management’ and ‘workers’ is very different from
the norm – there is no separation of conception from execution.
There is a different value system and a substantive rationality at work.
(from Let My People Go Surfing, by Y. Chouinard)
More Open Openness
Patagonia has been grown organically by people who love the sports that they
supply to. They are good at what they do because they use the products they
are selling. Their research and innovation plan involves testing out product
with the Do Boys, the extreme guys who are the leaders of the climbing,
surfing, and snowboarding scene.
The problems with the open innovation paradigm as it described by Chesbrough
are associated with two key factors:
• Its logic is still very much located within the confines of the traditional firm,
and within the economics of success through competition. But creativity and
innovation often lays within a network of people who have a much broader
list of motivations that ‘winning’. As a result, the open innovation paradigm
described by Chesbrough and others is not actually all that open in comparison.
• It tends to hold onto the idea that everything can still be rationally planned and
managed. It therefore does not allow for the random, unexpected, spontaneous
and emergent.
Recognizing a drunkard’s walk can help open out your thinking about
open innovation.
Question 2 – in the whole of the English language, are there more six letter
words that have ‘n’ as the fifth letter, or more six letter words ending in ‘…ing’?
The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow shows how randomness plays a much
more significant role in our lives than we like to think. Almost everything in our
lives depends to some extent upon those unconscious gambles, unexpected
turns and chance encounters that make up our lives. But this can be good news
when it comes to creativity and innovation, if we know how to take advantage
of it.
The concept of the Availability Bias suggests that because we can more
immediately recall words ending in ‘…ing’, we tend to choose that option.
However, a moments thought shows that all words ending in ‘…ing’ are also
words that have ‘n’ as their fifth letter. And then there are a few of the other
kind. So the ‘fifth letter as n’ category has to be bigger.
These little games show the value of keeping your options open. They show
the value of researching more ways that you can ‘roll the number’ you want
and the need to avoid the Availability Bias of assuming the ‘common sense’ of
keeping to the routine just because it is familiar.
Economists talk about the potential benefits of diversification. By this they mean
the benefits of being involved in lots of different markets. This way, if their work
in one market dries up, they can look to another one. Diversification is a fancy
way of pointing out the benefits of ‘hedging your bets’, ‘keeping your options
open’ and ‘not putting all your eggs in one basket’. This makes sense if your are
a big firm with the capacity for doing lots of different things at the same time,
but what if you are a small firm looking to get something new going through
research and innovation?
Game
What Are the Odds?
Question 1 – is it easier to roll a 9 or a 10 with three dice?
Leonard Mlodinow tells the tale of The Grand Duke of Tuscany and Galileo. In
1610, The Grand Duke asked Galileo why, when playing a game that involved
rolling three dice, the number 10 came up more often than the number 9. The
‘common sense’ view would be that with three dice the odds of a 9 or a 10
would be the same. But Galileo worked out that there are 27 ways in which
you can roll 10 with three dice, but only 25 ways you can roll 9.
Regression Towards The Mean is an idea that statisticians use to discuss how all
trends will tend to move towards the average over a period of time. Christiano
Ronaldo might think he is totally brilliant, but statistics show that success over
a longer period is more evenly distributed. You cannot win all the time! Over
his career, he will have really good seasons, really bad ones, and some that are
OK. The odds of him ‘rolling a 10’ every season over a long period are similar to
everyone else playing at his level.
So Regression Towards The Mean shows that it is useful to increase the
number of routes you can take, a diversification of creative entry points if you
want to be successful over a long period. The more variety of ways you can
‘roll 10’ the better, because it is inevitable that some will work sometimes and
others will work other times. The more you have, the more you can avoid the
Regression Towards The Mean at any particular time.
90
Structuring the relationship between creativity, innovation and openness
and grasping the usefulness of the diversification of creative entry points
entails listening to others all the time. This entails being good at organising
collaboration if it is to culminate in doing something and become more than just
‘pub talk’.
So…
Get Organised: How T-Shaped Do You
Need To Be?
Orthodox business organizations tend to be large, or at least work towards
becoming large. This tends to mean they quickly develop a very clear and
defined notion that they are an Organization with a capital O. These kinds of
organizations tend to have very definite structures, hard and fast boundaries
between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and lots of set rules about the relationships
between employees and management. The creative industries on the other hand
tend to be very small micro-industries (less then 5 people). This has three quite
profound implications,
• Creative practitioners more often tend to come together within networks rather
than Organizations. These creative spaces tend to be more informal, have less
rigid structures and boundaries, no hierarchies to speak off and definitely no
management.
• Because such creative networks are self-organized, getting the flow of ideas for
innovation going well tends to happen naturally, at least if the network is vibrant
and healthy. However, if there is only one of you, there just aren’t that many
ideas to flow around inside your company. So collaborations and co-operation
with people outside the formal boundaries of the company becomes more
important as a source of research and innovation.
• Organising this necessary collaboration within non-hierarchical and non91
managed creative networks becomes an important issue, but it is not something
that can always be done well by referring to orthodox business management
and organizational ideas.
Having lots of interesting conversations, making initial plans on the basis of
excitement and inspiration, but then seeing the project fizzle out because
nobody gets things organized and there is no ‘structure’ or ‘routine’ is a very
common failing of informal creative networks. They can be great for the
origination and initial flow of new ideas, but absolutely frustrating for getting
things done in a regular and sustained way. So, without going back into formal
rationality and the problems that brings for creative innovation, some degree
of organization is needed if the ideas are to flow into actual innovative work
through these creative collaborations.
One way of getting a hold on different organizational structures for creative
collaboration and the flow of ideas is the idea of T-Shaped Teams articulated
by the David Garcia and the (Un)Common Ground people. A T-Shaped team is
something with broad knowledge at one level. Its people can see how different
things can fit together from different angles, from different creative disciplines.
They understand several languages (creativity, business, technology, money,
public sector priorities, legal stuff).
So they have breadth across.
But they also have their own creative specialisms that go deep down.
A broad line going across the top, a deep line going down, hence their
T shape-ness.
Quotation
Geke van Dijk has written:
T-shaped people (or teams) can be characterised by having their own in-depth
expertise in a specific discipline and also a broad and general understanding of
various other disciplines.
(from (Un)Common Ground, by D. Garcia et. al.)
So being T-Shaped, as a person, as a team or as a business can be useful for
generating a flow of idea for innovation, depending upon what you are doing
right now, or what you want to do in the future. Below are six organizational
shapes for developing spaces for creativity that show varying degrees of
T-Shaped-ness. These six shapes need to be seen as points on a spectrum of
T-Shaped-ness. They are ideas for alternative organizational structures
92
that are often much more relevant for the creative industries than orthodox
Organizations with a Capital O thing.
Also, back to commensurability again, you don’t need to choose one of the
six organizational shapes below and stick to it. The six shapes should be seen as
a reference library of organizational structures to which you can refer at various
times depending upon what you are doing, rather than a list from which one
should be chosen. As we will see below, working with particularly experimental
and open-ended organizational structures will be great for a while, but after
that initial experimentation you might need to be less T-Shaped and more
hierarchical so as to get more ‘real’, practical and effective.
This organization of creative space needs to be less hierarchical than Pragmatism,
with less separation of conception from execution. It organises creativity through
a focus upon inter-disciplinary creative processes as much as upon creative
outcomes. Creative Experiments tend to be less time-limited and more focussed
upon on-going two-way innovation dialogues.
The different organizational shapes within the spectrum of T-Shaped-ness
are as follows:
Inclusive Design: Innovation between Creators and Users – this is about
organizing innovation through forging new relationships between creators and
end users. For instance, it can be about organizing openly democratic creative
relationships such that innovation emerges between:
Pragmatism: Focused Collaborations Directed Towards Concrete Outcomes
– the organizational structure with the lowest degree of T-Shaped-ness. Useful
for organizing collaborations geared towards already clear and specific aims with
a limited degree of open-ended-ness. Pragmatic structures organized in a way
that echoes more traditional organizations of work, characterised by:
• A division of labour and clearly defined areas of individual responsibility
• A team adherence to an over-arching plan and the acceptance of some
separation of conception from execution
• Clearly definable aims, objectives and ways of evaluating success
• A relatively high degree of vertical organizational communication from the top
down to the bottom.
Such organizational structures within specific creative projects are often
time-limited and their T-Shaped-ness lies in the variety of specific skills that
individuals bring to the project to perform specific tasks. These organizational
structures are pragmatic because they are more about people coming into an
already organized creative structure and pursuing innovation by getting on with
it, rather than being asked to engage in lots of talking about what it is all about.
The assumption is that this has already been done.
Collaborative Experiments – to structure this kind of creative space you need
to focus upon organizing inter-disciplinary or inter-business collaboration. This
type of collaboration needs space for:
• more horizontal collaborations rather than relying upon already established
pragmatic plans and hierarchies
• members to be drawn in from different creative and/or scientific disciplines to
encourage experimentation and innovative dialogue
• a plan or structure that can still stay focussed upon a relatively specific creative
outcome to underpin the open and experimental spirit.
However, there still needs to be a clear demarcation between areas of expertise
and responsibilities within a fairly high division of labour. So although Creative
Experiments are more T-Shaped than Pragmatism there is still a relatively low
degree of T-Shape-ness overall.
• members of the public and architects re-designing the area
• product designers and potential consumers within ‘design surgeries’
• performing artists and members of a participating audience.
This organizational structure encompasses a high degree of T-Shaped-ness
because it is a very open system. Creative innovation can come from the multifaceted social, political, economic and cultural facets the end users bring with
them to the creative encounter. And these will probably be way beyond the
specific creative act itself. Quite often it means resistance, the need for mutual
listening rather than talking and diplomatic respect. But that is why they can be
good. They are highly T-Shaped organizational structures because they open up
the creative process to such a wide community of voices.
Lab Culture – this organizational structure for creative innovation is a very free
and open structure designed to bring people together to ‘jump start’ unforeseen
innovative connections. Lab Culture is very T-Shaped because it encompasses
lots of deep expertise which people bring together around broad themes of
collaboration. It can be a good way of organizing a group of people to foster the
emergent behaviour discussed above, in that it:
• is radically open to new and innovation dialogues forming out of the creative
thinking of people with very different backgrounds
• encourages randomness and the usefulness of recognising ignorance for spotting
innovation opportunities
• offers a high level of multi- or cross-disciplinarity, the ‘thinking outside the
box’ thing. This is different from the more straight forward inter-disciplinarity,
whereby experts share their ideas but still from a position of ‘thinking inside their
box’ which tends to characterise Pragmatism and Creative Experiments.
Rather than being focussed upon pre-established and specific creative aims, Lab
Culture tends to be organized for experimentation rather than delivery. It is the
journey rather then the arrival. Back the Krishnamurti.
The organizational structure consequently has:
• a very ‘flat’ structure with little or no hierarchy up and down
• little in the way of a ‘master-plan’ other than the encouragement of innovation
as a basic premise
• little or no separation of conception from execution or the management of
creative direction
• no defined areas of expertise or responsibility so that the creativity can move
around and people can assume roles and responsibilities when they feel they
have ‘got that far’.
Once Lab Culture has done its work, you will probably need to go back towards
the Pragmatism end of the spectrum to get things done.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 13 – A New Cultural Politics
of Innovation
Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements
in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their
own new products and services. These innovating users – both individuals and
firms – often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation
communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric
von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centred innovation.
He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and
services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations
freely for the use of all… Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should
redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek
out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses that have learned
to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new
products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel
proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits,
should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized
user-centred innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for.
(You can download this book under a Creative Commons license at: http://
books.google.co.uk/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&dq=Eric+von+Hippel&source=g
bs_summary_s&cad=0)
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Partnerships and Placements – this organizational structure for creative
innovation is about encouraging and managing the placement of creative
practitioners within new business organizations or institutions as a kind of
knowledge transfer or exchange space. This can work in Pragmatic, Creative
Experimental or Lab Culture ways.
This is perhaps more relevant for formal Organizations with formal employees
than for the temporary creative spaces that emerge out of informal creative
networks. For instance, it can involve letting someone from your creative team
or business work with another creative team or business for a while. New
partnerships, innovative ideas, killer applications and business processes might
flow in both directions as a result.
From e2e to P-to - P: Open Source and the Flow
of Ideas for Creative Innovation
Cultural Brokers Facilitating Creative Encounters – this is about creating an
organized structure to encourage emergent behaviour as a driver behind creative
innovation. Emergent creativity and creative networks in general can be very
spontaneous and haphazard. This is what usually gives them their creativity
and innovative energy. But this does also mean they can suffer from a lack
of sustained organization. Cultural brokers facilitate creative encounters by
becoming ambassadors for emergence and the diplomats of creative networking.
Cultural brokers tend to run creative dating agencies and organize creativity
spaces to connect and ‘translate’.
They are people who ‘…drive and facilitate creative encounters connecting all
domains and disciplines’ as an ‘organizational structure’ for innovation.
One of his key ideas is the Innovation Commons.
If innovation comes from the flow of ideas within and across organizations, and
if creative businesses are often individually small organizations that work within
broader creative network of various organizational shapes, then getting the flow
of ideas across networks could be key to creativity and innovation.
This requires a network of networks.
Lawrance Laing is one of the main men when it comes to discussing the
impact of the Web and the impact it has had upon these kinds of structures and
processes of creative innovation.
He discusses how new digital networks have created new structures for
collaborative work. In this sense, the structures are the innovations as much
as the specific creative acts are. For Laing, these new structures are intimately
connected to a whole new creative space that has only just begun to enable
people to co-create in a non-hierarchical and non-proprietary way across the
planet. This is why they are akin to The Commons, in the same way common
land used to be an open, non-hierarchical space before they took it away from
us with the Enclosure Acts. The corporate use of copyright to Hoover up large
chunks of what is common culture might be another version of this, a Cultural
Enclosures Movement. This is why the copyleft and Open Source movements
are so potentially interesting. But that gets us into more of the politics of
knowledge, this time connected to common access and cultural democracy,
which is still a debate for another time!
In terms of organizational structure, the Web helps to create an Innovation
Commons because it can only ever be non-managed. The normal organizational
space is controlled from the centre, which tends to be where they keep all
the power, money and information. In contrast, the Web enables people to
co-create their own creative workspace away from the centre, because all the
ideas and creativity on the Web is kept at the ends of the wires. The structure of
co-creation on the Web is end-to-end, that is e2e. No-one is in control and the
centre is relatively simple, containing not much more than the pipe that allows
connectivity. This e2e architecture has the fundamental impact of increasing the
freedoms that the people who use whichever network have over it and the way
it can be used.
So, Laing, in a similar way to Von Hippel sees e2e as encouraging innovation
because it encourages plasticity, a very, very open openness that allows the
system and what it produces to emerge through the very processes of doing the
production. e2e is dialectical, self-organizing and auto-poetic (see Fish, Horses
and Other Animals).
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No. 14 – The Open Source Tradition
We can see how the end-to-end principle renders the Internet an innovation
commons, where innovations can develop and deploy new applications or
content without the permission of anyone else. Because of e2e, no one need
register an application with ‘the Internet’ before it will run; no permission to use
the bandwidth is required. Instead, e2e means the network is designed to assure
that the network cannot decide which innovations will run… Because of e2e,
innovators know that they need not get the permission of anyone – neither AT&T
nor the Internet itself – before they build a new application for the Internet. If an
innovator has what he or she believes is a great idea for an application, he or she
can build it without authorization from the network itself and with the assurance
that the network can’t discriminate against it.
(from Commons on the Wires, by L. Liang)
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And e2e structures enable innovative creative processes to happen though direct
Peer-to-Peer (P-to-P) working.
In lots of contemporary ways P-to-P is proving to be a very successful form
of ‘industrial relations’ for increasing the flow of ideas and producing highly
innovative products. For brevities sake we will talk about P-to-P in generic terms,
we recognise there are both similarities and differences from the Open Software
Movement, but feel they are similar enough to discuss together in this short
section.
So, in the light of the preceding discussion of degrees of T-Shaped-ness,
perhaps the most innovative aspect of e2e and P-to-P is the fact that it appears
to have very little organizational structure at all. In that sense it is an ‘antiorganization organization’, because it:
• Enables a community of creative people to come together to be each others
R&D department, without boundaries, fear of failures and hard and fast divisions
of labour, so increasing the flow of ideas
• Enables a self-selection of work, so increasing the sense of commitment and
meaning of those tasks, and increasing the flow of quality ideas
• Is usually non-proprietary in its processes, in that it emerges out of voluntary
and non-financial working relationships
• Is often non-proprietary in its outcomes, in that it leads to copylefted creative
output.
Within this chapter on organizing and managing innovation and associated
creative business skills, it might ultimately be a bit out of place to be discussing
e2e, P-to-P and Open Source ways of working because no-one ‘organizes’ or
‘manages’ them. The words ‘organize’ and ‘manage’ are always difficult words
because they imply that someone is in charge and making decisions. In contrast
to this, these new structures and ‘industrial relations’ happen because they
happen, because the people who take part in them want their bit of them to
happen.
We have now gone through what we think are some of the interesting and
useful ideas for developing, establishing and sustaining research and innovation
for your creativity. Let’s now pin these issues down more firmly by listening to
what some established experts in their various fields say about their approach to
research and innovation, and how they make a good dish out of them.
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Proverbs
Chapter 7 – Making a Good Dish
of It: Listening to the Experts Talk
about Research and Innovation
in Practice
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The oven has to get hot before you can bake any bread, because
you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
It is supposed to be difficult and complicated. That is why it is
interesting and useful.
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Having started this book with a quotation from Mozart, and the idea that
creativity and innovation involves thinking about the way you do thinking, using
different methods, getting ideas to flow and dealing with the peculiarities of
your various professional instruments, we now come to the chapter that relates
to his final point. Following Mozart, this chapter explores how the various factors
we have discussed so far come together – how creative innovation is about
making something happen as a result of initial inspiration; about embracing its
unfinished nature and looking for ways to methodize it, define it and consolidate
it and the need to be constantly seeking how the subject enlarges itself. By
contrasting upon interviews with experts in their field, this chapter explores how
all these various aspects of creativity and innovation can be brought together to
make a good dish.
and context. John constantly reviews ‘the tacit agreements of place’ and
this has coalesced into a view of the pathology of many institutions.
These ‘views’ are examples of a broader process of review that is the
initial impetus for installation works in specific places which is always
underpinned by rigorous conceptual thinking.
Quotation
The Authors (A) – John, what does the term research mean to you in
your practice?
Reviews and critiques of his work have been included in, amongst others,
Sculpture in 20th – Century Britain (Henry Moore Institute), Installation
art in the new millennium: The empire of the senses (Thames and Hudson)
and leavingtracks: artranspennine98 (artranspennine98). Monographs on
his work and projects include The Sacred and The Mundane, Currency and
Belief, Stamping Uncertainty, Westonbirt Wishes, Chatham Vines, An Essential
Disorientation and the Preston Market Mystery Project. In 2005 a double volume
monograph of his research essays from 1994 to 2005 was also published.
Theories of Creativity: No. 15 – The Reflective Practitioner
Reflective practice… attempts to unite research and practice, thought and action
into a framework for inquiry which involves practice, and which acknowledges
the particular and special framework of the practitioner. It is a framework that
encourages reflection in different ways. Retrospective reflection – ‘Reflectionon-action’ – is a critical research skill and part of the generic research process
of review, evaluation and analysis. ‘Reflection-in-action’ is a particular activity
of professional practitioners and involves thinking about what we are doing and
reshaping action while we are doing it. In this sense it is improvisational and relies
on feeling, response, and adjustment.
(from Visualizing Research. by C. Gray and J. Malins)
The Long and Short of It
The interviews that appear below are edited versions of longer interviews. A
lack of space means that we were not able to print these interviews in full, so
we have tried to give you a representative flavour of what was said. You can get
the longer version of all the interviews from Broadsheet, Broadway’s on-line
magazine, at www.thebroadsheet.org
An Essential Disorientation –
An Interview with John Newling
John Newling is Professor of Installation Sculpture at Nottingham
Trent University. His national and international practice is marked by
his enduring interest in notions of ‘place’, both in terms of cartography
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John Newling (JN) – My research is embedded in my practice… (it) begins to
connect my initial thoughts to other disciplines. In this manner my research
and practice starts to look across disciplines. In actuality, rather than trying to
be an expert in biology or human physiology or whatever, part of what I do is
put a team together for each project. Whilst I lead the project conceptually,
I put a team together which has experts in each area… One example would
be Westonbirt Wishes. This project was for the National Arboretum, where we
collected something like fourteen thousand wishes from the public on a steel
installation outdoors, that I had built. People were writing their wishes on ribbons
that eventually became a bolus on a nearby tree. A cast was made of the bolus
and the resulting bronze marked the site of the activity as a hollow skin that was
constructed through people’s wants, wishes. The listed text of all the wishes
became a useful document for social science research because it was a snap shot
of people’s desires at that point in time and place. Chatham Vines is another
project where we accidentally made a new, mutated variation of a vine. Plant
biologists are looking further into this aspect… In this manner part of my practice is
making connections across discipline, allowing experts in other disciplines to make
contributions through their knowledge and skill. So rather than thinking of research
as a separate, academic thing to my practice, residing in some oddly contiguous
space, I’ve built a practice that has always had research in it…
A – Could you tell us some of the wide variety of different skills and experts you
have to work with?
JN – I guess there are three distinct groupings of people. The first would be people
who have particular knowledge in relation to subject areas that I am working
across. These would be theologians, philosophers, natural and social science
people. They can inform and inspire a project through debate and questions. The
second group would be experts in particular areas that are move overtly connected
to my practice. These would be re-generation experts, social geographers, and
local, to the context of the project, historians. The third group would be material
experts that range from rubber stamp production, robotics, embroiderers,
structural engineers and many more as I endeavour to construct an appropriate
material knowledge for the project.
With every project all three of these groups contribute in some way...
ten to fifteen years of my work. Part of that difference is reading widely. I read
books which range from medieval theology and an overview of western theology
to contemporary philosophy and economic and political theory from the midnineteenth century. But I don’t read them thinking, ‘I’m going to make a work
about this’. It’s just great to read people that are great, and you just think ‘this is
fantastic’.
A – We have touched on the relationship between problems and solutions
elsewhere in this book. Scientific research often tends to be about puzzlesolving, with a clear problem for which scientists try to find solutions. But I also
think there can be solutions out there that are looking for a problem. Innovation
can come from finding a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ you didn’t know you had until
the solution arrives… Does that chime with your creative practice?
A – It’s beginning to suggest to me the question of paradigms within which
theorists nearly always sit, one way or another. I complain to myself sometimes
that I tend to read things through the lens of something else that I’m working
on. So I sometimes feel like I’m not really reading ideas as fully and as openly
as I could be. This tends to suggest that we all stick to the paradigms we carry
around in our own head…
JN – Completely. I’ve never made a work in the last five or so years that I wouldn’t
call a living project, where I’m never quite sure where it’s going. The kinds
of accidents that occur along the way have been, for me and the teams that
have worked on these projects, incredibly fruitful and rewarding. Some of the
rewards could be viewed as innovative contributions to material and speculative
knowledge. Risk for me is an important part of innovation. I cannot test risk
conceptually; I need to bring something into the public domain to test it and to
innovate the project’s possibilities. So yes, I often think post-project that the next
one can begin to evolve from what we discovered in the last. Things do occur that
become possible solutions to something else throughout my practice…
JN – I think there is a moment where artists are pirates that have plundered the
borders of many known subjects. For me there’s an important moment in an artists
evolution where they are confident enough or have been told they are OK enough
to allow the paradigm or the model that is obsessively within them, to expand. So
comprehending other paradigms and models that interdisciplinary research and
interaction can bring gets you to the idea that your project can expand outwards
exponentially…
A – Clearly understanding the social and historical, political, economic context is
key to your practice, so could you say a bit more about how your practice relates
to theory?
JN – Yes, I think anthropology has connections to what I do. There are two
anthropological methods I like. The first is the observer/participant method, which
I have often used. Recently the Preston Market Mystery Project was structured
on the ‘liminal’ anthropological method… I think most artists are in various ways
curious and interested in trying to know about human existence and purpose.
Existence I can understand, purpose is something none of us understand. Purpose
in relation to existence has generated many significant works and thoughts. As a
species that is predisposed to be detectives, we pursue mystery by way of survival.
We do find purpose both a challenge and a generator of inspiration…
…I think good art comes out of a continued critical reflective practice. This in
a sense is the observation side of it all. If you imagine you are in the middle of it,
you are the participant. But that participation needs to be contingent on being an
observer. The great art you might see comes from an artist who is very aware of
that centre and the borders in a kind of singularity. Such a singularity of being at
one and the same time at the edges and in the core helps the necessary distance for
generative critical evaluation.
JN – My practice is initially largely intuitive responses to the place or space that
I wish to work in and through. For that reason I would say that my work is not a
manifestation of any particular theory. I have seen and experienced art that tends
to do this. The problem becomes that once you become familiar with the theory,
you are looking at that work through the spectacles of that theory. Art is not a
recipe or an illustration of a theory. Indeed its clearest theory is perhaps that. Art
is an ‘essential disorientation’ that allows itself and us to express thoughts that
are not necessarily predicated on any particular theory… Part of art’s value is that
it can momentarily disorientate all theories without stating that theory is of no
importance…
A – So you see your practice informing theory that others come up with. But
back again the other way, and thinking about the other relationship to theory,
does reading that great theorist also lead you to your inspiration?
JN – Oh yes, reading a great set of complex thoughts that have been shaped and
cared for is always an inspiration. I think there is a distinct difference in the last
A – The way you talk about your practice could be described as a social
anthropologist, someone who is within the tribe that they are reflecting back on.
A – Another thing that comes from that is the way it can generate ideas and
getting that genuine flow of ideas within a group. I think that is one of the key
things for creativity.
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JN – I completely agree and I’ve learnt this over a number of big projects. The
best moments on these projects are when you see this happen. For example on
Chatham Vines, when the hydroponics people come back to me and say have
you thought about doing this. This is where I see the team properly engaged with
the project and making suggestions through their expertise. They are not simply
carrying out instructions as such, they never get instructions really. It would be
more like a question, ‘what we are going to try to do is make the world’s first
hydroponic vineyard’ or ‘how can we best disseminate what we are learning’ and
many more questions that are addressed through all of us...
Merge Like a Zip –
An Interview with Michael Pinchbeck.
Michael Pinchbeck is a writer, live artist and lecturer based in Nottingham. He
has a Masters in Performance and Live Art from Nottingham Trent University.
He won a 2007 Nottingham Creative Business Award for The White Album
commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse.
Authors (A) – Could you tell me what the idea of research for your creative
practice means to you? Is it about researching your own motivations, or more
about getting inside other people’s heads?
in a theatre and to pretend they are in your world. There is a fourth wall dividing
you from the audience that you want to overcome. But then going back to Brecht
and more recent experimental theatre, you can deliberately not do that and show
the theatre again. You say ‘I am a performer, these are lights and you are the
audience’. The piece I did in the church hall was very much about that. The safety
announcements we made at the start became part of the performance so we were
aware of it wearing its theatricality on its own sleeve… In some other research, I
am thinking about it again, about ideas of absence, looking at theory people like
Derrida and Foucault, and a performance writer called Peggy Fieldon who said
‘theatre is born of its own disappearance, once it’s gone that’s it, as soon as it
arrives it is already leaving’. When I took my MA, I had been working for a theatre
company in Chicago called Goat Island for around eight years; making shows
every year and never stopping to think ‘what is the practice here?’ I actually found
the work a little bit difficult to understand, so I would just go from show to show
to show. Then when I did my MA I became aware of the idea of a practice. So yes,
theory.
A – Kind of. Kurt Lewin was a famous social psychologist in the 50s, doing
therapy with guys messed up by the war. He is famous for saying, ‘there is
nothing as practical as a good theory.’ Again it’s that zip metaphor, they are the
same thing if you get it right...
A – The word ‘practice’ is an interesting term because on the one hand it can
mean what you do, but it can also mean what you do over and over again until
you get it right. So I think theory is sometimes useful as a corrective for doing
that practice over and over again. For assessing yourself and looking at different
starting points and pathways.
MP – I find that encouraging. It’s like one strip of fabric’s been made to form a
tube, like the guy who made a T-shirt Company called Four Holes, because there
are four holes in a T-shirt. It makes you think about the different dimensions of a
body and the fabric, whether that is information or knowledge.
Michael Pinchbeck (MP) – Wanting to get inside other people’s heads is a nice way
of thinking about it. I describe my work as either using self-as-source or site-assource. These are two different things really, and often Live Art work tends to work
from inside one’s self, a biography or something that has happened to you. But
then the other way of working is from a space or an object that can be a site on the
outside. For The White Album I got the idea from the record. Another project dealt
with a church hall and the events that happened there. So that became the site we
were exploring and that exploration took place in the church hall to become a site
specific performance. It’s also about how you can view spaces you wouldn’t take as
inspiration. For example, in the work for The White Album, the surface of the actual
record was really important for me, the journey of the needle around the record,
the groove, was the journey. The reason one of the characters was called Miles was
that the length around the record lasts a mile. I wanted to take the audience on
that mile long journey.
MP – I don’t necessarily know where that starting point is for research and practice.
I sometimes think about it as if it were one of those road signs in New Zealand.
When you are on a slip-road approaching a main road it says ‘Merge Like a Zip’.
So these two roads are going to merge like a zip. For me that’s what research and
practice do.
A – That describes your practice really well. But what would you say is the bigger
context of research, the relationship between your practice and ideas about
society and history or whatever? To theories that other people have developed
through researching the world?
A – Another one for motorways is stuff to do with ‘Lane Discipline’.
MP – I come from a theatre background, and the theory is often about the journey
you want the audience to go through, from knowing you are in a theatre to not
knowing you are in a theatre. You want the audience to accept that they are not
100
A – When they change the markings on a road sometimes they have other signs
that say ‘Changed Priorities Ahead’. It’s kind-of the same thing I think, theory can
signal that.
MP – I think so, and I was using the language of science for another project I’m
doing with a car. And it feels like, you know ‘blind summit’. That is such an amazing
phrase. That’s what I feel like, as if I’m at a ‘blind summit’ on a journey. What’s next,
what am I going to find?
MP – Yeah, and ‘only a fool breaks the two-second rule’. The language of driving is
really potent in the way that it informs us about our journey. We carry it with us in
other ways. I feel like research and practice ‘merge like a zip’, but that doesn’t mean
that I really know how it works, or how it’s held together. But there is this sense that
they inform each other without being a single thing. It comes back to your theory
of autopoesis.
MP – You need an awareness of context. If I was at the Playhouse doing a play
called The Ashes, which is a play about cricket and the concept of absence, I
wouldn’t go in talking about Derrida, but it would be somehow there and inform
the practice of the play.
A – That’s interesting for this book in terms of research ‘behind’ creative practice.
Then there is research ‘in and through’ practice and thirdly ‘in front of’ creative
practice. They are artificial separations because in your mind the contextual and
historical stuff, the reading about it is kind-of the same as research for actually
doing it. Which again mirrors the thing about theory and practice ‘merging like a
zip’. And also cars have mirrors.
A – Coming to the craft, one of the things I am asking people to think about
is how we can have knowledge that informs whatever it informs. One idea
that comes from this kind of epistemological debate is the idea of falsification.
Testing and trying to disprove your ideas. Do you call in the awkward squad?
MP – In terms of practice, I will always try things out before discarding them. And
also you often have to try things that you think won’t work in order to find what
will. Revising is always good. Students say all the time ‘why?’ and I say ‘why not?’
Then we will work out why. So it’s thinking around solutions, often that’s a better
way of doing it. There is a famous group in Ireland who say ‘we discovered a piece
by making it’. It’s a product of its own natural process. Again it’s that journey. I feel,
in terms of writing you often send yourself on a journey towards a blind summit
and make pit stops in unexpected places. You know you might not use that piece of
writing but it is an important bridge towards where you go next. Like when you edit
a film and there is a scene that survives numerous cuts until the very last minute
and it gets chopped, but it needed to be there to be built around…
the horrible corporate phrase of ‘thinking outside the box’. But it is actually a nice
metaphor. When writing The White Album I had to deal with thinking about what
the aftermath of the Manson Murders might be like… I was really absorbed by
the detail of it. It’s horrible. Trying to find something in words that best described
it was difficult, so what I did was focus in on the minute detail. The fact that
there were three fibres in a rope used to kill someone. That for me was a really
important dramatic detail. I had a lengthy discussion with a man at the Playhouse
who was saying, ‘where is the drama?’ And I was saying the drama is in the detail.
It’s a different drama but it’s valid. It sets off a chain of thinking in the minds of
the audience. To thinking ‘that’s awful’. So what I am saying is that comes from
research, from factual rather than fictional approaches to work.
A – So to what extent do you find yourself, maybe as a writer rather than a
performer here, researching the real people out there and getting inside their
skin, almost as a psychologist would try to?
MP – Thinking about my next play The Ashes and thinking how I might explore
working men’s clubs and pubs in Mansfield in 1930, I will go there… I went to The
Gladstone on the weekend and I was sitting there, I got a sense of that time. A
couple of old-timers came in and one of them said to the barman ‘how are you?’
to which he replied ‘I’m getting there.’ So the old guy said ‘you’re getting there?
I think I’m on my way back!’. So next, I text that to myself because that’s what I
use now instead of a note pad. You get these little snippets. Like when I went to
Liverpool for The White Album. I looked in books that weren’t any good, so I went to
the Cathedral and met this pregnant woman who was saying how tired she was. She
said ‘some days are just a waste of makeup.’ And that made it into the text. They are
these moments, you just can’t write that kind of material.
A – What you are saying reminds me of emergence and what you mentioned
earlier about autopoesis.
A – Nick Wood, another writer uses the term, ‘you have to murder your darlings.’
MP – I like the idea that you don’t know what it is leading you to. There is
something good about having a creative antenna saying ‘this is interesting and
this is somehow going to inform something’. For example, the piece I did for
Trampoline. I sat on a bench for three hours that was inspired by sitting on a bench
in Colwick which had ‘sit with me and always remember’ written on a plaque
as a dedication to someone they had lost. I thought it was the most wonderful
invitation. So I got it engraved by a man in the Victoria Centre and he told me, ‘I’ve
done this one before’. He probably did the one in Cowlick Park, but that’s inspired
something in me even though it was completely off the radar.
MP – Someone said that to me. They thought The White Album was quite acrobatic
and said; ‘you have to murder your darlings, run over them now’. For me, and it
depends what you write and how you write, but I would be able to take my darlings
out of one piece of writing and put them into another, a bit like a flower bed and
let them grow. I’m interested in ignoring the things you might ordinarily do. To use
A – The idea that things emerge out of other things rather than being the result
of some exterior plan brings us to the notion of emergent behaviour, which I
find fascinating. One of the hallmarks of emergent behaviour is recognising that
your own ignorance is useful. I think it’s a really interesting notion to have when
thinking about creative research, that you think the opposite of yourself. Which
101
is really strange, I know, but in practice it does suggest that research can be
about letting things happen to you rather than trying to make things happen.
MP – There is something about being on duty and off duty as well. These things often
reach you when you are off duty, I think that’s why artists don’t have weekends.
A – It might entail going up the motorway in reverse.
MP – It might do...
I Think Conduit is a Really Nice Word –
An Interview with Jennie Syson
Jennie Syson is an independent curator based in Nottingham. She is director of
Hinterland, a series of site-specific projects based in and around the River Trent.
Recent exhibition projects include Extreme Crafts at CAC, Vilnius in Lithuania.
Throughout 2008 she has also been working as a curatorial consultant for
Nottingham Contemporary.
Authors (A) – Jennie, your work as a curator means that you have a very broad
scope to your work. You have your personal work, you work with different groups,
and lots of other people. So could you tell us what research means within all this?
Jennie Syson (JS) – To me research is everything and it can mean everything…
The reason I decided to do Hinterland was that I had identified that many artists
practicing in Nottingham weren’t particularly research-led. As an individual, I
wanted to go away from the region and do proper Critical Study, learn about
Critical Theory. But I was very passionate about feeding it back into a local context.
Coming back to Nottingham, I realised there was something interesting happening
with people coming out of the successful BA courses at NTU, really motivated
people. They have felt driven to form studio groups, do events after they graduate,
but then they realise, ‘Shit, I haven’t made any work for myself, I haven’t read
a book for two years because I’m too busy helping other people all the time.’
That’s a curator’s job, setting up exhibitions is a gallery organiser’s job, and it’s
an institution’s job. I think in the past there have been institutions that haven’t
done that very well, but hopefully that’s being addressed now. But it was that inbetween space that I was interested in. It was really important for me to set up a
space for research for artists, and for myself as well, and to leave it as open-ended
as possible.
A – So that’s the agenda that brings the need for research with it, and that says
a lot about your work and why you are doing it. But could you say a little bit
more about how the nuts and bolts of that actually fit together? In terms of the
research for how you build things together?
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JS – In the past, the curating work I have done has been for specific exhibitions.
I did the Royal College Curating MA and that is very much based around the
thematic model pioneered by The TATE. One way of doing that is to look for
something current, the ‘why here, why now’ sort of questions.
A – So do you see the research and the curation work that comes out of it as
responding to a general cultural atmosphere and the ways you want to respond
to that? Or do you see the research as leading to something that is trying to set
a new agenda?
JS – I don’t necessarily want to set agendas. You have heard me describe Hinterland
in the context of a school geography project, where I take a geographical area and
lay down an imagined species quadrant, like you would do any scientific research
project. The idea was to set a boundary. I wanted that to be pretty loose, while
identifying an area in Nottingham that was slightly underdeveloped and without a
particular infrastructure for much of the time. It’s changing now, and that’s why it’s
interesting. The idea was to provide a very open-ended area for people to research
within, and it was absolutely up to the artist themselves to decide what that
might become. But in some instances, some projects have needed more hands-on
assistance than others. I don’t mind admitting some of the projects to date have
failed. Samuel Beckett used to say ‘Fail once. Fail again. Fail better’… I have the
freedom and liberty to do that as Hinterland is still quite small at the moment.
JS – I think conduit is a nice word actually. One thing I’ve noticed when working
with artists that live and practice here in Nottingham is that there is a lot of passion
and drive to do things, but everything is self-centred. I don’t mean that they are
selfish, but some of the experiences are kind of blinkered. I think it is good to
encourage people to look at artists who use other references points, other than
their own lives or things that are just directly relevant to their practice, I’m not
explaining this very well?
A – I think you are. It rings true with some of the main narrative elsewhere in
this book. On the one hand an artist might research the inside of their own
head and on the other hand they might be researching something about the
world. They could be working with internal, personal motivations or it could be
more like the creative business thing, about external things in the economy.
So it seems to me there is a whole spectrum of possibilities here. Maybe some
artists tend to swing to the more internal, subjective end, looking at their own
biography and therefore become very practice-centred. So perhaps there needs
to be more about getting that connected to theory, and vice versa.
JS – I think you’re right about research needing to be a broad thing, and I guess I
am more drawn to people who are slightly better read than me. Therefore being
more interesting and able to teach me something. But on the other hand there
have been some very intuitive artists in Hinterland, where perhaps the research
has been a careful consideration for the local community. And socially engaging
practice is something I very much want to continue within Hinterland, things that
are interested in local history. So I don’t mind people interacting with a Hinterland
piece, going away and not ever realising it was an art piece. That often happens…
A lot of the time I like the idea of an audience just falling upon it. The marketing is
intentionally obscure a lot of the time.
A – I’m interested in this space you work in, and still in where the agenda that
you either respond to, or add to, comes from. Does it come from aesthetic
judgements and choices? Or is it more clearly institutionally-driven, so that then
you work to that?
JS – It’s absolutely not institutionally driven. It’s really personal to me, to my
interests, to my thoughts and feelings about what’s good in terms of what artists
are able to do…
…I go to see as much other work as I can. I read a lot, that’s really important. At
the moment everything is going through an overhaul and spring-clean. It’s really
important to be able to continue with personal interests outside of it too, and all
the way through I’ve organised events that people can input into it and change the
structure if that’s been appropriate. I’m constantly interviewing other artists to get
their perspectives. Artists who work within the city, but also ones that have worked
in the public realm in other contexts. I think I have benefited from having some
really good mentors as well.
A – You mentioned earlier the MA, looking at Critical Theory and research in
the more academic sense. Could you say a bit more about how you see the
relationship between background theory or contextual stuff that other people
have said, and your practice as a curator, or you as a conduit between other
peoples work?
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Sometimes I say ‘Yeah OK… actually No’ –
An Interview with Raj Pathak.
Raj Pathak is a film director, writer and producer. Raj got his first taste
of Hollywood at the age of 20, working on Dodgeball: The Movie as a PA.
Recently, as well as writing, directing and co-producing Le Boxeur and directing
Konflooent (shown at Cannes 2008 and LA Downtown festival 2008,) he is also
busy working on a film funded by Capital One Bank and two new feature film
screenplays due to begin pre-production late 2008.
Authors (A) – Raj, what does research mean to you?
Raj Pathak (RP) – For me, research is about finding things you want to talk about…
Either in a controversial way or in a way to make people think about what their
views are, or what they think is real. Things like that.
A – Do you start with an idea that has come out of your own head and then
research into that to find a way of articulating? Or do you research the world
out there and respond to that in terms of your films? Or is it somewhere in the
middle?
RP – It’s somewhere in the middle, but a lot of the ideas I come up with for films
are very spontaneous. I could be in a cafe somewhere and I see a little picture or
something and that could spark an idea. Or I could hear a drum beat. Just recently I
went to a jazz gig and that sparked an idea. It made me want to research more into
how a jazz musician lives that lifestyle and how everything in their life reflects them
and what influences them in some ways...
A – From what you are saying, you start with an original inspiration and then
research how to bolt it all together? So it’s not that you do research behind the
original inspirational moment. That just comes. Most of your research lies ‘in and
through’ the doing bit to make it actually work?
RP – Exactly, and while I’m actually researching I try and visualise in my head as
well, and it all starts to tie together… It’s kind of scattered! There can be breaks
when I start something then suddenly stop, say ‘OK, I need to think about this’,
then do some more research or some reading or something and go back to it. Or
something can spark back to me at random moments and then I can start writing
again. There was a script I started writing at 5.30 in the morning, I was fast asleep,
woke up, lay there for about an hour, thinking about this idea, progressing it, then
just got out of bed and started writing it.
A – To what extent do you think about the history of your genre of film making,
semiotics and all that background theory stuff? What’s the relationship between
theory and practice in your work?
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RP – It probably sounds really bad of me, but I find all that really distracting. It
is very useful I know, but if I’ve come up with an idea, I want to get it out of me
as quickly as possible, otherwise I’d forget it or become disinterested in it. But
that’s not to say I don’t do my theory, theory definitely does play a huge part in
film-making and writing. You have to remember, there could be people in the
actual field of work that you’re writing about, and so you have to make sure you
get all your facts right or you just have to be really skilled at pulling off a semiunbelievable storyline!...
A – It sounds like you have found a formula that works for you. But what about
the more nitty-gritty stuff, searching for locations, finding crew etc? Is that
something you do or do you bring someone else in for that?
RP – I bring someone in. I will hire a production assistant. I’ll say ‘this is what I’m
looking for’. I’ll even draw out a little list and say please go find this location or
prop etc.
PM – A bit of both. For instance I’m working on a show I’ve got in Berlin. It’s in a tiny
little place. I’m doing a polystyrene sculpture with lights inside it, but I’ve got such
a small scale to work on, so I’ve started doing that in the studio, experimenting
with the smaller scale… But that was interesting as a tangential method. Coming to
new ideas by not actually dealing with what I should be dealing with, if that makes
sense. Through doing that process I’ve actually identified a little part of something
I can extract and take on later that will actually inform the thing that I should be
researching…
A – How do you manage your team?
A – Paul Matosic, a sculptor who we have also interviewed, described things in a
similar way to you. It’s the craft of putting something together. For him, research
lay in the craft of making the thing work and articulating the thing. It lay in the
nuts and bolts of the doing of it, rather that some big far-flung idea or heavy
duty market research? It’s very much in the making of it.
RP – Yeah, it’s very much as you go along. I totally agree with that. There is a
film I did the year before last, which was about raising awareness about guns,
drugs, violence in Nottingham. Because we had so many people behind us kindof overseeing everything, the education board, the police, Capital One, we had
influences coming in from victim support units, Channel 4, Mothers for Justice
Groups, things like that, they were actually giving us all this research information…
(but) The research they were giving us would have gotten us into the whole
shock factor thing. But I wanted to make a film that was better than that, more
sophisticated in the way it got the message across, because although the target
audience were young… I didn’t want to patronise them, so we moved through
different stages and ended up giving the film a raw-documentary-like with an
interactive feel. That’s how I have seen it.
A – When one thinks about academic research for things like gun crime, one
would want one’s research to be as complete as possible… (but) To articulate
something about the world through a film means you need to do things in a
particular way. To dramatise something you can’t be saying everything about the
whole world. So in terms of research, what you seem to be saying is it’s almost as
important to know what you are going to leave out as what you are leaving in?
RP – Yes, I agree with that. It all depends on what that is. When they adapt a book
into a film, they sometimes miss out the little bits here and there and people get
really annoyed with that, but that’s all for a cinematic purpose. So again it depends
on the doing, of what it actually is… I guess when you’re putting it into film format
it’s all about taking the all evidence, views and possibilities of repercussions into
account. But if it’s a personal project I wouldn’t particularly be worried about
repercussions as such, because it would be more of a film that I’d want to make and
that I’d want to see...
RP – If it’s working to a brief, I get the order of what they are looking for and how
they want the message put across and just work towards that. But when it comes
to working with a bigger crew, it’s much more of a team-work thing. Most of my
crews aren’t run in the traditional sense. Roles aren’t totally strict, and I try to make
it more of a family thing…
A – So in day to day operations there is room for everyone to be involved.
RP – Yeah, but if it’s an idea that I don’t think will work with the style we are going
for I’ll say ‘Yeah OK, actually no.’
Coming to New Ideas By Not Actually Dealing
With What I Should be Dealing With –
An Interview with Paul Matosic
Using a variety of reclaimed or found objects, Paul Matosic’s work takes a
critical look at our consumption-oriented society. Paul uses a variety of art
forms to express these views – installation, sculpture, film and performance
have all been used to generate new work whose central focus is on the
environment, whilst commenting on other aspects of contemporary society.
Authors (A) – Paul, as an artist and a creative practitioner what does research
mean to you?
Paul Matosic (PM) – Artists research all the time, they just don’t necessarily write
up their experiments. We don’t use those methods. The creative process is basically
about moulding your own stuff in the studio. You try something out. If it doesn’t
work you try it a different way and that springboards you onto something else. So
it’s an indirect methodology, which would not fit into the scientific paragons.
A – Already that might suggest that research can be developing ideas about
working through the processes. And then connected to that how you articulate
those ideas through materials. So is research a conscious thing for you that goes
in a straight line, or do you just respond to things as they happen?
A – So that tends to suggest that what you are calling research is like
experimenting and playing.
PM – There is that notion of the child at play and that’s quite present in a lot of my
work, but it’s a process of discovery as well. What will this material do and how can
I make this work? Can I make this piece of work in this tiny little gallery in Berlin?
Not the way I’m doing it here, but that bit might work. So it is experimenting to test
a hypothesis.
A – That makes sense in the playful method of research, how do I get from A
to B, but could you say more about where those agendas rise from in the first
place? What research do you do to get you to the ‘why’ of that, rather than the
‘how’? Where does the first idea come from in the terms of research?
PM – Well that’s assuming that I’m starting from point A, quite often you don’t
start from point A you start from Z and work backwards, so I can’t really answer
that, as I’m so far down the road with so many different things that I can’t
differentiate the different ideas. It’s all subsequent to what’s gone on before. Short
of telling you about the painting I did at eleven years old on wallpaper, where do
you start?
A – That could suggest that research in and through your work now is almost like
responding to briefs, or like a skilled craftsperson. You’re given a brief or a small
gallery to fill. So is your research about pulling together the skill and material to
pull it off in the way a skilled craftsperson would?
PM – OK, well let’s take it away from that particular project. Responding to a
specific brief is again subject to everything that has gone on before. These days
I wont pick up any old brief, it’s got to have some relevance to what I’ve already
done for me to even think its worth putting pen to paper.
A – This is a similar question put in a slightly different way. I know you have an
ecological politics theme running through your work. Is research and ‘making the
work’ a response for you and your attempt to understand yourself? Or is it about
researching the world and what people have said about it in terms of ecological
theories and the commentaries other people have made?
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PM – There is certainly that response to what is going on out there, just coming
across stuff and thinking ‘oh wait a minute, I need to look further into that aspect’,
because it refers to something else I am doing. How can I explain it? I guess if I had
a big blackboard I could draw it, I might have five or six things that are happening,
sort of like a multi-lane motorway that I drive along and weave in and out of all
these things. Maybe I take turn-offs somewhere, do something else, get lost in
some little backwater then come back onto the main highway.
A – When we think about innovation, there’s the thing about problems and
solutions. There are problems waiting for solutions, but also there are solutions
out there looking for problems, and the idea of finding killer applications for your
work.
PM – Yeah absolutely, I think my work bounces between those two quite a lot. I
like to think that what I do is actually something like that.. There may be solutions
to problems that we don’t even know exist yet and I think in the environmental,
ecological thing that’s very important. There is stuff out there where we don’t know
what’s going to happen.
A – Looking at the term discovery, clearly there is an element of discovery in
your practice, and having this two way view between problems and solutions
perhaps mean you are more of an innovator than an inventor?
PM – Yeah I was just going to say discovery is quite an elevated way of saying it. It’s
more that you become aware of something about the work. But it’s not like wow, a
new concept or anything, it does sound a bit weighty that.
Arriving at the Chicken –
An Interview with Terry Shave
Terry Shave is Professor of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. His
current practice and research stems from his interest in the way the activity
of painting can be transformed by using other processes and methods such
as new technology, photography, film and video. Rather than reinforcing a
traditional position of painting, he is interested in exposing the problems of
that tradition, to pose questions about the physical and emotional activity of
painting as well as what is painted.
Authors (A) – What does research mean to you given you have your own
established arts practice?
Terry Shave (TS) – It means knowing where I fit in the food chain, or the creative
chain. Knowing where you fit is very important and it’s an easy thing to find. It’s
about mapping a terrain. For me that’s a big thing. Mapping where the arguments
are, who else is in that territory, is in the same pool you are in, where the antithesis
of the arguments are. But at the end of the day research always, for me, has to
end up with an artefact. Because making is always my question and my set of
potential answers. And the making gives me another question. Is it possible to see
from the artefact itself a chain of events that lay behind it? I think it is, but in my
most embedded research it is actually only visible in quite a faint way. But the thing
about being a creative practitioner is you also have to be aware of your audience,
which is slightly different to the purely empirical kinds of research one finds in the
sciences.
A – One of the basic themes throughout this book has been demarcating
research starting-points. One of these is research ‘In/Through’ creative practice,
where research and innovation comes from the doing of it. But where do your
initial ideas comes from? Do they come from outside of the doing of it itself?
TS – This is the chicken and egg thing isn’t it? I don’t always know where the ideas
came from. Knowing the world around you is essentially baggage but it can also
be a very useful layer of information that I index, sift through mentally and also
physically in terms of my books and things like that.
A – The chicken and egg thing raises something that keeps coming up in all these
interviews. For want of a better phrase, when one is doing research for creative
practice there is a problem and research is about finding the solution. But I also
think there are solutions out there in search of problems.
TS – Oh yes, I do too. It is the chicken and egg thing again, but it’s also that sense
of empiricism that you are talking about, researching the world out there. You don’t
have to end it with the duality, this thing or that thing. You can go past that. It’s not
helpful to get stuck with polarities and it’s better to have a more ongoing thing.
A – You talked about understanding your place in the food chain, others’ work,
other arguments, the genre. I know this is a big loaded term but theory, could
you tell us about what you make of that term theory?
TS – Theory for me is this sense of knowledge underpinning what you do to arrive
at the chicken, and through to this chicken, you and the work are enriched. But
for me theory isn’t about coming up with those sorts of solutions that science
seeks, its about nurturing the argument, about playing the game, trying to locate
something, knowing why what you have isn’t good enough anymore and why you
want to be somewhere else.
A – It might be a problem with the word ‘theory’, maybe we should all start to
call it background investigation. It doesn’t have to be heavy duty, it could be
reading the paper every morning to find out what is going on in the world, which
is the context in which you work.
TS – It’s a bit like the word ‘idea’. I always remember when I was young, my Dad
was passionate about cowboy films on the telly. There they were on the wagon
train, surrounded by Indians and the cowboys thought they were all going to be
dead, until one of them said, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ and then you think ideas are so
big they can change the world. But at the same time, when I went to art school
someone said, ‘look, an idea can be this: instead of doing it with an H pencil do it
with a 2B’. We often think of ideas, like theories, as being great big things, they are
also tools to move around on within the practice itself.
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A – Bertrand Russell once said ‘there is no such thing as useless knowledge,’ it’s
always good to know what is going on, even if you don’t use it.
TS – I think what’s good about it that is the way it gives you somewhere to feel that
you belong. If I think of a day in the studio, it gives me somewhere to spend my
waking moments at the beginning of practice to think of where I have come from,
how I might describe it, how I might ventriloquise other people’s words to describe
it. And it gives me somewhere to feel confident in being before I go into that
moment inside the work, where I lose the sense of owning my thoughts. This can be
like disappearing into a state of making and oblivion. And when I come out of that
again there is this sense of re-drawing, re-grouping my feelings towards where I
first began. I do have a bit in the middle where I feel it’s gone, and I think this is true
not just me but other painters and sculptors involved in a physical process. So there
are those moments where you are absorbed in it, having first set up the premise,
your set of arguments beforehand.
A – Do you see this setting your stall out as being primarily about you, your own
internal dynamic, internal biography, or is it more political about the world out
there, or both?
TS – Both. Often the fuel for the day is a bit more local than that but I think you go
back to that audience thing. At the end of your working process particularly you
become much more aware of reception, how it’s located, what you have done in
that intermediate time that allows you to collide with a different wider world out
there.
I Have to Know When to Bring on a Man with
a Gun – An Interview with Nick Wood
Nick Wood is a playwright. His work has been produced in the UK, Canada, the
USA, and throughout Europe.
Authors (A) – Nick, as a writer you will often end up looking at all sorts of
different things. Could you tell us how you go about doing research for all this?
Nick Wood (NW) – It’s best to categorise things in two ways. On one hand, if I
am writing about a subject which people will know about, then I will do proper
research just to make sure I have got things right. You don’t want people switching
off in the first two pages because they say ‘you’ve got that wrong’… Other times
though, it can be researching a background, or a feel. This can be researching an
area to get a feel for what I’m going to do. For example, for Children of the Crown,
the brief from Nottingham Playhouse was that they wanted something mythic.
So I decided to make something such that when you saw it, you felt it was a story
you already knew, but no-one had told it to you yet. So I read Ovid, I read Robert
Graves on myths, Celtic myths and I re-read King Lear. I absorbed as much as I
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could, to try to create my own world, characters and story out of that. But what I
had also done was absorb a different way of thinking about writing, different from
writing about a couple of people in a bed-sit in Hockley… On the other hand, if
I write a short film for the Home Office or Prison Service about kids doing really
dumb things and their first night in prison… it has to have a different feel…
For this prison film, they had the idea that they wanted it for the Northern
Ireland Prison Service because kids weren’t just getting involved in sectarian stuff
over there, they were also doing the same dumb stuff: twocking and flogging
pills for a bloke who then disappears and they are the ones left to face the
consequences. In that case I had to say ‘you can’t do this, this is too English. If
you want me to write this I am going to have to go to Belfast’… I went to the
young offenders’ institutions, travelled in the back of the bus with them from the
Court, and went through the whole experience bar taking my clothes off, of being
inducted into the prison… I was talking with one kid about what I had in mind for
someone in the script to say, ‘I was wandering down the Dublin road...’ and the kid
said, ‘No you can’t say that, its ‘dandering’, I was dandering down the Dublin road.’
It’s just really important to find those kinds of things out…
A – What you have said relates to the research one does that lays behind actual
creative work, and gets into the research one does actually in and through the
creative act itself. But before we go into that, what you are saying is interesting.
Go back to what you have read, researching one’s genre, could you tell us more
about how you see the relationship between theory and practice?
NW – It’s the iceberg isn’t it? If I had done something like Children of the Crown
and felt insecure about the world I was trying to create, maybe I would have
wanted to put more obvious references in it. Not great blatant ones where Oedipus
is mentioned, but research can make you feel secure enough to not need that so
much. The piece I’m writing for the Playhouse at the moment is about a teacher
who is leaving at the end of a summer term to work in a school with kids, which
includes a boy who is fifteen. He is about to leave the school with all the baggage
of being autistic and go to college. So I don’t want someone to come to see it and
think straight away, ‘no, he’s got it wrong, they don’t do that’. But there comes
a point where it’s like an iceberg. If I don’t leave all that research underneath the
surface just holding up the actual play, it can get in the way. It comes to the point
in the creative process where the iceberg is just about to break through, that is
where I have to stop the research, otherwise what I write becomes lumpy and heavy
and full of facts… It’s interesting to screw it up, throw it away and try to forget it.
When I research something, whether it’s practical or it’s going to give me a feeling
or an atmosphere, I don’t want it getting in the way…. (but at the same time) I
want the audience to also think ‘yeah he’s done his homework, this feels right.’
A – I think that takes us onto the actual creative process. From the contextual
research that lays behind the practice to the research that lies inside the practice
itself. Clearly for a lot of creative practitioners that’s when it really happens.
Some creative practitioners don’t tend to worry too much about the background
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research as you have described it. For them most of the research is inside the
practice itself. So clearly there is a lot of research that emerges as the creative
process goes along. Do you recognise that?
NW – There are a lot of links to be made with fine art and music in the way that I
work. Talking to painters, for instance Mik Godley, I find similarities between the
way he approaches his work and how I approach mine. I can’t remember who it
was who said, ‘It’s not what you do it’s what you throw away’, that kind of process.
If you think of painting, it starts with a layering. So the first thing you have is a
wash of blue paint which bears no resemblance to what you see in the end but it
is a building up. Similar to that, in my research there will be just writing lots and
lots of rubbish really, to try to find ‘Jim and Kim’, my two characters. How they
actually speak. So by the time I give the actors the script and they have read the
first page or so, they should be able to take the names of the characters away from
the left hand side. They should know who is speaking because the rhythms are
right…It involves looking at the places the people might be, sitting in places like
this (Broadway) scripting pieces of dialogue that might never come out. You have
the two things going. One is knowing the world, and then all those processes in
my head, as it’s all an imaginative piece. I wrote a piece called Hanging On which
came out of my experience working in North Notts pit villages. All that came out
of my imagination and my own local knowledge. I wrote another piece about a
serial killer in World War Two. That came from a folk song, but was again out of my
imagination. But then you sometimes look for much more practical things. I went
to an undertaker to find out what would happen to the bodies. Because the World
War Two piece was a radio play, millions of people were going to listen to it and you
know if you get it wrong, someone will phone in and say ‘I used to be an undertaker
in 1943 and it didn’t happen like that’…
A – Set against all this stuff about research leading into creative practice, I am
also interested in the intuitive stuff that sometimes leads to work. Your research
tells you what not to put in, what to throw away. Maybe that comes from
experience…Could you tell us about that?
NW – You have already done it. You have to know the rules and the techniques.
You can’t walk onto a football pitch never having seen a game of football and think
that you’re going to be a genius. It’s the iceberg thing again. In my line I have to
know about structure, I have to know things like when people are going to start
shuffling, when to bring on the man with the gun, when to turn things round. But
I’ve got to know not to just apply it like a template because that doesn’t work at
all. I have to feel it…
Getting on the Train of Thought –
An Interview with Mik Godley
Mik Godley is a living Venn diagram of artistic practice. He is an activist,
lecturer and painter. He is currently concentrating upon his Considering Silesia
Project which responds to internet sources through a focus on his conflicting
heritages.
Authors (A) – Mik, what does the term research mean to you?
Mik Godley (MG) – It’s a question, as you know, I have been looking at quite a
bit over the last couple of years. The relationship between academic research and
artistic research. They are not distinct for me, but they do have different aspects
and aims. The overlaps between the two are perhaps trickier to define… you have
this circular movement if you like, and any definition of research has to move and
shift as that kind of relationship develops. What research means to me is dependent
on the stages of the work as well. There will be periods of time when I tend to focus
very much more on my practice. Other times on other things. Recently for instance
I’ve been spending a lot more time working on the communication of my work.
And part of the reason for doing that is very much connected to research in terms
of trying to gage public responses in a different way. At the moment I am exploring
what the internet can do for this research. The project I am working on experiments
with the way that work can be seen over the internet, but also involves trying to
find other artist’s work that have some relevance to the kinds of things I am doing.
So it becomes a mix of research and networking if you like.
A – The idea that research has a circularity within it is interesting. Could you
elaborate on that a little and give us some examples of where you see that circle?
MG – I have always thought, as far as developing my practice is concerned, that
it’s almost like getting on a train of thought. It might take some time to generate,
but having been at it for twenty five years or more, you see a pattern in how you
operate. For me it is very much a case of how certain influences from the outside
world, which could be as simple as reading the newspaper or other events in your
life and the world around you, obviously provoke thought. And from this you
begin. You begin a discussion around a pub table, you find other people have
certain connections with that and they chip in with thoughts, lend you books,
and gradually the thoughts build up and you take them back to the studio. In the
studio you are in a particular situation, in relative isolation, where you can process
what has been fed into you and consider how you respond. Almost ‘document’ the
responses in your studio practice.
A – You mention the relationship between research and networking. Networks
can be one of the key resources to draw upon for research. To what degree has
cross-disciplinary working and collaboration been useful for developing your
work?
MG – It’s been useful to see a commonality of thoughts and connections
across what, on the surface might seem quite disparate things. During in-depth
discussions you begin to realise that this person making films or that person writing
a play are dealing with similar themes to you… Not exactly the same but there will
certainly be things you can connect with.
A – What other disciplines have you collaborated with in terms of the research
leading into the creative practice?
MG – There have been a number of them. One of the interesting people I have
discussed work with at length has been François Matarasso who is a writer
engaged in similar wartime history research. Graham Lester George is also a writer/
screenwriter, those two have been quite key. The Creative Collaborations MA at
NTU was very fruitful. Jezz Noond and Elaine Grew understood my way of working
and were very encouraging as far as that was concerned…
A – Can you tell us about the relationship between researching history and your
biography? About the relationship between personal dimensions on the one
hand, and the outside social and political world on the other? How you bring
those two dimensions of research together?
MG – That’s been very easy because the whole project has been based on the
realisation that I am very much a product of the world. I mean that in the very
specific biographical sense, that I have a mixed background which has created
situations throughout my life and has had repercussions. This is essentially what
I am investigating at the moment. So the outside world, talking about Europe
over the past 70 years, has come to a point where it has created not only me but
the next generation. It is the politics in the personal if you like, that I have tried to
respond to in a visual way.
A – Do you start with you as the lens and then look backwards through history
or do you start with this notion of history coming forwards to get to you? Or is
that the wrong question?
MG – It’s not the wrong question, but in some respects it becomes more complex
than that. It becomes both. Certainly as far as the size of the project is concerned
it began with a very general ‘Oh, this is interesting, let’s have a look’ sort of thing.
It was through that process that I recognised that I was unearthing issues that were
very relevant to me on a personal basis whilst also having a degree of universality
that I responded to very strongly. I realised that here was a scene of discovery that I
needed to pursue.
A – If knowing history is about knowing where we are so that we get to
understand where we are going, then we get to the idea that history is about
the future. This automatically gets us into the notion of politics in the bigger
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sense of the word. So to what extent do you see your work as being political in
the sense of you making statements back to the world that are about
society as a whole?
MG – It is certainly political. I am examining Fascism, looking at the reasons
and motivations as to how on earth it could have happened. Once again it’s this
dialectical way of one informing the other. The most important thing it has sparked
is a realisation that throughout the project an understanding of the relationship
between what and how it happened then, and what is happening now has become
a greater part of its motivation...
A – You talked about bringing public responses into your work, how does that
feed back into the bigger question of research?
MG – It was made easy by doing the Creative Collaborations MA. You get a level
of public feedback through that process. One of the things that was surprisingly
gratifying for me was the realisation that I had found an arena to work in that
enabled me to gauge responses I’d not had before, and that encouraged me to
continue. However, I would be wary about following the market demand thing. I
have not wanted to respond to public responses too directly by saying ‘that was
popular so I’ll do ten of those’.
…it is market research, but not the same in terms of how I responded to that
kind of research. Having the insights you get from public responses, from peers,
curators and the general public can confirm it’s worth investment in continuing
along that train of thought, because you are in a situation where it is generating
communication. I think most artists want that degree of communication.
You Wouldn’t Go to Your Doctor and Say ‘I
Don’t Want to Take These Pills, I Want to Take
Those’ –
An Interview with Wolfgang Buttress
Wolfgang Buttress asked us to describe him simply as ‘an artist’. But he is
a very good one, and has recently been working on big public sculptural
commissions. One of these is The Angel in Islington, a 15 metres tall sculpture
which is what he is talking about as the interview starts…
Wolfgang Buttress (WB) – …when I made the Angel for Islington I was trying
to make it in the workshop in one piece, because of the scale of it. It was 15, 16
metres tall by 18 metres wide, but the workshop wasn’t big enough to build it all at
once, so we built it in sections. But I really wanted it together so we could see what
it looked like. To get it to London I actually looked at getting the RAF involved. The
idea of the angel flying in would have been really nice. I imagined them picking the
whole thing up and taking it down. They were up for it, but because of terrorism
or whatever it could get shot down and the insurance would have been superexpensive. At one point we looked at getting sponsorship, Virgin and all sorts of
people were going to get involved. It was a massive thing and they would have paid
the insurance. But in the end it became so prohibitive, no one would touch it.
So in the end it was built in sections because of physical perimeters like the height
and width of motorway bridges. We designed a six inch clearance from the top of
one of the wings to the motorway bridge. We did it all with CAD models.
Authors (A) – So in terms of research you even had to research how high the
motorway bridges are?
WB – Yeah, the bridges, the lorry, what’s the maximum height you can go up to.
We had to have police escorts in the middle of the night, into the middle of London.
There were road closures, all these things that I imagined would need to happen,
but you don’t really know until you get going. It’s not as simple as ‘build a sculpture
and take it down to London’. You are building all these little intricate bits but they
are 12 feet high in the sky, how do you do that? And I wanted it to be seamless, not
bolted on, so it’s integrated into the design.
But it’s about control as well. When I used to make smaller things, it was me
and a pencil and a piece of paper. Or me, a welding plant and some steel. If it has
smaller dimensions you can do it. You’re on top of it, but as soon as you go to the
next level of scale it has to be made in a factory.
A – So in developing your work, what are the compromises you have had to
make as the pieces have got bigger? What have been the tensions between what
you would really love to do and what you feasibly can do?
WB – Usually, right at the beginning, 90% of what I do happens through entering
competitions to get the commission. So right at the beginning you know what
the budget is. And then through experience you know what you can do with the
budget, what materials will work, what scale you can use in the space. One of the
benefits of experience is knowing how to get the most out of that budget so you
can make it as fantastic as it can be…
A – You mentioned working with fabricator and engineers. In this book we
talk about where innovation comes from. A lot of the time I think creative
innovations come not from trying to invent something, but from looking around
yourself and trying to work with people who already have the know-how. That
might be where innovation comes from. What experience have you had with
getting expertise from completely different realms to bring it to your work?
WB – Recently I’ve been doing loads of etching with bronze and other materials,
and that came from the model maker who made mock-ups for us. He used an
industrial process that had something fantastic about it for etching into metals.
So I’ve started working with this to work on the surface of metals instead of just
polishing or sand blasting it. There is something about coming nearly full circle in
this… I think that is an example of having an arts background as opposed to having
an engineering or business background and so responding to new possibilities in
a particular way. Sometimes you have a more lateral way of looking at things or
solving things. You’re not afraid to say ‘why not…’ or ‘why don’t we…’ even if it
hasn’t been done before. Sometimes things don’t work but its about not being
scared about asking those questions, finding inspiration in quite small things and
turning one thing into another…
110
A – Do you see yourself as working within a recognisable genre or history of work?
WB – I think so yeah. As well as the modernist thing, there is a craft, artisan thing
in the way things were actually made and built. That goes back to churches and
cathedrals being built. And there is certainly a link there in terms of understanding
materials, so you can understand form. Then that affects the visual aesthetic and
also that can inform the concept.
A – You go into the public realm, and so you are often working with local
government or public agencies. They are paying the bill but maybe they don’t
fully understand what you are trying to do. Or they do understand, but pull the
plug half-way through for whatever political reasons. To what extent have you
found yourself researching that cultural policy stuff and finding ways to be able
to translate what you want to say into their language?
WB – Yeah, that’s a tricky one. The best sculptures in the public realm usually have
a good team commissioning it. Having a good team is essential to making art in
the public realm happen. When things go tits-up it’s usually because the process
and the team have fatal flaws. It’s also sometimes about not understanding or
appreciating what art can do. There are too many expectations like, ‘we can plonk
that there and it will do this.’ It doesn’t work like that.
A – So have you researched and developed ways around that or ways of
translating what you want to say into other languages?
WB – Without sounding patronising, it’s about trying to simplify how I explain
what I do. Sometimes I give them a brief history of modern sculpture and context.
I talk to the planners to learn as much as I can from them. So as well as trying to
have them understand your language, you are trying to understand theirs as well. If
you show you know things about planning laws or Section 106, and Highways Act,
they will have more faith in you.
A – So do you pro-actively go into their world and language to talk about
regeneration, signature architect for the city, inward investment and the like
when you are talking about a commission?
WB – Yeah, but I think that’s getting abused at the moment because everyone
wants an Angel of the North. Cities think they can get a piece of art to regenerate
an area of the city, but it’s a very blunt instrument saying it will inevitably do
such things for an area. People have expectations about that, that a piece of
sculpture can do that, and sometimes it can. But it’s a lot more ephemeral than
that. If it’s integrated well into the landscape, with architecture, and things are
developed holistically, then you are making spaces, places better and it can elevate
everything. And then hopefully you are making places better for people to spend
time in, spend money. These can happen, but to have a simple equation that says
art-equals-more-people-equals-more-money is too crude.
111
A – Does your practice involve any research in front of the creativity itself, where
you research the public’s responses, do an evaluation, ask the locals ‘what do you
think of this?’ to learn for next time?
WB – I have started to. Sometimes you get that informally as you speak to the
commissioners or the council to get feedback. Sometimes you can’t avoid it
anyway. For example, during some work I was developing for Weston-Super-Mare,
there was a massive campaign to stop it going in. People were saying it was a waste
of money, we don’t need it. Sometimes that can get you into trying to get people
to understand what art was doing. For loads of reasons people were not happy with
the situation there, and art can then be a political battering ram to hit each other
over the head with. But there was strong support from the commissioners. They
explained the process and had the balls to see it through. And it’s justified now. It
won a Civic Trust award this year and they are using it on brochures to promote the
town. The locals seem as if they have come to really like it, but that process takes a
long time.
112
A – When it gets into the realms of public ownership, the word ‘ownership’ itself
is overused. I think if it was more about genuine public authorship, rather than
this false idea that public has ‘ownership’ just because they have been told about
it, people might get more actively involved in the actual process. That would
involve the kind of research that more constantly talks to people before and
during the design of the piece. Have you been involved in anything like that?
WB – Again it depends on how that’s done. If you give over too much, and it gets
to be ‘designed by committee’ then it ends up looking shite. But I do think it’s good
if the process is open and people can see what’s happening, what the ideas are
through exhibitions, talks. Occasionally I’ve been into schools to do things that run
parallel to the main commission and that can be cool. But when you start inviting
people to make comments and they start saying ‘it needs to look like this or this’, it
doesn’t really get you anywhere. You wouldn’t go to a doctor and say ‘I’m feeling
really ill’, he says ‘take these pills’, you say ‘I don’t want to take these pills, I want to
take those’. And then complain when he tells you, ‘Well if you do that your legs are
going to drop off ’. You go to people who are professional and good and you pay
them to do what they are good at.
Theory
Theories of Creative Innovation: No 16 – Towards a Theory of Creative Need
We have already quoted several times from Carl Rogers’ brilliant essay Towards
a Theory of Creativity, so let’s end this small book with another one. The fact
that this was originally written in 1954 does not detract from it, but rather
only goes to show just how brilliant and relevant it still is.
I maintain that there is a desperate social need for the creative behaviour of
creative individuals… Many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trends
may best be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity. Let us state some of
them briefly:
• In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose
education is ‘completed’, rather than freely creative and original thinkers
• In our leisure-time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action
are overwhelmingly predominant, whereas creative activities are much less in
evidence
• In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can
creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed
• In industry, creation is reserved for the few – the manager, the designer, the head
of the research department – whereas for the many life is devoid of original and
creative endeavour
• In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear,
the food we eat, the books we read, and the ideas we hold, there is a strong
tendency towards conformity, towards stereotypes. To be original is felt to be
‘dangerous’…
…we cannot expect an accurate description of the creative act, for by its nature
it is indescribable. This is the unknown which we must recognise as unknowable
until it occurs. This is the improbable that becomes probable. Only in a very
general way can we say that a creative act is the natural behaviour of an organism
which has the tendency to arise when that organism is open to all of its inner and
outer experiencing, and when it is free to try out in a flexible fashion all manner
of relationships. Out of this multitude of half-formed possibilities the organism,
like a great computing machine, selects this one which most effectively meets
an inner need, or that one which forms a more effective relationship with the
environment, or this other one which discovers a more simple and satisfying order
in which life may be perceived…
(from Towards a Theory of Creativity, by C. Rogers)
The world needs your creativity and innovations as much as you need it
for yourself.
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References and Other Useful Reading
On Epistemology and Research Methods
R. Barthes (1993) Mythologies.
Vintage Press: London
J. Berger and J. Mohr (1982) A Seventh Man: A
Book of Images and Words About the Experiences
of Migrant Workers in Europe. Writers and Readers
Association: London
A. Chalmers (1999) What is This Thing Called
Science? Open University Press: London
N. Denzin (1989) The Research Act.
Prentice Hall: London
P. Feyerabend (1993) Against Method. Verso: London
A. Gell (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
C. Gray and J. Malins (2007) Visualizing Research:
A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design.
Ashgate: London
T.Kuhn ( 1970) The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. University of Chicago Press: Chicago
P. Mishra (2006) An End to Suffering: The Buddha in
the World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York
L. Mlodinow (2008) The Drunkard’s Walk: How
Randomness Rules Our Lives. Allen Lane: London
K. Popper (2002) The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Routledge: London
On The (Alternative) Political Economy
of Culture
M. Wark (2006) A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard
University Press: Cambridge. Mass.
S. Johnson (2002) Emergence: The Connected Lives
of Ants, Brains and Cities. Penguin: London
S. Florman (1996) The Existential Pleasures of the
Engineer. St. Martins Press: New York
Y. Benkler (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How
Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms.
Yale University Press: New Haven, Mass.
S. Weber (2004) The Success of Open Source.
Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass.
P. Ormerod (1999) Butterfly Economics.
Faber: London
S. Freud (1972) ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’. in A. J. Cropley (ed.) Creativity. Penguin:
London
T. Flew (2005) ‘The Cultural Economy’. In John
Hartley (ed.) The Creative Industries.
Blackwell: Oxford
On Creative Networks, Ecologies and Other
Background Concepts
J. Shorthose (2007) Fish, Horses and Other
Animals: Professional and Business Development
for the Creative Ecology. Broadway Publications:
Nottingham
P. Kane (2005) The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a
Different Way of Living. Pan Books: London
J. Kao (2007) Innovation Nation: How America is
Losing its Innovative Edge, Why it Matters, and What
We Can Do To Get it Back. Harvard University Press:
Cambridge. Mass.
L. Laing (2005) A Guide to Open Content Licenses.
Piet Zwart Institute: Amsterdam (free downloadable
copy available on-line)
L. Lessig (2006) Free Culture: The Nature and Future
of Creativity. Penguin: London
C. Leadbeater (2008) We-Think: Mass Innovation not
Mass Production. Profile Books: London
P. Ricouer (1981) ‘The Hermeneutical Function of
Distanciation’. In Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences. J. B. Thompson (eds.). Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge.
T. Roszak (1986) The Cult of Information: The
Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking.
Lutterworth Press: Cambridge
P. Ball (2004) Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to
Another. Arrow Books: London
G. Bateson (1878) Steps to an Ecology of Mind:
Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution and Epistemology. Aronson: London
P. L. Berger (1974) The Social Construction of Reality:
A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor
Books: London
C. P. Snow (1993) Two Cultures. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge
D. Zohar and I. Marshall (1994) Quantum Society:
Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision.
Bloomsbury: London
E. von Hippel (2006) Democratizing Innovation. MIT
Press: London
I Janis (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of
Policy Decisions and Fiascos.
Houghton Mifflin: Boston
T. Kelly (2004) The Art of Innovation: Lessons in
Creativity from IDEO. Profile Books: London
Krishnamurti (1996) Total Freedom: The Essential
Krishnamurti. Harper: San Francisco
R. Buchanan (1995) ‘Wicked Problems in Design
Thinking’. R. Buchanan and V. Margolin (eds.) The
Idea of Design. MIT Press: London
N. Cross (1995) ‘Discovering Design Ability’. In R.
Buchanan and V. Margolin (eds.) Discovering Design:
History, Theory and Criticism. University of Chicago
Press; Chicago
T. Dant (1999) Material Culture in the Social World.
The Open University Press: London
A. Julius (2002) Transgressions: The Offences of Art.
Thames & Hudson: London
D. Miller (2001) (ed.) Home Possessions: Material
Culture Behind Closed Doors. Berg: Oxford
D. Bohm (1998) On Creativity. Routledge: London
C. Leadbeater (2008) We-Think: Mass Innovation
not Mass Production. Profile Books: London
C. Mitcham (1995) ‘Ethics into Design’. In R.
Buchanan. R and V. Margolin (eds.) Discovering
Design: History, Theory and Criticism. University of
Chicago Press: Chicago
S. Freud (1963) Civilisation and its Discontents.
Hogarth Press: London
M. Cooley (1980) The Architect and the Bee: The
Human/Technology Relationship. Langley Technical
Services: Slough
L. Liang (2005) ‘Commons on the Wires’. In John
Hartley (ed.) The Creative Industries.
Blackwell: Oxford
V. Papanek (1995) The Green Imperative: Ecology
and Ethics in Design and Architecture. Thames &
Hudson: London.
D. Garcia et. al. (2007) (Un)Common Ground:
Creative Encounters Across Sectors and Disciplines.
BIS Publishers: Amsterdam
Y. Chouinard (2006) Let My People Go Surfing: The
Education of a Reluctant Business Man.
Penguin: London
C. Rogers (1972) ‘Towards a Theory of Creativity’. In
A.J Copley (ed.) Creativity. Penguin Books: London
M. Press and R. Cooper (2003) The Design
Experience. Ashgate: London.
N. Hamdi (2004) Small Change: About the Art
of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities.
Earthscan: London
A. J. Cropley (1972) Creativity. Penguin: London
Other Useful Academic References
H. Chesborough (2008) Open Innovation:
Researching a New Paradigm. Oxford University
Press: Oxford
C. Ashwin (1986) ‘Drawing, Design and Semiotics’.
In R. Buchanan and V. Margolin (eds.) Design
Discourse; History, Theory, Criticism. The University
of Chicago Press: Chicago
F. Capra (1996) The Web of Life: A New Synthesis on
Mind and Matter. Harper Collins: London
L. Hyde (2006) The Gift: How the Creative Spirit
Transforms the World. Cannongate: Edinburgh
On Theories of Creative Innovation
U. Eco (1989) The Open Work. Harvard University
Press: Cambridge, Mass.
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