Creativity by stealth

A piece of life wisdom: surround yourself with people brighter than yourself. And I have. One such group is the trustees of the Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch trust.

Source: https://learningcitychristchurch.nz/ 

This week I attended a meeting at which the Trust brought together some of the contributors to the 2023 'Learning Days' in something of a look back and look forward exercise: 'what worked, and what do we want to be doing in 2024?'.

The 2023 Learning Days were held under the 'umbrella concept' of 'Kōtuituia Weaving Curiosity'. I love that idea of a city in which we value, feed, and nurture, curiosity (using the word curiosity in preference to the word 'learning' which comes with a veritable truckload of baggage for many). I've written on this previously.

The talk this week centred around taking a new central idea, 'gamification', and weaving its threads into a 2024 Learning Days event.

If you are not sure what gamification is, I have placed the Wikipedia definition at the end of this post for reference.

Gamification is a powerful educational strategy, and perhaps more importantly a powerful developmental strategy for business and organisations generally. I suspect (opinion alert!!) that it has however proved damnably difficult to 'realise', to actually implement, particularly in a business context, but in almost any context.

Source: https://www.harbingergroup.com/blogs/how-to-build-a-gamification-strategy-an-expert-view/

I see the potential of gamification in a different way (and an entirely predictable one if you have read any of my other thinking on this blog). In the same way that there was talk in our long lost war on drugs about 'gateway drugs', so too could gamification be a 'gateway to creativity'.

I am a huge fan of the concept of creative cities, although as always I mean creative in ways that go well beyond the creative arts. To me, creative cities are places where creative problem solving is 'how we do things around. here'. So I am imagining:

• a festival in which gamification is used to enthuse, to inspire, and to engage, a wide range of people in a wide range of new things. 
• a massive game design contest that engages young people in particular in game design and creation. 
• the creative potential of our most vulnerable unleashed
• gamification in all of its guises, both digital and analogue

... and perhaps most importantly: 

• gamification as a tool to build creativity and creative problem solving at a community wide level. 

Perhaps this is creativity by stealth. I am drawn to a story I heard many decades ago a t ban Art galleries and Museums' Association conference when I was heavily involved in the world of museums and art galleries. James Mack (then Director of the Dowse Art Gallery in the Hutt, related a story of his time at the Suter Gallery in Nelson. He was running a showing of a film of "The Lord of the lies', hosted in the galleries amongst the art works on show. This was in those days when you played movies from reels of celluloid, using a projector (no Youtube back then).  group he described as 'punk rockers' came to see the movie. At the half time break, when it was time to change reels, the punk rockers got up (as you did) and began walking around the gallery. They began talking about the art hanging on the walls. James laid down a defiant challenge: 'how many of you can claim to have had a group of punk rockers in your gallery critically analysing art?" I loved that story. James' message was 'it doesn't matter how you get 'em in, just get 'em in'. Education by stealth, creativity by stealth.

I also come back to some of my earlier thinking.. where I said:

An even bigger question in my head is, what happens if we are deliberate and intentional about nurturing the 11 dimensions of the Creative Schools Index across a city?

The CAST team research indicates that nurturing and growing creativity in schools supports wellbeing and academic outcomes. Could it do the equivalent across a city?

• How do you identify 'points of curiosity' in a city context?
• Is a better focus for that the idea that we deliberately and intentionally create 'points of curiosity' across a city?
• Is this a way of addressing inequity in the ways in which we create those points of curiosity in different parts of a city that target those most likely to suffer from. those inequities?
• What could that look like?
• Who does it?
• How do they do that?

Creativity needs to be nurtured, front and centre, in our schools. So too it needs to be nurtured, front and centre, in our businesses, amongst our civic leaders, our NGOs .. everywhere. It needs to be 'how we do things around here', it needs to be embedded in our city culture.  If gamification is one way to do that, I say let's start playing.. NOW!!

Gamification:

Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.[1] This is generally accomplished through the application of game-design elements and game principles (dynamics and mechanics) in non-game contexts.[2][3]

Gamification is part of persuasive system design, and it commonly employs game design elements[4][2][5][6][3] to improve user engagement,[7][8][9] organizational productivity,[10] flow,[11][12][13] learning,[14][15] crowdsourcing,[16] knowledge retention,[17] employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems,[13][18][19] physical exercise,[20] traffic violations,[21] voter apathy,[22][23] public attitudes about alternative energy,[24] and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals.[5] However, individual and contextual differences exist.[25]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification