16:30 - 17:30, Friday 29th April 2016
Anatomy Lecture Theatre - Level 6, King's College London

This session is part of the Creativeworks London Festival. A full list of CWL Festival sessions can be found here.

This talk suggests that we need to re-invent the paradigm of invention. It is informed by Professor John Wood’s 20 years of design research, coupled with John McKiernan’s public art interventions with Platform-7. In 1964, Arthur Koestler asserted that all creativity tools are, in essence, combinatorial. Why does this idea still seem out of touch with common belief? Part of the Enlightenment legacy is the idea that ‘genius’ only derives from a singular intellect with exotic powers of creativity. This was such a powerful myth that we are still fond of the inventor stereotype as an eccentric ‘Übermensch’ (e.g. a Sherlock Holmes or David Bowie figure). Likewise, we still tend to identify the act of creation with a one-off product, ‘app’ or ‘widget’ that acts as a ‘magic bullet’ for complex problems. However, developments in today’s creative sector are raising new questions about the future of innovation hubs and collaborative workspaces. They are another reminder that the monocular myth of ‘creativity’ is past its sell-by date. In evolution, multiple resources are simultaneously re-combined by a multiplicity of agents in many places. Although humans are not wise enough to emulate the creativity of nature we can learn from it. As part of its #Synergy6 framework, Creative Publics has developed a systemic innovation tool that assumes ‘four’ to be the minimum number of resources to be re-combined together. However, using this tool calls for a mental shift from managing assets as finite quantities and ‘bits’ to seeing the world primarily as a dynamic set of relations. Ultimately, this would require us to‘re-language’ everything in the discourse of the next paradigm. This is where the fun begins.

Speakers
Professor John Wood, Creative Publics
John McKiernan, Creative Publics

Session Organiser:
Tarek Virani, Creativeworks London