The Conversation: Part 3
Author of this post: Andy Polaine Rick Bennett | About Blog Authors »
The following post is the third part of an ongoing conversation between guest authors Rick Bennett and Andy Polaine, friends and partners in Omnium – a research group of academics, designers, artists, programmers and writers who work collaboratively (and from different countries) to explore the potential the Internet allows for what they term – online collaborative creativity (OCC). We asked Rick and Andy to explore the topic of online collaboration through a collaborative online conversation. Stay tuned over the next few weeks (or months?) as this unique meeting of minds unfolds:
ANDY: Rick, your thoughts about design education and its relevance (or lack of) to the contemporary world of design practice is spot on, though I feel this isn’t limited to design, but to the whole notion of what we consider successful higher education institutions. This is an issue that goes right back to schooling and I feel there’s a real resonance here in the way we think about the social, cultural and environmental issues that face us.
I feel strongly that art and design have always had a very inferior status compared to languages, maths or the sciences. I have a friend in Australia who is an art teacher in a school and the way that he first got into art was because he was sent to art classes as a punishment. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at that story. If art was so easy I think we’d see a lot more multi-million dollar earning artists around the place. I see many more multi-million dollar earning bankers.
The reason why I find this so frustrating is because creative thinking is now the big buzz in corporate culture, whilst at the same time being not taken seriously in school education. I have always felt that thinking as a designer is about asking the question, “Does it have to be that way?” and then thinking through alternative approaches and solutions. That’s far from easy and a great deal of shaping and life experience goes into being able to think like that successfully. It’s not something you can simply quickly cram from a ‘Boost your creativity” afternoon seminar in a corporate environment. I’m with Bruce Nussbaum on the idea that CEOs must be Designers Thinking about how things might be done differently seems to me to be the most crucial skills of the 21st Century.
I know we’ve both felt the frustrations of our profession (both as designers and academics) from time to time and although the first Creative Waves was a great success in terms of its process, I know we both felt that it could have had more potent outcomes from the design brief itself. So, can designers change the world? Stefan Sagmeister summed it up well when we chatted to him:
“I don’t have to turn into a firefighter or cancer specialist or sweater knitter in order to improve my relationship to my fellow human beings. We all have a role to play. Why not try to play it well?”
You are very much a doer, Rick, which I have always had great admiration for. I tend to me more of the grand-interconnected-ideas kind of person, but they sometimes remain ideas. I think both are valuable, but best when they combine and I’ve most enjoyed the times when we have worked together like that.
Football shirts from Creative waves 07
When we set up the Omnium Creative Network [OCN] it was intended to be an extension of the thriving communities that had built up over the shorter Creative Waves projects. Many participants said that they wanted to continue to do collaborative projects online with a social improvement/responsibility aspect, which aligned with what we were thinking about more and more. But the OCN as a giant community ground to halt after a while and I think it’s worth talking as much about why that failed to take off as it is to talk about the successful projects.
I believe there were a few converging reasons. One was that we expected the community to really drive itself, that a few key people might emerge with project ideas that they would then own and run. What happened was that it seemed the community wanted you and I to tell them what to do and that required an ever-increasing amount of time.
Another reason, I think, was simply timing. 2006 saw a proliferation of design and social/sustainability communities. Everyone who had been thinking “there must be something I can do” joined them all. It was the year of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and really the tipping point of much of these issues becoming accepted in mainstream culture. At the same time social networks like Facebook were on the rise and I think we really ran into a kind of online community fatigue, despite the best of intentions from all involved.
The other reason why I think it stalled is an interesting contrast between our two styles. The OCN lacked a specific focus of the kind that I think you’ve brought so well to the [re]frame project in Manila. The OCN was too much a general idea - which was probably my fault, I think - and whilst everyone rushed in wanting to ‘do good stuff’, nobody really had a clear idea of what that should be.
Online communities really thrive when people get as much (or more) out as they put in - the whole is greater the sum of the parts, once again. Once it starts to tip into being more effort to put in that what you gain, it’s hard to turn that around (you can see this happening with Facebook fatigue too).
The lesson there, I think, is that great things start small and not to be worried that a small change isn’t enough. Helping one family or community achieve a higher quality of life has ramifications for many generations hence. I think it’s easy to forget that sometimes. (Majora Carter’s TED talk ‘Greening the ghetto’ is a great example). Our plans to make the OCN an umbrella for smaller, more independent projects, make a lot more sense, I feel.
Hunts Point Riverside Park, one of Majora Carter’s “Grening the Ghetto” projects
Designers really can create a great deal of change, both as simply people, but also as designers. The Creative Waves Visualising Issues in Pharmacy project really highlighted that many of the health issues facing the Winam community in Kenya were not just about money but also information and knowledge. Great design can communicate complex ideas simply and that can help people to remain healthy in an environment where being unhealthy means probably dying. Even if one of those football kits makes one kid use a condom and not get HIV, it’s a pretty good score.
Rick Bennett (left) carries boxes of VIP shirts
For me this also aligns with personal decisions. I chose to live in a smaller town in Germany with obviously fewer big career prospects as, say, London, but with a much more pleasant lifestyle and community. Although my ego would probably love to be doing more large agency jobs (I do still get to do those from time to time), often the small jobs I do – and certainly my teaching – are just as satisfying, if not more so. I still get e-mails from my ex-students about things they remember I’ve said or telling me the great things they’re now doing and I’m more proud of those than anything I’ve done personally.
I’ve learned a lot in the last two years too and I think it is impossible to separate out that personal development from the professional. Maybe it’s a coming-of-age thing too. So, Rick, I’m interested to know how your own personal priorities and experiences have led you to projects like [re]frame and what, for you, have been the most satisfying aspects of it? After all, you’re a decade ahead of me in years!
RICK:
Ah ha! … my new direction with our Omnium Outreach Projects eh? Ok, well there are many drivers for this new direction: For one, I got fed up with the trend in popular media which all to often seems to demean our disciplines in design as being ‘easy’ and ‘trivial’. Everyone is apparently becoming a ‘designer’ (such as the Hilton sisters per se) and TV shows in various countries are abundant in showing how to turn whole societies into overnight interior designers or graphic designers or fashion designers. Even more locally, our own students were seemingly wanting to continually design products for high-end markets and design was becoming for designers, and for the wealthy, and not for the good of the general population and especially for those who could not afford the luxury items that seem to adorn duty-free shops and trendy high street boutiques.
I also was saddened to see the amazing and exhaustive creative energies of our many and talented students being channeled into meaningless hypothetical college projects when such efforts surely could be focused on producing outcomes for more worthy causes of which each country in the world is full. When so many people in the world live in less fortunate circumstances than ourselves, it seems crazy not to be able to assist some of these people in some way.
The first Creative Waves (2005) project in 2005 brought this home to me. The project was a resounded success in forming a global creative swell of energy online … but, what did it actually produce apart from a wonderful process? Throughout the planning of CW05, I approached some very interesting people to work on the project whom I had met previously in various locations. I was struck in particular by two talks I had heard by Stefan Sagmeister and Neville Brody. Both had asked questions about what is design and who should we be designing for? I suppose these questions had got under my skin and has made me think more carefully ever since.
When the CW07 was in planning stages, we felt that it was important to have a clear and worthwhile project to work on and to construct the brief for. My co-convenor, Dr Nataly Martini, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), had suggested the project as being a collaboration between pharmacists and graphic designers to suggest and design new visual campaigns to raise awareness of chronic health issues affecting Africa. It was Nataly who identified the actual village in Kenya we would be helping and made all the contacts with NGO workers there. The social reality of the project gave CW07 everything that the earlier project had lacked.
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However, still today, one year later, we are still trying to resolve problems from actually implementing and producing the outcomes and sending them to Kenya. Having designed and had produced 64 Soccer outfits (including shirts and shorts) that convey a message to young Kenyans about the dangers of HIV, the Kenyan customs is still refusing to release the shipment we sent that are totally non-commercial and donated as charitable gifts to the people of the village of Winam. The saga goes on but emphasizes the difficulty of working in some countries that obviously need help but whose red-tape and bureaucracy only harm their own people.
The experience, the challenge and even the frustration of working on the CW07 (Kenya) project only fueled my own ambition to work more and more on these kind of social projects. At Omnium we have become fortunate that we do sell licenses to our own software that is ideal for either e-learning ventures of for any people who want to set up online communities where they can share text, image, movie or sound files. In fact I was recently talking to an acquaintance I met whilst overseas whose job it was to raise people’s websites in the Google (and other search engines) listings. I was fascinated how they went about this and how he saw our Omnium Software - he saw it from an outsiders perspective as a ‘content management system’ and emphasized that we should market it as such to be really successful. Anyway, despite being an open-source project the Omnium software has generated us a fair amount of income which allows us the fortunate position to be able to allocate any profits to whatever we like to … and it’s the new Omnium Outreach Projects initiative where ALL the profits go.
And so to answer your question, Andy, why did I end up working in the Philippines on the [re]frame project? I had been traveling to the Philippines on holidays for a number of years and fell in love with the country and the people. However, it is not an easy place to be (as a foreigner) and the country does exist amongst immense hardship. I desperately wanted to find a project that Omnium could begin to explore in terms of lending some assistance.
Installation of the Manila project
I contacted a university in Manila who amazingly had a whole office dedicated to Social Action and working with the community. To cut a long story short, they took me about 3 hours from Manila to a remote province famous for embroidery. The embroidery in this region (Laguna Province) forms part of a rich historical culture and the women who worked there were amazingly talented, hospital and generally lovely … but needed help to update their market place.
Having visited the region, I returned to Sydney where my team began devising a project that would use their existing techniques but bring them into a whole new realm that would hopefully lead to more work and further commissions. The trouble was that at every turn they were being ‘ripped off’ and left with hardly any money for vast amounts of skilled and creative work. The first thing to do was to gain their trust and then work with them regularly for one year where together we devised and produced the massive [re]frame • manila project which was unveiled on May 15th this year <>. The whole project was a mammoth venture but at every step of the way incredibly rewarding and great fun.
The Manila installation at night
What I am doing now, is to further this work with the embroidery ladies of Lumban and the Social Action Office of the university by having designs produced by students in both countries and then made in the provinces at proper rates of pay. Omnium’s next step will be to set up an e-commerce site where over time we can sell a range of crafts produced by poorer artisans from various countries and funded by our software. We shall then be able to reinvest the total income back to their communities. In Lumban, Laguna where I have been working for a year, there is a little fisherman’s clubhouse on the river and my aim is to fund an extension to the building to make a meeting place for the towns many embroiderers. A place of social exchange and safety.
There is so much more to tell about this aim and the Philippine work but to keep the conversation on track here, I will explain more about how online collaboration will achieve this aim – but it will !!!
To continue this dialogue Andy, I ask you give some thought to a subject that you and I have talked about many times … and a topic that has seen me leave conference rooms and talks after ridiculously short periods of time through sheer frustration. Let me remind you of one such example … we were in Berlin a year or so ago attending a major online education conference. Having given our ‘amazing’ talk to a room of about 30 people the day before, where for 2 hours we showed people a whole string of real online interactions where real people had done amazing things together, we were ‘honoured’ to be able to sit in a room of about 3000 people and hear the keynote speaker drone on about some ‘drivel’ which meant nothing to nobody (except maybe the speaker himself). Luckily they did have a good wireless connection and sitting two seats away from you, I IM’ed you to tell you I was going to the bar for a beer (at 11.00 in the morning sadly).
So … what is the fixation for academia to ignore the really interesting and productive examples of online collaboration and to only showcase the grand Professors and organizing committee members of such conferences and the menial work they more often are doing. The emphasis on technology frustrates me further and to see what little they are doing with it is simply saddening. Is there any way round this problem? It seems that in the design disciplines cream rises to the top but in education and academia the opposite applies. Is this just another example of the two fields becoming more and more dislocated? I would be interested to hear your probably more thoughtful opinion….
