pitching novel idea

Copyright© David Gauntlett 2018

The right of David Gauntlett to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copynght, Designs and Parents Act 1988.

Firsr edition published in 2011 by Polity Press This second edition published in 2018 by Polity Press

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Names: Gauntlett, David, author. Title: Making is connectin~ : the social power of creativity, from craft and

knitting to rugiral ev::'l'°'ing / David Gauntlen.. . .. Description: Second edioon. I .\1edford, MA : Pobty, 2018.- I_ ReV1Sed edition

of the author's Making is connecnng, 2011. I Includes b1bhograph1ca l references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017043969 (Print) I LCCN 2017052215 (ebook) I ISBN 9781509513512 (Epub) I ISBN 9781509513475 Q1ardback) I ISBN 978 15095IH82 (paperback) . . . . . ,

Subjects: LCSH: Social networks. I Creaove ab1hty--SOC1al aspects. I ~ eb . 2.0-Social aspects. I Culture. I BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE I ~erua Studies.

Classification: LCC HM741 (ebook) I LCC HM741 .G38 2018 (prmt) I DDC 302.30285-dc23

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Vl

Preamble to the second edition 1 1 Introduction 9 2 The meaning of making I: Philosophi es of craft 30 3 The meanin g of making II: Craft today 56 4 The meaning of making ill: Digital 91 5 The value of connecti ng: Personal happin ess and

social capital 112 6 Tools for change 146 7 Online creativity needs better platforms 165 8 Making connections and th e creative process:

From music to everything 192 9 Doing it yourself: More lessons from music

making and connecting 207 10 Platfo rms for creativity 231 11 Conclusion 252

Notes 277 Index 313

DOING lT YOURSELF

accessible creative environments - have begun to emcq.tt' J As in music, the preponderance of the conventional .11111 conservative set of things prompts us to imagine deli14l111111 and inspiring alternatives. That's not as good as if we Wl'I c living in a properly egalitarian and respectful utopia alrc.td), of course, but it's exciting to be establishing new things, ;tnd finding colourful, inclusive and antisexist ways to suppor 1 creativity - which, as it happens, is the subject of the ncx1 chapter.

10

PLATFORMS FOR CREATIVITY

For all of the reasons outlined in previous chapters, I believe that we need to develop more, better, and more inclusive opportunities for people to explore their creative abiljties in everyday Life - and to exchange ideas, have creative con- versations, and inspire each other. 1 In the yea rs since the first edition of this book was published, I have adopted the term 'platforms for creativity' to point to any and all kinds of events, spaces, environments, tools, or toys that might enable people to take some steps into the world of creativity. Often I am thjnking of platforms that anyone can access - ideally - but you can also have platforms that are particular to certain groups or workplaces.

'Platforms for creativity' are not necessarily online, though they could be. The value of a platform might be enhanced through some hybrid of offline and onune activity. They can be big or small. An imaginative programme of events and interactions across a network of museums might be a very large platform for creativity. Two people tinkering with a

232 PLATl' ORMS FOlt CHE.\T l \' ITY

handful of LEGO would be an example of a very small plat- form. These platforms, whatever their size or type, are about offering people opporronities to creatively express them- selves. Platforms for creativity can help people to connect with each other and build shared understandings. Over time, they can potentially contribute to social change, community resi li ence, and sustainability.

Platforms for creativity typically present an invitation to do something. Th is activity can be something very simple, but the fact that a platform has been created for it tends to make it more meaningful. A good examp le of this is the G loba l Cardboard Challenge. It's a very straightforward idea: the G loba l Cardboard Challenge invites you to make some- thing out of cardboard, on a particular day. You might do it with others, and you are encouraged to share pictures of the activity onlin e. But that's all. Clearly, this is very simple. I t's barely an idea at all. Anybody who wants to make something out of cardboard, you might observe, can do that anyway, any time. The thing that makes it magic is that people have been invited to do it, as part of some larger shared project- a 'global challenge'! - and with an inspiring starting-point (in this case, the online video 'Caine's Arcade', the true story of a nine-year-old boy who made a whole world of arcade machines out of cardboard).

Other platforms offer similarly open, unspecific invita- tions. Online, YouTube invites people to fill it with videos about anything. Wikipedia invites articles about whatever you like. Minecraft invites you to build anything you can imagine within its world.2 Offline, knitting groups invite people to come together and knit. Makerspaces invite you to tinker an<l make whatever you fancy with 3D printers, elec- tronics, wood. Forward-looking libraries open their doors to peop le who like to create together.

All of these are broad and unspecific invitations - things

PLi\TFORi'lS FOH CREAT I VITY 20:J

you could probably do anyway and elsewhere - but it's the particular invitation to share an experience with others, with a simple bit of framing to give it meaning, which makes it an actual thing that people like to do together.

So when we think about platforms for creativity, we should think about how they engage people - in terms of both minds and bodies - and the materials or environments that are offered, as well as how the invitation is framed, and the use of inspiring prompts, things, or people. Doing all of this thoughtfully means that we can develop opportunities for people to be expressive and creative, and consequently help to ensure that we live in thriving communities of people who are engaged with the world around them. We can help people to recognize that they can make and shape their own worlds, and do not merely have to consume stuff made by others. It is in this way that platforms for creativity can be fun and nourishing, and also vitally important for society and culture.

SUPPORTJ G CREATIVE IDENT!TlFS

There are a number of theoretica l models of creativity, typi- cally produced by social psychologists, which often position rather obvious elements in overcomplicated and/or clunky diagrams which can leave the reader with a strong feeling of 'so what?'3 Here, though, if we are thjnking about devel- oping optimum platforms for creativity, it might be useful to have a meaningful model of the relationships between a person's sense of their own creative identity, and external factors such as other people, tools and environments. The most fruitfu l of these seems to be a model presented by Vlad Petre Glaveanu and Lene Tanggaard in a 2014 article called 'Creativity, identity, and representation: Towards a socio- cultural theory of creative identity'.4

204 PLATFORMS FOR GUEATIVITY

Glaveanu and Tanggaard begin by observing that over the decades since the mid-twentieth century, when the field of psychology started taking creativity seriously, creativity has been studied either as a property of individuals, 'a system

of personality traits and cognitive abilities' to be dissected, or else - in deliberate contrast - as something that emerges from social systems and environments, and not much to do with particular qualities of individuals at all (the latter being the approach of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, discussed in the early chapters of this book). The authors note that the role of creative idrmtit:y has been largely neglected, but is absolutely central, linking up the individual and their social context:

The creative person therefore, far from existing as an iso- lated unit, is a social actor able to co-construct his or her own sense of creative value in communication with others and in relation to sodetal discourses about what creativity is. In the end, there is creativity in identity construction just as there is identity construction in the most mundane forms of creative expression. Most importantly, identities condu- cive for creative perfonnance are not just 'given' but built over time in interactions that are often marked by struggles and acts of resistance.5

This is of relevance here because platforms for creativity would need to help individuals to recogruze and nurture their own creative identity. Glaveanu and Tanggaard argue that this creative identity is a 'representational project con- structed within self-other relations'. In other words, we each create some kind of sense of ourselves as creative people, or perhaps not-creative people , with particular strengths and weaknesses and interests, and we work out this picture of

ourselves - that's the 'representation', even if we never actu- ally speak about it or make it explicit - in a kind of dialogue

PL.\.Tl'OR.MS FOR C UEATl\'J'J'Y 205

with other people and things we see in the world. And of course it changes over time.

So creative identity is forged through the interactions between three things: one, the individual; two, multi- ple others; and three, societal discourses around creativity (which might favour, say, the idea of the lone genius, or the notion that creativity is primarily collaborative, and may support or denigrate the amateur). These three elements can be seen as the three sides of a triangle, but then we have to add the dimension of time - as creative identity is an unfold- ing phenomenon - which drags out the triangle as a prism and gives the model its memorable shape, looking like a Toblerone, the popular Swiss chocolate bar. You've seen a Toblerone, right? The three sides of each triangle represent

the individual, others, and social ideas about creativity; and it goes on and on lengthwise because of the passage of time. And it has chunky bits and Aat bits because over ti.me, some- times there's more going on and sometimes there's less.6

Now, I know this model doesn't sound amazing. The fact that it feels rather blandly correct is to its credit, in a context where people hadn't managed to put these elements together very cleverly before. There's a long history in psychology, matched by an even longer one in everyday public discourse, whfrh sees creativity as a set of individual characteristics that we might, potentially, measure, or nurture. So that's a focus on the individua l, which is not wrong as such - it's certainly true that peop le are all different, and have had different experiences, and they have different kinds of creative capaci- ties and inclinations that I do believe you can nurture. So a

focus on the individual is not wrong but it disregards other things - th.e social and cultural dimensions of creativity. And similarly, you can take approaches which look at the social

or colJective ways in which _creativity is brought into being, or you can focus on how creativity is considered within

r 2:)0 PLATFOJHIS FOR CREATl\"ITY different cultures at different times, and these are very va lid and important factors to look at, even though they disregard individual qualities and passions. On top of aU this, it's rela- tively easy to forget that things change over time.

All of this explains why Glaveanu and Tanggaard, with their Toblerone, have done something noteworthy, because they have managed to bring together these components in one integrated mode l. It's fundamentally straightforward but it doesn't leave anything out.

And once we've got our heads around that, we can see the value when Glaveanu and Tanggaard suggest that individu- als trace a line through the Toblerone, over time, developing their creative identity as 'an identity project fostered by the self and accomplished within social encounters'.7 The 'pro- ject' of your own creative identity is owned by you but is both expressed in, and shaped by, social interaction with other people and with the culture at large. Glaveanu and Tanggaard show - based on interviews with makers and teachers in Denmark, and with folk-art egg decorators in Romania - that a creative identity, far from being a straight- forward thing that each person proudly develops, is often denied, or problematic, or a source of anxiety. A particular creative identity shapes a creator's engagement with their own work, so the choices of what to do and how to do it are decisions at particular points in time influenced, of course, by the individual, social and cultural dimensions that pull on them from the three sides of the triangle. So we should keep all these things in mind as we consider effective platfonns for creativity.

PRINCIPLES OF PLATFORMS

In 2011, I wrote an article which drew together what I had learned from collaborations that I had been involved in

237

with the BBC, S4C and LEGO. Each of those projects had been about, in different ways, creating online platforms that should support and foster people's creativity. The article appeared online in 2012, and in a longer form in my book Making Nledia Studies in 2015. In this work I proposed eight principles for the design of platforms for creativity, based on what I had learned in these collaborations - sometimes prompted by things that hadn't been done, or h11d11'tworked, rather than all positive successes. Since then I have realized that although the eight principles were originally meant to be about the design of digital platforms, they are actua lly rel- evant to any kind of 'platform for creativity', large or small, online or offiine, or both.

Here are the eight principles for the design of platforms for creativity:

1. Embrace 'because we want to'. - A platform should go with the g;rain of what people alre11dy want to~; eMble a sense of 'flow' by allowing them to do what they want to do in a way that feels natuml, rather than compel- ling them to fit their ambitions into rm imposed-from-elsewhere fnm,ework.

2. Set no limits on participation. - A platfonn should enable people to take their creativity as far as they like. There can, of cottrse, be other kinds of limits (such as prohibition of harassment). Rather than requiring people to do certain types of thing, all different ways to participate should be supported. Platforms should undergird the self-efficacy beliefs of individuals: that is, their sense that they can make ti dif- ference in the world, and that this difference can be attributed to their own deliberate actions. 8 These beliefs an like~y to be fostered by platfonns which enable users to make their mark, and which are designed to encourage constructive interventions from others.

2:JO Pl.A TFOHMS FOR CREATl\"ITY

3. Celebrate participants, not the platform. - A platform should be designed to showcase the inspiring things that people can do there, and help them to make connections, rather than promoting its own identity or brand, or that of its creators.

4. Support storytelling. - A platform should enable people to exchange and connect through stories, because storytelling is n fundnmrmtal way in which people come to comprehend the world, understand them- selves, and connect with each other.9 Stories are not necessarily long things - they can be as short as a sentence - bztt a story connects experience, identity, and the wish to share something.

5. Some gifts, some theatre, some recogrution. -A platform should provide a space in which creative 'gifts' can be given and received; should offer a pe,formative space, a stage on which people can show off their creative identity to others; and should enable individuals to explicitly recognize and give credit to the creative abilities of others. As we saw in chapter 4, crea- tors typically value the sense of being part of a community, and they like unambiguous ways to be seen, and to be recognized and

appreciated. 6. Online to offline is a continuum.

- A platform should seek to connect the digital realm and the

physical everyday world in imaginative ways. There can be exceptions - generally where a platfonn is purely offline, which can be refreshing in a world where so much is online - but usu- ally it is valuable to create pathways for connection bet:ween people's online and offline existence.

7. Reinvent learning. - A platform should enable people to learn from each other. Writers on education and learning such as John Holt and Ivan Jllich - as we saw in chapters 3 and 6 - argued that learning is a 11at11rnl process which flourishes when learners can follow their own interests, and explore whatever engages their cmiosity. 10

PLATFORMS FOR CREATIVITY

Platforms for creativity can support this kind of infonnal, spon- taneous learning, where people can learn through being inspired by other learners.

8. Foster genuine communities. -A platfonn should enable a meaningful community - or mul- tiple sets of meaningful communities - to form around creative work. Although the term 'community' is used quite freely ro describe online gatherings of users, a tmly effective commu- nity is based around relationships of respect, trust and support. Platfonns should be des-igned so that users are encouraged to give useful feedback to others, and to form connections with identifi- able l/Sers over time.

This isn't meant to be the definitive list or final wor<l on the subject. But it seems to have stood up well. I do like a numbered list, so I'm going to tell you about a further three- point thing, as well as a four-point thing, which complement the principles above.

TWO MORE KEY SETS OF PRINClPLES

There are two more sets of principles which strike me as incredibly helpful and relevant, and both of them come from Mitch Resnick and colleagues at MIT Media Lab. I've worked with Mitch for a decade now, on and off, connected by LEGO and the LEGO Foundation, and we strongly share the same values - well, in fact, I probably learn ed them from him -that people should have tools which they can play with very openly and freely, rather than the tools coming with prescribed meanings and purposes. This applies co children and toys, as well as - I like to think - everything else. And we bejjeve that people should be able to make things in a very open and unlimited environment, because we learn through putting thmgs together, tinkering and making things - the

i

21,0 PLATFORMS FOR Gl<EATIVITY

idea of construaionirm, pioneered by Seymour Papert, who was Mitch Resnick's mentor and supervised his PhD. 11

Resnick has worked on various projects to enable this kind of play and learning to happen, most spectacularly by creat- ing Scratch, the global phenomenon that enables children (and anyone) to click together code on screen to create com- puter programs. By summer 2017, as Scratch celebrated its ten-year anniversary, 20 mi llion users had created 24 million projects in Scratch, and bad made 120 mi ll ion comments on each other's work.

In developing such tools, Resnick champions the idea of a 'low floor, high ceiling, wide walls' experience. 12 (I men- tioned this in the previous chapter, in relation to music.) It was Pa pert who suggested that for a technology to effectively support learning and creativity, it should be easy for people to step into the experience and get started - that's the low floor - and it should also enable people to work on increas- ingly complex projects as their skills and ambitions deve lop - that's the high ceiling. Resnick added the notion of wide walls, which mean that the path from simple to complex is not one straight-upwards path but can take many different directions. 13

So if we take the case of LEGO, for instance, the LEGO system offers a 'low Boor' because it is easy and natural for anyone to pick up a few bricks and pieces and put them together to make something. But there's a high ceiling because you can make incredibly complex architecture, or spaceships. And there are wide walls because it doesn't have to be architecture or spacesnips at all - you can use LEGO to make birds and Bowers, marble runs, jewellery, machines, or whatever you want.

So ideally all platforms for creativity should offer 'low floor, high ceiling, wide walls' experiences. And in a differ- ent angle on the same topic, Mitch Resnick and his ream

PLATFOJUl!S FOR G HEATIVITY 241

have identified the '4 Ps' which are crucial to platforms like Scratch, and other creative learning activities: Projects, Peers, Passion and Play. Resnick summarizes the point of each as follows:

• Projects: People learn best when they are actively working on meaningful projects - generating new ideas, designing prototypes, refining iteratively.

• Peers: Learning flourishes as a social activity, with people sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, and building on one another's work.

• Passion: \.Vhen people work on projects they care about, they work longer and harder, persist in the face of chal- lenges, and learn more in the process.

• Pilty: Learning involves playful experimentation - trying new things, tinkering with materials, testing bow1daries, taking risks, iterating again and again. 14

This excellent list captures all of the elements most vital to fostering creative experiences that are going to be both enjoyable and valuable, and which will therefore be sustain- able, because people will want to keep going and doing new things.

PLATFORMS FOR CREATIVITY I N PRACTICE

In the rest of this chapter I will give a few more examples of platforms for creativity. I think the online ones are straight- forward and I don't need to explain much more about them. For instance, YouTube is a classic platform for creativity for the reasons set out in chapter 4, and for all the ways in which it matches up with what I've said about such platforms above, which I am sure you can recognize. Also my com- puter tells me that the word 'Y ouTube' has already appeared

PLATFORMS FOH G HE.\.T IVITY

in th.is book 150 times, so we seem to be well covered there. (YouTube is also at the epicentre of some of the economic woes discussed in chapter 7, but that doesn't stop it from being an effective platform for creativity.) The digital game i\1inecraft became phenomenally successful - more than 130 million copies sold by 2017, tbe second best-selling video game of all time (after Tetris) - due to its open invitation to do anything within its environment, and to create sto- ries yourself, rather than having them created for you by a professional developer elsewhere. Indeed, 'game' is not necessarily the right word for it - Minecraft is a toy, and a platform, and a sort of social network. It is also a stage upon which numerous performances are delivered and captured in phenomenally popular YouTube videos. (And we're back to YouTube again; it's not without reason that Kevin Kelly identifies YouTube as 'the center of our culture'. 15) 1n the world of real-life construction, LEGO is a good example of a physical tool which is a great platform for creativity, for aU the above reasons. LEGO is again boosted by a huge online community of YouTube video-makers, as well as multitu- dinous other enthusiasts who exchange images and ideas across numerous biogs, sites and networks, as well as physi- cal events.

So let's consider other kinds of things that might be considered platforms for creativity. In 2014 I was con- tacted by the team at De Chocoladefabriek in Gouda, the Netherlands. De Chocoladefabriek was an old chocolate fac- tory, as the name suggests, which had been converted into a new home for several different civic services and societies - the city library, the regional archive, a printing society, workspaces, a media workshop, a youth workshop and a res- taurant all made their home there. Their vision was inspired, they said, by the first edition of Making is Connecting, which was one of the nicest things I had ever heard. Their idea

Pl,.\Tl'ORMS 1'01( Gl(EAT l V ITY

was that all of these organizations and facilities would come together in one place, and think of themselves holistically as facilitating creativity in the community. They developed a 'cultural programme' together, and I found it memorable that the restaurant people had just as muc.:h of a say in the cultural programme as did the library people or the print- ing people. They used wooden pallets, which had previously been used for cooling chocolate, to show off creative work by the people of Gouda in prominent places around the building. I Hked their sense of doing this all as part of one collective creative mission, and that they wanted to invert the idea of the library, so that it was not just a place where you went to find the written-down expertise of others, but where you could go to make and explore the knowledge and inspiration of your own community. 16

So the idea of the city library was expanded from being like a bookshelf - a repository of knowledge - to being a platform - a place where the community m{(ke knowledge together. Rather like a11 online platform, it was a place that invited people to come in and do something, and to create the experience together, in terms of tone and feel and plan- ning, as well as actual content. It's in this way that a physica l place or environment can be a platform, just as a toy can be, or a digital social media enterprise can be.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS BUCLDlNG

PLATFORMS FOR CREATIVITY

Through my work with the LEGO Foundation and Ashoka - the global network that aims to build and cultivate a com- munity of change leaders - I have been able to meet and work with astounding socia l entrepreneurs who have estab- lished organizations that are changing how young people learn around the world. I will discuss three of them here. 17

PLATFOHMS FOR C REATIVITY

lmaginatirm Foundation

The Imagination Foundation (more recently styling itself as Imagination.org) is the organization that runs the Global Cardboard Challenge, mentioned above. The Foundation grew out of the huge response to a short online film , 'Caine's Arcade', which went viral in 2012, the true story of a nine-year-old boy who made an arcade-game centre out of cardboard, in his father's Los Angeles car parts store, just for fun. Tbe 11-minute video included a link for people to donate to Caine's college fund, which raised over $60,000 on the first day, and nearly $250,000 overall. This was matched with funding from the Goldhirsh Foundation, and quickly led to the launch of the Imagination Foundation. It was Nirvan MuJUck who made the film and raised the money, but he hadn't been planning to run a foundation, so the Imagination Foundation quickly appointed Mike McGalliard as its passionate and hard-working Executive Director.

As well as the annual Global Cardboard Challenge, since 2014 McGalliard has been supporting people to launch Imagination Chapters, which are ' pop-up learning spaces that foster creativity, entrepreneurship and 21st cenmry skills through creative play'. There are already more than 120 Chapters around the world, in Libraries, com,mmity cen- tres, and other spaces, as well as in schools, using a range of tools and materials, from cardboard to advanced electron- ics. Chapters usually meet weekly, and Chapter Leaders, who come from all walks of life, have formed a highly active onJine social network for idea-sharing and support. Like the Cardboard Challenge, it's a very simple idea - a weekly meemp to make stuff, essentially - but becomes a platform for creativity because of the invitation and the shared experi- ence, both within each Chapter and shared around the world online.

PLATFORMS l'OR GREAT l\' [TY

It still takes some organizing. McGalliard recalls that the first Imagination Chapters were weekly two-hour ses- sions where participants could build whatever they wanted. 'People said, "This is great, we love the freedom, but actu- ally we need more direction".' Therefore the Foundation has been developing tools for support - to provide a rich seam of inspiration, as well as personal support for leaders. McGalliard says, 'We communicate with people a lot online, but they are still very personal interactions. Our Chapter Leaders are from all walks of life; half are teachers but half have no teaching experience at all. They support and inspire each other all the time.' Imagination Chapters were con- ceived as an out-of-school activity, but it has mrned om that in some cases they are being used by teachers who want to change their systems. McGalliard calls them tools of 'modest disruption '. They slip in under the radar: 'The Chapters are such a positive thing - nobody's actually going to stop you.' But the Chapters open up a playful space which is unlike most other kinds of school learning, and they are beginning to have a knock-on impact on how learning is conceived in other parts of those schools. So platforms can begin simply, but then their reach grows, and can change how people think about schools, libraries, and other taken-for-granted places.

Design for Change

It was another unexpected moment that led to the global platform Design for Change. In Ahmedabad, India, in 2001, Kiran Bir Sethi was so dismayed by the regimented and impersonal style of her son's education that she removed him from school one day, and started her own, in her home. Trained as a designer, she couldn't help noticing that educa- tion had been designed to satisfy the demands of parents, not children. Sethi insisted on listening to children, co-creating

:.! l(J l'I.ATJ'ORMS F'OH <..au;AT l\'JTY

learning with them, and designing learning e!.'Periences that would enable them to flourish. 'In India', she explains, 'design was always thought of as happening only in design studios - an ideal. Nothing to do with children and education. I think that's what I really understood. Design thinking, and how design thinking should shape education.' This meant listen- ing carefully to the needs of children and collaboratively designing a system which would enable them to learn in the best possible way.

Her school quickly grew to become the Riverside School, in Ahmedabad, with 390 students and an outstanding reputa- tion as one of the best schools in India. Creating this school led Sethi to articulate design processes in ways that made sense to young learners, and she developed her idea that schools should build the 'I Can' mindset - where chi ldren instinctively know that they can do things and make a differ- ence in the world. By 2009, Sethi realized she could have an impact beyond her own schoo l, and launched these principles as an inspiring national and then international movement, Design for Change. The core elements of design think- ing were reduced to a memorable four-step process: 'Feel - Imagine - Do - Share'. 'Feel' means to empathize with the people facing a problem; 'Imagine' is about brainstorm- ing possible solutions; 'Do' means selecting and executing a plan; and 'Share' is about communicating the story to inspire others.

Since then, Design for Change has empowered children in more than 200,000 schools in over forty-four countries to create 18,000 stories of change, uploaded to the Design for Change website. Riverside School is the base, and offers training to other educators, but the Design for Change idea s and resources are spread for free. 'We really simplified it', Sethi explains, 'and we said it was open source, so you could download, you could customize, you could change. We

l'l,A Tl'O IHI S FOR GR IL\T IVITY

would support you in any way we could. That's what made it global.'

The platform of Design for Change invites young people to tackle any kind of problem in a creative, playful way, using the four-step design thinking process. Sethi considers: 'I think one of the things that design thinking has removed is that there's no such thing as a problem - it's an opportunity. There is no failure, it's responsibility. Just as in play, there is no failure, just an opportunity to do something different, do something better.'

Skateistnn

Perhaps the most unusual and thrilling of all these exam- ples is Skateistan, founded in 2007 by Oliver Percovich. Skateistan runs skate schools, first in Afghanistan, and then also in Cambodia and South Africa, which offer a combina- tion of skateboarding and arts-based learning to deprived chi ldren.

At first Ollie Percovich can seem diffident - you get the impression, at any time, that he would rather be out- side skateboarding. But rus gentle determination to create opportunities for girls in Afghanistan has been incredible. Of course, we should give full credit to his team , and the com- munities which enab led the schools to open, and the young women themselves who seized this chance. But the story starts with Ollie, who went to Afghanistan because his then- girlfriend was working for an NGO there.

He was immediately struck by the sheer unfairness of the situation for young women in Afghanistan. He explains, ' I didn't see any women driving a car, or serving me in a shop, or anywhere - they're just invisible in society.' But when he was skateboarding on the streets of Kabul, it turned out that both girls and boys were eager to have a go. Because there

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were no cultural rules forbidding girls from skateboarding, they found an opportunity to Aourish. Percovich took this as an opportunity to show girls that they could succeed.

'I wanted the girls to beat the boys', he adrnfrs. 'In every sphere the boys were saying they were better than the girls, simply because they've had the opportunities to do those things. They practised things so they had got better. The girls had opportunities cut off. They were told they couldn't do anything, but they didn't have any opportunities to do anything in the first place. I thought that was grossly unfair. I could get away with enabling skateboarding because skate- boarding hadn't been seen before. Nobody had made up rules saying that girls shouldn't do it.' ·

Skateistan was established with a particular emphasis on recruiting and supporting girls - 'We put 80 per cent of our effort into getting 50 per cent girls.' This involved gaining support from the community and religious leaders, and work- ing within cultural norms, such as having separate days for boys and girls, and having only female teachers with female students. Step by step, they were able to get girls skateboard- ing and then get girls into the classroom. And step by step, following the interests of students, they became interested in subjects such as photography, social media, art and the envi- ronment. Because they felt comfortable and safe, the girls and boys became eager learners. Older and more confident children became teachers to other .

This led , amongst other things, to a delegation of the Skateistan girls going to speak in the Afghan parlfament, an<l at UN conferences in other countries. Percovich reflects, 'It was amazing, first just getting them to school, and then get- ting to represent Afghan youth around the world through the bridge that the skateboard created.' In Afghanistan where female literacy is less than 25 per cent, Skateistan ensures participation of at least 40 per cent girls on all its

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programmes. Afghanistan now has the highest proportion of female skateboarders in the world.

This may not sound like the most straightforward exam pie of a platform for creativity - and it isn't - because it is many things, including being a school, a school with a significant emphasis on one activity, skateboarding. But you may not have realized - I didn't, initially - that skateboarding itself is a platform for creativity. It invites you to do whatever you like with that one bit of equipment, the skateboard. Ollie Percovich asserts that skateboarding is intrinsically play- ful because, unlike other sports, there is no 'correct' way to do it. Skateboarding tends to create a community of people who, whatever their own ability, are highly supportive of others anJ welcome innovation rather than competition. 'It's important that there is no right and wrong way. The more playful you are, the more inventive and creative you are with the skateboard, that is what is celebrated in skateboarding culture. You're not actually doing it right, unless you're somehow breaking the rules.' Skateistan is an mcredible and inspiring platform that has unlocked the: creativity of indi- viduals and contributed to real social change.

PLATFORMS FOR CRFATTVJTY:

KIND~ESS A:-.:D THE FUTURF

As we have seen, platforms for creativity are not necessar- ily technological, and can take many forms. Social media services are often referred to as platforms, but may not be platforms for creativity unless they actually invite creative par- ticipation . For instance, Facebook is usually more a place for communication and social org:mization, and sharing things found elsewhere, and not so much a platform for creativity per se, although it can be used in that way. (Also, Facebook is creepy for reasons discussed in chapters 6 and 7.) But it's

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not clear-cut that certain things 'are' or 'are not' platforms for creativity - it depends what you do with them. I think that Twitter is more of a platform for creativity, because of its invitation to craft little gems out of 140 (or 280) cha r- acters, and the ways in which it enables users to show and connect their creativity with others, including others that they don't know. But that's not how it is used by everybody. YouTube is more of a platform for creativity than either of these because it comes with a clear invitation to participate by producing quite substantia l creative works. Of course, the people who create videos are heavily oumumbered by the people who onJy view videos, and not all of the content is non-professional material, but the invitation - the sense of 'you can do this too' - is part of YouTube's identity. (And this remains true even if we recognize that the reasons why YouTube wants users to feed it free videos are commercial.) Of cou rse there are also non-commercial online platforms for creativity, such as Scratch, mentioned above, and open source systems such as Elgg and Buddycloud, which power socia l networks that are not commercia l and not vehicles for advertising.

With on line platforms there is a particular need to develop environments which facilitate kindness. It wou ld be nice to think that human kindness just emerges anyway, but we have seen that that is not always the case. Tim Wu, professor of law at Colwnbia Law School and author of The Attention Merchants, 18 observes that 'to maintain spaces that bring out the best in us' there need to be very careful ly designed structures.

Looking back at the 2000s, the great mistake of the web's idealists was a near-total failure to create institutions designed to preserve that which was good about the web - its openness, its room for a diversity of voices and its

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earnest amateurism - and to ward off that which was bad: the trolling, the dickbait, the demands of excessive and intrusive advertising, the security breaches. There was too much faith that everything would take care of itself - that 'netizens' were different, that the culture of the web was intrinsically better. Unfortunately, that excessive faith in web culture left a void, one that became filled by the lowest forms of human conduct and the basest norms of com- merce. ft really was just like the classic story of the party that went sour. 19

Wu suggests that this is not exactly a new depressing discov- ery, because we have known for a long time that key public institutions such as parks, universities and museums need to be carefully framed and protected. We don't just let people or businesses do whatever they like with them - we look after them, for everyone, for the greater good, and for the future. So we need to start th.inking more about how online platforms can be set up and run in ways tl1at foster kind- ness and supportive behaviour, and which also do not have to adopt a corporate business model with continuous pressure for revenue growth.

And as we have seen in this chapter, platforms for creativ- ity can take many forms. They do not need to be online at a ll, although the connecting properties of the internet can often add value. They can be single happenings, or orchestrated multiple events - Like the Cardboard Cha llenge, or Hey Clay, a day of free pottery sessions across the UK run by the Crafts Council2° - or can be toys, toolkits, schools, or other kinds of thing and environments. Not all kinds of platforms suit all kinds of people, so there is a wide-open opportunity for us to develop new platforms to engage different groups and give them opportunities to unlock previously unrecog- nized creative potential.