Creative Clusters 2006 : Mainstreaming Creativity
November 7, 2006
Posted by Dick in: Events | TrackbackSecond day of this three day conference coming to a close - detailed info on themes, speakers, delegates etc is at the Creative Clusters website.
The first day was a bit slow but I was really inspired by a talk from Andrea Siodmok, Head of Design Knowledge, Design Council UK. The headline was Mainstreaming Design and Andrea was a late change of published speaker so I don't have a copy of her slides, but the inspiration bit was simple: when developing a 'product' you need sketches to visualise the product, when developing a 'service' you need a narrative to understand the experience. This linked straight back to Jon Drori's focus on the need for storyboards as a key development tool in his 'Compelling User Experiences' talk at the recent Connecting the South West event - download from the Connecting Bristol website.
The Creative Economy Programme has featured extensively as the key driver of future Govt policy and apparently Will Hutton is writing a paper for Govt at the moment.
In contrast to day one, today has been stimulating - not least because I had to focus on my own presentation which was on Electric December as a project which makes Creative Connections which are inclusive - seemed to go very well and led to lots of interesting conversations and contacts. However the key info to share is how many people talked about the importance of place or location in sustaining a creative economy - everything that Tom Fleming says in the CEP Infrastructure paper has been referenced many times today in different ways. It also made me think that you cannot have a cultural strategy which is not cast as an integral part of creative economy strategy. In fact I begin to feel that public investment needs to focus on the cultural and connectivity infrastructure to create the environment for creative business but then leave them to get on with it. Final interesting snipet from Graeme Evans, Director, Cities Institute, London Met Uni in a talk titled 'Cities of Culture & Creative Spaces' where he said that any truly creative city would not need to brand itself 'creative' and would not need a 'tourist board' - don't homogenise, celebrate difference and the constant process of evolution & change, moving into my words now: DO NOT brand it LIVE IT.
Dick
Newcastle
7 Nov 2006
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