Creativity at Social Scale Part 2
Building Creative Societies
Check out Part 1: Creativity as Public Good and Part 3: Designing for Scale
Steven J. Tepper and Terence E. McDonnell
In the Western world, we treat creativity as a property of individuals. This is particularly true in America given our hyper-individualized society and orientation toward exceptionalism. Our culture places creative geniuses, innovators, and disruptors on pedestals and views creativity as an innate trait–something specific people have that others do not. Given such orientations toward creativity, it comes as no surprise that we structure our organizations and institutions to search for “talent.” We let the cream rise to the top, pooling together those we label as gifted and artistic. Then we skim them. We separate them from the rest of society by putting them in elite art schools or segregating the “creatives” from other employees. Creativity becomes a zero-sum game where scarce resources are organized to support the select few rather than invested in ways to spread creativity to make it commonplace. This is the bubblefication of creativity.
Focusing on and segregating out creative individuals rather than supporting systems that generate creativity more widely is anathema to the health of a creative society. We need to push back on this social organization of creativity and its inclination toward elite and exclusive creative bubbles. How would the world be different if it was organized to see and support the creative potential in everyone (Creativity for Everyone)? How can we encourage people to creatively work together toward civic goals (Creative Crowds)? How do we integrate creative workers and processes throughout social systems (Creativity Everywhere)? Creativity at Social Scale is the shift in frame we need. Below, we look at a number of innovations along these paths.
Creativity for Everyone
We advocate for emancipating creative tools and training so that more people can nurture their creative capacities. According to the Department of Education transparency tool, 7 of the top 10 and 15 of the top 30 most expensive schools in the U.S. are art and design colleges. Art and design colleges historically don’t scale, making them expensive and selective. Can we afford to keep creative education on the sidelines as the global demand for secondary education grows to 300 million new learners over the next two decades? If not, how can we scale studio-based art and design education?
At one of our colleges, the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, we have embraced the challenge – opening up restrictive gateways and embracing new technology and new approaches to teaching that allow us to scale and achieve high levels of excellence. At 8,000 students (fall 2022), the Institute is the largest design and arts college at a research institution. This has required rethinking the studio and embracing new types of scalable assignments. For instance, a first-year architecture class turned the campus into its studio, with hundreds of students collaborating on a design project that covered 3 athletic fields. Because of innovations like this, instead of choosing only 45 of 200 aspiring sophomore architects (due to limits of studio space), the school advances almost every student from the freshman cohort.
Universities are only one solution to scalable creative education. Games like Minecraft and popular game ‘modding’ ecosystems have empowered a generation of gamers to become creators, not just consumers. New companies like Endless Studios are building platforms to learn storytelling, game design, computer programming, project management, 2-D and 3-D art, sound editing, and more. Endless wants to create educational and work pathways for many of the 3 billion gamers across the globe interested in digital media creation as a career.
And, if we are interested in scale, we should also look to movements that build community and infrastructure to support creatives who are already tinkering, designing, and making things. The Maker Movement is a fantastic example. Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, hosted the first Maker Faire in 2006 in San Mateo, CA, attracting 20,000 people in its first year. In an interview, Dougherty reflected on the movement: “people were experimenting, playing and trying to create culture, not just receive it, and I knew there were others like me who wanted to learn from each other.” Soon after, Maker Faires sprung up across the country, as did new magazines and websites that supported the community of makers. Finally, thousands of maker spaces – what we call “creativity gyms” –were launched by governments, nonprofits, and schools across the US and globally. One lesson here is that creativity is already operating at scale – there is a groundswell of passion and interest in building, designing, and expressing ideas. What is often missing, however, is an infrastructure that builds community and allows creators to improve, critique, learn, grow, and have an impact on one another and their broader communities.
We acknowledge that creativity (or at least creative expression and artistic production), especially through digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, does operate at scale. The level of activity and the fantastic potential of these tools and platforms, but we believe creativity at social scale – designed for impact and public purposes – requires a community of generous feedback, like the makers community, as well as opportunities for growth and sustainable impact. Too many of these platforms reward “a flash in the pan” creativity-driven celebrity culture and, we contend, fail to harness this abundant creative energy and potential toward more robust public and personal outcomes. But we leave that for another debate.
Creative Crowds
We also champion scaling creativity so it is intimately intertwined with democratic life. Many observers and pundits worry about the state of American democracy and the health of civil society. Today, we see signs of growing alienation – as more people report feeling like their voices don’t matter or that the political system doesn’t care about ‘people like them.’ And while hyper-partisanship has driven up voter participation, the U.S. still lags far behind other industrialized nations in terms of voter turnout; and more sustained and active forms of political engagement – joining a protest, attending a town hall, writing to an elected official – continue to decline. While there are many factors that influence participation, we believe that an under-leveraged tool for democratic renewal is creative co-production – what we call creative crowds.
Creative crowds are inclusive civic projects that bring people together to participate in art-making or other creative pursuits, organized around political or community ends. For example, the AIDS Memorial Quilt involved hundreds of thousands of Americans contributing a quilt panel to commemorate loved ones lost to AIDS. In its first appearance in 1987, it was about the size of a football field, but by 1996 it had expanded to cover the entire National Mall. All 54 tons of the quilt on display made manifest the weight of loss and grief Americans were carrying. The AIDS Quilt deployed creativity at scale to invite and engage millions of Americans – providing a relatively low barrier to participation and yielding an extraordinary civic payout – seeing one’s voice harnessed and leveraged to create something much more powerful than many individuals acting alone.
Another creative crowds project was conceived by artist Mel Chin in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Chin wanted to call attention to the alarming rates of lead poisoning in children’s playgrounds throughout New Orleans. To do so, he invited school kids to draw their own $100 bills – what he called “fundred dollars.” Several hundred thousand school children created fundred dollars, which Chin then collected in an armored truck, stored and displayed in a row home that was converted into a gigantic bank vault (and also served as a community meeting space) and, eventually, delivered to the steps of the U.S. Capitol. As with the AIDS Quilt, we see the power of creative crowds to 1) lower barriers to participation; 2) give voice to everyday people through creative expression; 3) turn the personal into the political; and 4) allow individual acts to become monumental once collected and exhibited.
Creativity Everywhere
Creativity will operate at social scale only if it is integrated into other social scale systems – it cannot be limited to stages, studios, laboratories, and other special contexts. How do we build a society where creativity -- the act of generating ideas, making unexpected connections, openness to novelty and difference, taking risks, and creating social meaning through shared stories and expression -- pervades how we teach, how we care for each other, how we work, how we govern, and how we communicate? Inspired by The Vagina Monologues, V-day is a movement of art and activism that mobilizes people and communities to end violence against women. Held on Valentine’s Day, V-day events integrate and catalyze creativity on college campuses and in communities where local groups perform The Vagina Monologues or produce monologues from their own experience (raising over 120 million dollars toward this public health crisis). Reflecting on V-Day events, founder V (formerly Eve Ensler) embraced the scale of these endeavors:
“From all over America and the world, everybody has kind of joined these forces together of dance and poetry and song and art installations to … break through this kind of denial and patriarchal wall and prison that we all live in all the time. And it's so beautiful to see everybody doing it in their own way, in their own community, adapting it to their own culture" (NPR, 2013).
Or consider the work of indigenous designer Joseph Kunkler, who engaged artists from the Santa Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico to envision and build an “arts trail” – marked by eight community-designed sculptures. The trail connects tribal members to a new commuter rail running to Albuquerque and Santa Fe. This artist-led community design approach to a transportation challenge provided a creative alternative to the daily hazards of walking along busy roadways to the train station – integrating place, history, identity, culture, and economic opportunity.
Many examples of creativity everywhere come from the “creative placemaking and placekeeping” movement – with more than $150M invested by national foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts over the past 10-15 years in pilot projects, including embedding artists in city agencies, community development organizations, hospitals, state and city parks, and other areas where they can work side-by-side with decision makers in other sectors.
In our recent interview with Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation and creative placemaking advocate, he reflected on the extent to which the methods and processes of cross-sectoral collaboration and arts-led community development diffused widely and became a durable part of policy-making. He referred to the “machinery” of scale and diffusion, which included a strong narrative, powerful advocates, credible research, pooled philanthropy that included the National Endowment for the Arts, and strategic convenings. This machinery helped the “creative placemaking” movement grow. But, ultimately, the machinery was dismantled when ArtPlace America – a pivotal organization that distributed grants, funded research, and convened practitioners, educators, and policymakers – sunsetted in 2020. There is an active debate as to whether the machinery that Rapson describes was necessary for the continued diffusion of the creative placemaking model. But it is clear that if creativity is to be everywhere, we need tacticians and designers to devise a playbook for infiltrating other sectors, domains, and institutions and equally effective tactics and designs for how to make sure such advances are sustained. The ArtPlace America model was “designed” for scale and diffusion, something that is often missing from other innovations and initiatives in the cultural sector.
Beyond arts-led community development, we are seeing investment in placing creativity and creative practitioners at intersections with other sectors. Even private companies – like Google, Autodesk, Facebook, Xerox, Bell Labs – have recognized that embedding artists and designers as creative catalysts throughout their organizations can drive innovation and change. We need to build on these examples if we want creativity everywhere. Can we expand the “artist-in-residency” model from a few dozen cities to every city in America? Can every hospital and nursing home have creative ambassadors who work with patients and caregivers? What would it look like if creative catalysts were everywhere – influencing our approach to every area of work, health, education, and community development?
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven J. Tepper is dean and professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest, comprehensive design and arts school at a research university. Tepper is a sociologist and leading writer and speaker on higher education and U.S. cultural policy, and his work has fostered national discussions around topics of cultural engagement, creative work and careers, art and democracy, and the transformative possibilities of a 21st-century creative campus.
Terence E. McDonnell is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a cultural sociologist who studies the role of art, media, and creativity in everyday life. He examines how resonance and persuasion shape behavior by examining cases as diverse as HIV prevention campaigns, protest art, awareness ribbons, art installations, images of President Obama, virtual reality experiences, and junk drawers. He is the author of Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns (University of Chicago, 2016) and Measuring Culture (Columbia University 2020).
