Creative Producer International Labs

Central to our design of Creative Producers International were two major events held in the first two years of the programme, in Bristol and Tokyo respectively. Each of these events consisted of an extended residential lab and a conference on the theme of Making the City Playable.

We began with a three-week residential Lab which brought the Creative Producers together at Watershed in Bristol. The Lab utilised the skills and experience of Watershed’s producing team and wider network and was designed around our core beliefs and core aims, as outlined below.

Core Beliefs

Creative Producers are the key to change in cities

Inspiring future city projects embody inclusivity

We transparently share what works and what doesn’t in a safe space

We prioritise the importance of peer to peer learning

Core Aims

Cohort Building

Create trusting relationships. Sow the seeds of self-empowerment, collective cohesion and collaboration. Ensure cultural differences don’t lead to inequality in participation. Work towards effective communication across cultures and time zones.

Network Building

Establish the network of participants themselves as the primary source of knowledge.  Enable participants to share their experiences, expertise, methods and networks with each other.

City Change Making

Understand specific city contexts and the landscapes of city-change making.  Learn from best practice and latest thinking. Generate ideas for city change and an understanding of how to deliver and communicate them.

Tools, Skills and Confidence

Equip participants with skills, confidence, networks and language to start the change and make work in their cities.

Practice and Reflection

Foster an open atmosphere where questions, honesty, agency, exploration and failure are important constituent parts. Give ample time to reflect, share and absorb.

Morale and Atmosphere

Have a good time! Keep space for discussion and disagreement. Leave with energy and inspiration.

A year on from the Bristol lab, we hosted a second residential lab for the cohort in Tokyo. By this point, the Creative Producers had spent a year researching and developing strategies for city change and were now comfortable with what change could mean or look like in their own contexts. Building on this foundation, we wanted them to think beyond the local and familiar, and connect into a global conversation – emphasising the value of having access to viewpoints from five different continents across the globe. Tokyo was a context that, for the majority (ourselves included) was very different to their own. We encouraged the participants to reflect on their work in relation to their new surroundings, to challenge their habits and preconceptions, and consider how their practice would translate (or need to adapt) for this city.

By leading them through this process together, we hoped that they would grow comfortable with this kind of critical interrogation, and realise the benefits of exploring their ideas through the perspectives of the other Creative Producers’ cities. Here, the global conversation became more urgent and important than ever before. 

“It’s easy to make assumptions about how the world works without actually going to visit the places that you’re making assumptions about working in, and to place a lot of your own bias and privilege into those environments from afar and from within, when you’re here. So, I think a broadened horizon is definitely something I will take away from this, and a sense of new possibilities.”
– Luke Emery (Bristol)

We worked hard to replicate the open and trusting environment we had so successfully created in Bristol but holding a space in a city in which we ourselves were guests proved to be challenging.

As well as bringing the cohort together to connect and converse, we created opportunities for them to actively collaborate and engage a wider audience. In both Bristol and Tokyo we held a public conference on the theme of Making the City Playable which brought together an international mixture of artists, producers, academics and policy makers to examine how we engage with play in the modern world and look at its potential importance in the future of our cities.

The Creative Producers designed and delivered playful workshops for the conference delegates held in a variety of public spaces – from an empty shop and a church crypt in Bristol to busy public plazas in Tokyo where messy creativity is not usually permitted. Co-designing these activities for our audiences at the Playable City conferences gave the Creative Producers’ joint ownership of the programme content. They experienced each other’s methodologies in practice, explored how to adapt their ideas to new surroundings and grew comfortable with collaborating and co-creating solutions together. This process laid important foundations for ongoing collaboration over the course of our time together.

We bookended the programme with two Digital Labs and worked with Fred Deakin, Professor of Interactive Digital Arts at University of the Arts London, to create an online Lab format that would allow the Creative Producers to collaborate remotely. The Labs experimented with synchronous and asynchronous methods –  some sessions involved coming together online to workshop ideas in real time, whilst other tasks were completed independently and shared with their colleagues for development.

The process presented very real challenges; from difficulties in finding humane meeting times for synchronous communication across different time zones through to subtle cultural differences that can be easily misinterpreted when using video platforms. But the results were extremely encouraging: the labs allowed the cohort to co-design creative workshops to be delivered for public audiences during our Tokyo conference and a manifesto for the continuation of the network into the future.

How to Run Your Own Creative Digital Lab

How to Run Your Own Creative Digital Lab

By Fred Deakin

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