I spent most of yesterday in the ‘Explore, Map, Build Workshop’, an event hosted by the ATELIER-D project in which I’m working with 6 colleagues from the area of Design. We managed to get together a good group of people from the four corners of the university, representing some of the projects around Web 2.0 and Open Educational Resources currently in development across campus (‘some’ because there are actually too many and our space was limited!) . The idea was to create an opportunity for people to explore and forge connections across projects, but it was quite nice just to see people meeting others, in some cases for the first time, and I ended my day thinking that some good links were forged or renewed in the process.
I had a go at live-blogging the workshop, but I made a pig’s ear out of the job. Toggling between computer, post-its and mobile just didn’t work for me, though I suspect there is also an element of practice involved, like mostly everything. Andreia Santos from OLnet, on the other hand, did a very nice job in 3 posts: post 1, post 2 and post 3. Another OLnet’er, Giota Alevizou also posted some reflections and created several clouds on Cloudwords. So, instead of sharing my dismal attempt, I thought I’d write down some intial reflections on the day as a blog post because, as night fell and I found myself with my dog warming my feet as he likes to do, I started thinking about boundaries once more …
We started the workshop by asking people to create mood boards representing their projects. Later on, everyone was asked to roam around the room and add coloured post-its with notes onto each other’s boards. Notes on what? Answer: ideas, themes, questions, anything that came to mind. A bit vague, I know, but this was an experiment.
I think everyone found these activities provided fun and interesting possibilities for them to present themselves, their projects and also to strike bits of conversation with others with whom they might share or combine interests – with ‘combine’ being the operative word I had at the back of my mind when we were discussing the aims and structure for this.
So, initially we had a bit of ‘icebreaking’ combined with ‘brainstorming’ of sorts, but everything rather dynamic and visual.
Working with images (and, for me, sounds too) has enormous potential, and the materials we collected from the walls at the end of the day were quite powerful. One thing we didn’t do (though we’d considered doing, when we were discussing the activities for the day) was to explore the use of colours on the post-its. But I think we also need to think about another aspect of this that we didn’t quite explore as much as I’d originally hoped (partially because we had very little time), what I tend to think of as the ‘creative gap’.
In music (and arts, generally, but I can only honestly own up to stuff I say about music), there’s talk of ‘reception’. This is, basically, the way in which the audience interprets what the artists create. It’s quite fascinating that what an artist ‘intends’ (and many will take issue with the idea that they may have ‘intentions’, but I’ll move swiftly on) is rarely ever what the audience (not an homogeneous category, to start with) ‘receives’. There’s a lot of debate (and terminological confusion) around this, but (again) moving swiftly on to the point, I guess that, what remains as a common ground there is what I called above the ‘creative gap’, this space between ‘stuff’ and ‘what-we-make-of-it’. For me, this is where the most exciting and innovative things come from.
So, basically, I think that yesterday we only barely scratched the surface as far as the possibilities of this creative space are concerned. The addition of post-its onto to others boards was an attempt at identifying boudaries of this space and start playing with them, but I think we need to refine the idea and come up with other, perhaps better techniques to exploit the results of the ‘presentation’ and ‘brainstorming’ stages, something that can encourage play with the boundaries of this communicative type of space in-between people.
I think the themes and model framework that emerged towards the end of the day are brilliant, though, and there were lots more interesting thoughts exchanged throughout the day. I’m hoping all of this will be picked up and taken forward somehow, perhaps on a follow-up event sometime soon(ish)?
