So we took a volunteer week 2 weeks ago and volunteered at the Creative Places and Spaces (ArtScape) conference, I’m a little bit late in sharing my experience but hopefully the video I’m sharing will makes up for my tardiness.  It was an interesting experience for me in that I’ve never been to a ‘real’ conference like that before and I’ve certainly never volunteered at one either.

The volunteering aspect was actually kind of secondary to the rest of the experience though I think because my responsibilities always fell during times when there were no speakers, so for me that was very fortunate.  This obviously allowed me to observe the conference as an attendee for the most part which I really enjoyed.  There were 3 speakers that I thought I would share some thoughts about.

The first is Richard Florida. I have never seen a picture of Florida before and frankly he’s a lot younger than I expected.  He talked about local governing, changing education to be a more modern and relevant medium and the importance of intelligent collaboration and competition. It was a good talk but I think that’s what I was expecting, so I wasn’t blown away.

The second speaker of note was Spencer Tunick, who among being arrested countless times has been able to organize 18,000 people to pose naked for him in a public place at one time (see the link above – and yes these are all real pictures, nothing photoshopped). The man is clearly dedicated to his art, but then again it looks like a blast, so who wouldn’t be. What I couldn’t wrap my head around is how he found so many people in one place to get naked for a picture. The amount of community building behind this is nothing short of amazing.

Finally was probably the one of the best talks I think I have ever heard in person or on TV or even on TED. Sir Ken Robinson absolutely captivated the crowd through a lot of laughter and even more wickedly intelligent insight and delivery.  He spoke on many different topics and one of the more interesting ones to us is that our current education systems kill creativity. There are many takeaways from Sir Ken’s talk. Firstly is that you will never be creative if you let fear keep you from being wrong. You must overcome your fear and allow yourself to fail. Second he gave great insight into the nature and thought process of taking things for granted.  Here he describes an interesting correlation between common sense and creativity and how your ability to ask “why” about your surroundings changes your ability to be creative.  There are many other great tidbits within his hour long speech and is certainly worth watching.

So with no further hesitation, here is a very poor quality video of the speech (sorry for the quality), but it’s worth watching.

Sir Ken Talk

Being a volunteer at the event, I didn’t get to participate in all the conference’s happenings but the Torontoist provides a good play-by-play here. I did make a point, however, to see the presentations by the creative world’s equivalent to All Stars -Sir Ken Robinson, Richard Florida and Charles Landry. Sir Ken’s speech was, in particular, thought provoking as he described the solution to our “climate crisis of the mind” by suggesting that we can plan for creativity.

I first found this comment counter-intuitive but his methodical explanation of how we accomplish this was worthy of the subsequent standing ovation. Simply defining creativity as new ideas that have value, Sir Ken implored the audience to consider why we associate intelligence with rational thinking while we associate creativity with irrational thinking since new valuable ideas are theoretically intelligent. His point, at the end of the day, was that we should not only embrace creativity but we must foster its growth in all of our systems. No system is more important than our educational one where we explained that “in school it’s called cheating, outside it’s called collaborating” to simply illustrate the divergent modes of thought in and out of our school systems.

The championing of collaboration ran deep through the conference to the point that by the time Landry spoke on morning of Day 2, he joked that he would not say the word in fear of overuse. But his presentation ran along this same current and he used example from cities where avoidance of collaboration produced disastrous results (in fact, Landry seemed to have a real disdain for public leadership in general). The goal, according to Landry was that we must go forward by being strategically principled but tactically flexible which parallels Sir Ken’s main point that we must start planning for creativity. Florida, on the other hand, left us with a different conclusion.

Florida’s takeaway point was that creativity’s biggest struggle now will be with control which was somewhat an ironic contrast to Landry and Robinson’s idea of bringing an element of control to the creative. He also talked at length about his new book, The Great Reset, which seemed to be a divergence from his previous works focusing on the creative city and the creative class in suggesting that we are all creative and can be a part of a ‘reset’ movement. I don’t disagree with the recession being a rare opportunity to start things anew but it was interesting to hear him argue for universal creativity when he’s already devoted so much time to defining a specific class where it most prevalently exists. Although Florida made a point to mention that he thought all people could be creative in Rise of the Creative Class, I wonder if his new book represents a maturity in his thinking or even an accommodation to his critics who accused him of class-based arrogance for his championing of the Creative Class.

The difference now, in the words of Florida and the rest, is how we bring creativity outside the creative class.