What does co-creation look like in the age of COVID-19?

Dee Halligan, cultural programmer, strategist and co-founder of creative consultancy From Now On reflects on the potential for co-creation to build craft communities.

Lady Kitt presenting during the Craft Participation in a New Landscape event, 2020

Co-creation and its siblings, collaboration and cooperation, and in fact any approaches which centre the joint and the shared, are having a moment. Even before the groundswell of community spirit provoked by Covid-19, participatory methods adopted by anyone from IKEA to Extinction Rebellion had drifted into everyday language and shifted our understanding of good practice across creative, cultural, community and civic activity. It’s a time for the collective above the individual.

To see this as working in opposition to individual artists or creatives would be a misreading. Authorship and leadership will persist alongside and within this kind of creative practice, but it’s a new world and we need new tools for change. People expect to be listened to and not told what to do; we expect to participate in decision-making about the world around us; increasingly we demand it if we don’t get it. There are new needs for organisations and processes which are representative and inclusive, to deliver change which is nurtured not imposed. New knowledge, expertise and skills have developed to meet these needs, building on traditions from civic activism and participatory design to corporate innovation.

As a result we’re spoilt for choice for new methods and tools, and dizzy from the proliferation of co-creation formats, from consultations to hackathons. What we lack perhaps is discipline. Language, for example, can be broad and confusing in this space; when is something a collaboration and when is it co-creation? And why is it important to know the difference?

Co-creation is not something you can layer on to a project; it's a culture shift which can have deep implications for an organisation.

In 2018 when the Crafts Council asked us at From Now On to explore the potential for co-creation to build communities around craft and making, we grabbed the opportunity to use case studies from their Make:Shift:Do Craft Innovation programme as evidence. We drilled down into these inspirational stories through a number of community events, seeking to understand how both language and methods influence the outcomes.

In a series of exchanges we found, not unexpectedly, that co-creation projects in practice differ according to context; different places, communities, skills and needs require different approaches. One co-creation project might open every decision to participants, another might limit participants to specific areas of activity. Questions of control, responsibility, skill, ownership and expectation need to be explored in order to design a co-creation project - a piece of creative work in its own right.

We heard again and again: co-creation is not something you can layer on to a project; it's a culture shift which can have deep implications for an organisation. If you’re not in a place to meet this challenge, maybe cocreation isn’t right for you. But if you are, the benefits can be abundant, in terms of the makeup of the participants and their motivation and commitment, as well as the quality, meaning or relevance of the work which is produced.

2020 challenged our ongoing exploration. ‘With’, ‘together’, ‘shared’: the defining language of anything ‘co’ in nature disappeared in favour of our words of the year: ‘distance’, ‘isolation’, ‘quarantine’. Struggling already with these ideas, we were further confronted by questions of equity, social justice, decolonisation. Our conversation about the collective was weak on questions relating to power and representation in sectors already recognised to be poorly performing and slow to change.

The Crafts Council stepped up and the brief changed. A new question: what does co-creation look like in the age of Covid 19 and what might it mean in our near future? And a new digital format: this project now offered the opportunity to draw on a wider section of the Crafts Council’s community and tap into their experiences. Here’s what we learned from 3 thought leaders.

Stella Duffy and the Fun Palaces

Stella Duffy comes from what she would call ‘the radical end of cocreation’ in which ‘artist led or anyone led is a shit way to cocreate’. Her vision is of local people leading culture and her interest in ‘the conversation that happens when no-one is leading’. Her Fun Palaces project offers a light touch framework in which ‘mini revolutions’ happen. Her take on co-creation opens up control across all decision-making, from organisational processes to the end product and importantly, consciously, lets quality and taste take care of itself. This exposes the tension in co-creative practice in contexts where the aesthetic is a primary currency. As she says “If we want a genuinely inclusive culture, we have to stop saying “this stuffs good but this stuffs not” who knows what’s good? I don’t”.

Her experience of Covid has shifted an organisation which was always focused on the hyper local to the next level - families, the smallest social units.

Stella Duffy presenting Fun Palaces during the Craft Participation in a New Landscape event, 2020

Black Girl Knit Club

Since their set up in 2019 Black Girl Knit Club have shot to prominence demonstrating the kind of magic that can happen when deep need and good timing combine. Their modest proposition, to create an inclusive space for friends to collaborate, shouldn’t have been that disruptive. But it made visible something people needed to see at this moment, and in the confinement of Covid, and amid the turmoil of the BLM movement, the new narrative they offered resonated on levels from the personal to the global.

Craft clubs can generally be seen as fixed in format and open in culture. Whether co-creating a piece, like quilting, or creating ‘shoulder to shoulder’, they’ve traditionally been spaces for social connection and knowledge exchange. Black Girl Knit Club might have started as a meet up, but they’ve become something more like a movement. By listening to their attendees, supporters and partners and flexing in response, multiple channels and platforms which have opened up to them. Their co-creation is less a method and more a set of responsive behaviours which has delivered powerful relationships and partnerships, and which have enabled them to thrive during a period that has shaken more traditional structures to their foundations.

Black Girl Knit Club presenting during the Craft Participation in a New Landscape event, 2020.
Black Girl Knit Club presenting during the Craft Participation in a New Landscape event, 2020.

Lady Kitt

As a researcher as well as a practitioner it's understandable that Lady Kitt is explicit about the ‘exchange rate’ of their co-creative projects. What individuals contribute, and what collectively and individually they’re getting back is open and centred in projects like their Covid initiative Art Confined. In this project it’s clearly Lady Kitt’s idea, and Lady Kitt’s plan, these components of the project are not open. From there onwards, the project is entirely and generously co-created. In being explicit about these lines, Lady Kitt recognises the tensions which accompany co-creation: the lines of power, of authorship and ownership which, when blurred, can derail open exchange. Work is still work even if it sits under a banner of participation, and ownership, of ideas or of output, is not just linked to recognition but to material reward.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, Lady Kitt’s learnings about what you need to ‘do’ social practice in a socially distant world are heartening, not only because they’re tightly entwined with what's important in any social practice. We’d call this a co-creation list to live by:

- Focus
- Humour
- Empathy
- Pauses
- Pockets of time
- Listening to understand (not to respond)

These speakers inspired and energised us at a point in the year when everything felt overwhelming. The message they brought, alongside many other inspiring creative practitioners around the world, that collective effort is stronger, more supportive, more efficient, economical and responsive is perhaps the message of 2020.

How that influences your vision for the future and translates into activity is now up to you. Why you’re co-creating, what you’re co-creating and how you’re co-creating, even if you co-create at all, are questions that need to be answered, together preferably. There’s lots of tools out there that can help, and we’re sharing some here to start you off with our short Planning Community Projects toolkit. Have a look, try them out and let us know how you get on. They’re published under Creative Commons so you can even hack them and create your own version to share along.

Planning Community Projects toolkit

From Now On are creative strategists and cultural programmers. From creative hubs to clusters, museums to high streets, we work collaboratively to imagine new formats, build new programmes and connect people.

Part R&D Lab and part consultancy, we’re small, connected and serious about finding better responses to our changing world.

fromnowon.co.uk

What does co-creation look like in the age of COVID-19?

Read more

How to co-create a craft programme

What we learned from co-creating in makerspaces