All posts by Lloyd Davis

What I'm doing

Another Social Artist Residency

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nolalaugh

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” Camille Pissarro

“The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal.” Joseph Campbell

I need your help with something.

You may have seen my work as Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC). The definition of social art that I work with is “The process of skilfully bringing people together in such a way as to create a sense of beauty and attraction in those that see or participate in it”. My time at the centre has meant that the team hit several of their first year targets in a few months and I have encouraged a culture of conversation and online presence there. I’m just about to complete my first six months there and the University has just agreed a further six months extension.

I’m now looking for a simultaneous and complementary residency with another partner for least for the next six months (and possibly longer with the right organisation). I’m hoping that you can help me find such a partner organisation.

Why might you benefit from having me as a social artist in residence?

I believe that many organisations need more of their people behaving as social artists to create beautiful situations in their working lives and to allow creativity to blossom wherever it is needed. I see people obstructed and cut off from the people they need to be connected to. I see silos where people in another department or function are seen as too different to bother working with. I see industries decaying and ultimately falling apart with people knowing deep down that the old ways aren’t working for them, but unclear on how to find a new beginning. I see people inside organisations starved of inspiration and opportunities to reflect on and appreciate what they already know that can lead them out of where they are stuck.

As a manager and as a consultant myself I’ve tried to introduce new processes and tools to deal with this problem. I rarely saw the radical change and creative inspiration that was needed. I believe that real, lasting change happens in the gaps in-between the formal processes of an organisation. I’m offering myself as a social artist in residence to help fill those gaps with interesting and useful stuff that helps ease some of these difficulties.

If this all sounds like hand-wavey nonsense to you, then thank you for reading this far, it’s probably not for you. But if any of this resonates with your experience of work, then perhaps we can do something together.

How do I work?

I work with individuals and groups to encourage them to take their own first steps in social art. By definition, I don’t work in isolation, but t also won’t impose myself on anyone who doesn’t want to be included. I also rarely tell someone exactly what to do, preferring to let them discover it themselves. My work usually revolves around conversation, giving people the chance to engage in different kinds of talking and to recognise that they have the answers already but that the answer is sometimes just buried deep. I can’t guarantee you specific outcomes, but I am certain that you will be able to dscern a positive effect afterwards. This is art, not consulting, so I don’t have a structured methodology or a toolkit that you can scrutinise beforehand, however I can arrange conversations with people who’ve worked with me in this way if that helps.

What is it then that I actually do?

I will usually spend at least one day per week on your premises or directly working with your people. I spend some time at first just observing what is, how the organisation really works, what stories people tell about it, where people feel blocked and hopeless, where people feel hopeful and passionate. I may write about it and make connections with other things I’m currently working on. Soon, I will start doing. I will experiment. I will get people together to talk about something and I use different forms of conversation to help people see what they might do differently. I’ll also bring other parts of my practice in – perhaps inviting other artists or collaborators from C4CC to take part in conversations and sometimes, I’ll just sit around and make stuff – draw or write something – I go with the flow of what is needed. I also document as I go along – preferably on a public blog to help people see how things are coming along.

Hmmm….

Perhaps you like the idea but a commitment to a six-month residency isn’t for you? There are other ways that I can help.

You might like to get involved in a one-off social art field trip project such as Tuttle2Texas by sponsoring some element of it. I can also facilitate creative conversations to generate ideas, inspiration and potential collaborations. Or maybe you’d like me to run a workshop or two on how your people can use some of these techniques to develop their own capability to engage in creative conversation through social media. I’m also available for a limited number of one-to-one mentoring/coaching relationships. Let me know if you’re interested.

What I'm doing

Unpave Paradise

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280420091359I love demolition sites. Not for the potential new building that will take place there, but for the old view, blocked out for so many years, that gets set free again. Sadly, the view is usually lessened by the big hoardings that keep out people who might get up to no good, and then, sooner or later, some other ugly pile of bricks, glass or concrete will be shoved up and obscure the sight line again. It’s called development and I understand the economic imperative. But.

Someone asked me recently “What would you do if you just had shedloads of money, more money than you knew what to do with?” I really thought about it for once. Or rather I didn’t think, I just let something tumble out of my mouth. And when I heard it, I knew it to be the truth.

“I’d buy up old, ugly, useless buildings in the city and knock them down. Then instead of building something new on the site, I’d make it into a park, a green space, perhaps with a tree or two. And no-one would be allowed to build there again.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be a better legacy than putting up yet another building (however beautiful or well-designed) in a city that already feels like it has too many?

I think so. I also think it’s too good to wait until I’ve got shedloads of money, more money than I know what to do with. I never say never, but it might be a long time coming. I think a better idea is to crowdfund it. How much would we need to raise to buy something small (but ugly) tear it down and make something beautiful and natural in its place? What sort of organisation would it take? What planning obstacles might there be? Anybody want to take it on as a juicy co-operative social enterprise? Anybody already doing it?

What I've Seen

Let’s Fix the World! A 21st Century Parlour Game

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Here’s a game that’s become popular among those of my acquaintance in recent years.

“Let’s do something to fix the world!” requires 3 or more players. Otherwise it risks descending into “Two boring gits mouthing off in the pub.” 20-30 folk make for a really good game.

The players are gathered out of business hours in a conference suite of a leading company or a government department. In the foyer, they are given mineral water, orange juice (occasionally cranberry), tea and coffee. Sometimes there are peanuts and kettle crisps. Gamesmasters who introduce alcohol at this stage are asking for trouble. The players are left to mingle. Most huddle in corners with their old pals. One or two, not knowing the etiquette, pursue other players around the room trying to press business cards into their hands while describing their highly valuable services.

After this warm-up period, the players are led into a meeting room which may contain tables and chairs arranged cabaret style or just chairs randomly scattered or, in the Owen variation, there may be little or no furniture at all.

The gamesmaster/mistress announces the theme for the evening, the “Big Question of the Night” or BQN (once hilariously, but mistakenly referred to as “the bacon” – ie “If we can please just get back to the bacon”). If any mild excitement has already emerged s/he will dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd by reading the contents of a long and detailed Powerpoint presentation. The theme is usually a confusingly worded question. Those devising the BQN should ensure that it covers a very wide subject area – it needs to be BIG, man, really BIIIIG. Squash out any specificity and introduce as much ambiguity in the question as possible. To add spice you may wish to declare that supposedly well-defined and well-understood terms are up for re-definition in this context.

Players are now grouped by a method of the gamesmasters choice, though “Boys v Girls” and distinctions based on social class or ethnic background are generally frowned upon in today’s politically correct dystopia. Don’t worry, the socially capable can get on with anyone and those who look a bit lost can be shepherded up into a “Nerds” group.

Now the “conversation” starts. There are a number of recognised opening gambits: “There’s nothing new under the sun”, “We must firmly lay the blame at the feet of the last government”, “I’m alright, Jack” etc. are played as a dummy to make sure that any new players don’t have a clue about what’s really going on. Then the real play starts. Players take it in turns to offer their solution to the BQN.

You may find the following observations on play to be useful:

1. If you are there to sell a commercial service that might at a stretch be a solution to the BQN, you must not refer to that service by name, nor may you reveal (except in a whispered aside to a trusted co-player) to the group this happy coincidence.

2. If you know or suspect that a co-player is trying to sell such a service, it’s considered bad form to declare this outright. However, you might make some knowing remark which makes your co-player blanch while the rest of the team remain unaware.

3. Wherever possible your contributions should refer to solutions that stress certainty, incentivisation, efficiency, driving out redundancy and duplication and the well-known fact that all human-based systems tend toward equillibrium. Phrases such as “it’s human nature”, “survival of the fittest”, “no pain, no gain” are all splendid signs that the game is going well.

4. Points are available for telling a story you once read in a book. With a bonus if you manage to get the title of the book and the name of the author completely wrong. Extra bonus if you actually heard the author speak but still get her name wrong.

5. Points are sometimes awarded for inventive use of diversionary tactics such as arguing definitions, restating the important differences between the public and private sectors, drawing pyramid-shaped diagrams on the back of a napkin. However, most conoisseurs will recognise these as the hallmark of the newcomer or amateur.

6. At the discretion of the gamesmaster, a “plenary” session may follow where those players with inflated egos get to repeat everything they said and ignore what the rest of their group offered. If these people are particularly self-important, you may wish to provide “scribes” to make a glowing record of their wise words on flipchart paper. Then it’s off down the pub.

Disciplinary notes:
1. People who try to point out that this is just a stupid game that we play and it never gets us anywhere except salving our consciences, and it’s always the same old faces and god, what are we doing here? may be pronounced “A Bore” and sent to the corner to think about their wicked ways (mostly though they are simply ignored).

2. Anyone trying to start a real human conversation based on individual, personal experience, that isn’t about selling anything, or making people look wrong, or making ourselves look good is given one chance to try again and a withering look of pity. If they start up again they will be escorted from the premises immediately.

The winner is anyone with a vested interest in their little bit of the world staying exactly the same as it is, thank you very much.

What I'm doing

Friendship

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nolalaughI’m going to ask you to be my friend.

This isn’t about whether the use of “friend” on online social networks is appropriate. Neither is it a heart-warming, tear-brimming story about one of my mates, how fabulous they are (though I have a few stories like that to tell) and how I’d like you to be one of them.

It’s about a specific use of the term “Friend” as used by arts organisations to mean someone who gives regular financial support in return for the value they get from that organisation.

As I become more comfortable with being a Social Artist, I’m offering my own version. So I got thinking about value and of course I asked people to help me out. I set up a survey to ask people what they would get if they had £5, £10, £20 or £50 and they came back with the following answers:

For a Fiver
Flowers for the missus; A trip on the Cardiff Waterbus; A trashy magazine and a packet of starmix; Comics from the bargain bin;
iTunes; Take-away for lunch; Either a beer with a friend or dessert with a friend; a magazine or book; A really really good ice cream: at a 1950s ice cream parlour in Broadstairs overlooking the sea – Morelli’s is the one http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Seaside.html ; Go to Hawkins Bazaar. Enjoy!

For a Tenner
A “push the boat out” bottle of wine i.e. one that’s more than a Fiver;
An edition, or back edition of Special ten – Ultimate goodness http://www.specialten.com/ ; A couple of good steaks; New comics; Beer, supermarket special offer most likely; Books from Oxfam; Pack of smokes and a beer with a friend; new knickers; Your favourite trash author has published a new book. You pretend to your friends you don’t read this stuff. You can wait, as you usually do, for the cheap paperback edition to appear on Amazon or a second hand copy from Abe Books. Or, you can splurge £9.99 on the hardback, discounted, offer at your local bookshop. You can walk in and buy it. Yes!; Fish and chips for two and cups of tea on the beach at Whitstable in the winter.

For £20
A bottle of single malt (you have to wait for them to come on special); Cheap bottle of Moet rose – usually on offer in Tesco, owner of all land; A bottle of wine and ingredients for dinner for my boyfriend; A mix of comics, old and new; Cinema tickets for two, sweets with the change; Doctor Who DVDs; Dinner with a friend;
241 cocktails with friends in cardiff (wouldn’t get much for £20 in london); Spend it on flowers – from Steve at Chapel Market, near Angel – do a deal you can get lots for £20; Look at Moleskine notebooks. Go on, you know you want to.

For £50
Dinner; Lunch, or dinner in my FAVE cantonese in the UK ever in ever of historian style ever – http://www.riversidecantonese.com/; Taking my boyfriend out for dinner; Big comics (or graphic novels, as they’re known); Meal for two, out at restaurant; Stick it in an ISA! If that’s not available, solar powered electro-gubbins; New sex toy to be used…..with a friend!; a new frock; Take 4 friends to the movies in Leicester Square; or the poshest cinema in your area and buy them popcorn. Ace!; Go to your local railway station. Tell them you’ve got £50. Say “A cheap day day return to somewhere nice please. Where can I go?”

Now obviously this represents a wide variety of tastes and geographies as well as some clear preferences based on gender, but it gives you a pretty good idea. So, I’m offering the same rates for regular donations each month – maybe you see me as “comics from the bargain bin, a take-away lunch or a really good ice cream” once a month – in which case you’d go for the £5 option. Or, at the other end, maybe to you I am “solar powered electro-gubbins, a cheap day-return to a mystery destination or… a new frock” – then I’ll put you down for £50pm. See?

But that’s not all. I’m not just asking for cash because you think I’m like an ice cream (?) I’m offering the following benefits in return for four levels of monthly payment.

£5 – a link and a public thank you on the social networking site of your choice, plus the warm glow of knowing that you’re supporting Social Art. Oh, and acknowledgement when I see you next – shoulder squeeze for the gals, manly shoulder punch for the guys.

£10 – as £5 PLUS a postcard from me saying thank you and an invitation to an annual party for other tenner friends

£20 – as £10 PLUS a postcard-sized piece of original art from me twice a year and an invitation to a special summer picnic and a mid-winter feast

£50 – as £20 PLUS a copy of Tuttle Chronicles – a new quarterly publication for such special friends and a quarterly meetup with sparkling conversation.

I’ve made links to recurring payment plans via PayPal.
£5 per month
£10 per month
£20 per month
£50 per month

UK friends – paying by standing order avoids paypal fees – e-mail me and I’ll send you the bank details.

If you’re going for anything higher than £10 I’ll need a postal address for you to send you goodies.

PS thanks very much to Jon; @chkn; Kathryn; Pete; @tookiebunten; edent; WankerGirl; lynsey; and Brian for their ideas

PPS if you’re not my “friend” you can still be my “friend” and you can definitely still be my friend.

What I'm doing

Who’s next for a Social Artist?

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#c4cc buzzingI’ve been Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration for four months now. I love it. It’s great to have somewhere to focus my practice around – not just so that I have somewhere to park myself to work, but to contribute to a mission while doing my stuff.

I set out here to make new connections between the centre and the various communities that I have a presence in; to create synergy between the work of the centre and other projects I work on; and to encourage others to join in by writing about what I’ve done and speaking about it widely.

It’s been more successful than I’d anticipated (I know, for example, that the majority of people who’ve come through the doors of the centre have done so because of my efforts), which is great, particularly given that this is a startup environment which doesn’t officially launch until later this month. We haven’t talked yet about what happens to my place here after the initial six month agreement, though I’m hoping to stay involved in some capacity.

I’m now looking for another residency to complement it. I’m interested this time in finding something that’s different. I’d like to try what I’m doing in a differently challenging environment, one where there’s an established status quo – somewhere regimented, hierarchical and silo-bound. An organisation that’s struggling to make sense of or come to terms with a shift in their market or operational environment. In short somewhere where I have something to push against.

Any ideas?

What I've Been Doing

Most Interesting…

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120920091927I set this up this morning – Most Interesting

It’s a group posterous blog collecting the “most interesting” pictures that people have posted to Flickr. For those not in the know, Flickr has a measure of interestingness and I’ve been fascinated to watch how “interesting” some of my pictures are measured to be by this algorithm.

I was wondering how you might collate the most interesting pix from a group of people and get them to reflect on what comes up. Thankfully posterous.com has been developing faster and faster of late and I was able to set up a site in a few minutes to capture this. Now that it allows posting by anyone (with pre-publication moderation) and has static pages, it’s really easy to set something up for whatever it is that we now call user-generated content.

There are instructions here for how to submit something. Basically you just send a specially formatted e-mail. Kyle McRae (who knows a thing or two himself about curating UGC!) was the first to contribute, even before I thought I’d publicised it at all. But have a go. Of course you may not have a flickr account or you might not have very many pictures there – a very good reason to get one and start adding to it!

I’ve also added a Facebook page that it will be autoposted to for those of you who like to see stuff within that particular walled garden.

Let’s see how it goes.

[UPDATE] Anjali points out that it’s a similar idea to pixtories Yes – I think it’s nice though to have people’s thoughts on things that they own, but which have been picked out for them, rather than things that they think are interesting themselves.

What I'm doing

Transmedia storytelling, new journalism & digital curation

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tuttle2texasI’ve become more aware of a few things recently while thinking about getting these “social art” projects off the ground.

Firstly I’ve started to track the term “transmedia” on twitter and seen an awful lot of related and interesting stuff. There’s lots of excitement in the film, TV & videogame worlds about this. Advertising too. Exploring the value in the creation of fictional universes that can be expressed or explored in a variety of media, moving beyond the idea of this stuff as merchandise or spin-off material and seeing it as a part of the creative process. At least that’s my reading of where things are going. So instead of making the “game of the movie of the book” etc. ie taking an existing property and extending into another medium, they are planning stories that are told in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences, including those created by fans, the people formerly known as the audience.

Secondly, I’ve seen that Dave Winer is getting into his stride at NYU and “organising” a hypercamp this week on “Sources Go Direct” sadly it’s not on at a good time for me to watch & participate live, but it’s being ustreamed and presumably that will be archived along with everything else. The bit of Dave’s thinking that I’m most drawn to here is what he’s been saying for a while about opening up journalists’ processes and notebooks – “open sourcing” their stories and articles so that others might see what stories they might make out of the same material.

Then over the weekend, JP has written two important posts about digital curation. The second of which in particular deals with curation in the age of unbundling. What I’m talking about is unbundling in the sense that a book, film, photo exhibition, whatever is a bundle (with all sorts of preconceptions about how they are produced and distributed) and we’re not predefining which bundle we might choose to create when setting out to explore an idea.

My interest is more in the “real” world than in fictional universes. They’re amazing and fascinating and are giving us endearing and engagingly fresh cultural artefacts that help us understand ourselves better and yet, I’m left thinking “why not explore our own universe?” I’m also drawn more to the more reflective forms that we used to call features, factual and documentaries rather than the current affairs end of journalism.

That, I think is what #tuttle2texas was a prototype for – a series of explorations of spaces or ideas, a series of true (whatever that means) stories that help us understand ourselves better, expressed in a variety of media, open-sourced and unbundled for curation, remix, re-use whatever you want.

What I'm doing

Designing a better field trip

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So the Social Art Field Trip idea has been very well received. Everybody I’ve spoken to thinks it’s a great idea: “love the concept”, “sounds really cool” etc. Thank you!

However, despite the outpouring of encouragement and support, nobody’s actually booked a place yet. So the first one, planned for tomorrow, isn’t going ahead. I’d like to work out what I need to do differently to get the “cool concept” really working – the positive side of this is that I get to ask and find out what works rather than it just “working” and me not learning anything about why 🙂

So here are the variables I can think of that we can tweak to make it more appealing or practical:

Timing: They are 10-4 on Thursdays. Is there a better time of day? Is there a better day? This is always the obvious thing with events “Oh I’d have loved to have come but Xday is my day for doing Y, sorry” “If you did it on Zday I could come” but it can send you round in circles trying to please everyone. I still have people telling me that Tuttle would be “much more successful” if we didn’t do it on Friday mornings when they can’t come. So think about this as “If I were to be doing it every day, which day would you like to come” and “Should it start earlier or later?”

Length: is 6 hours too long? or not long enough?

Content: Do I need to specify more clearly what we’re going to do or was it too vague? I’m assuming from the positive feedback that the content is OK but thought I’d check. Is there anything I can do to make it more appealing?

Sales & Marketing: I blogged about it 3 weeks before the first one, tweeted several times (I have about 3k followers) and sent out invitations by e-mail and twitter DM to around 200 people (mostly asking that they pass it on or suggest it to other people). I also posted it on chinwag.com, done my usual thing of talking about it wherever I go and announcing it at Tuttle. Is this just way too little? Do I need to allow myself to be more spammy?

I made the assumption that most people in my immediate network, those who already understand something of my work would not be the market for this. Is that right? My approach then was to ask those people to put it in front of people that they thought would be interested or find it useful. Is there an obvious flaw in this? How could I have done it more effectively?

Price: is £75+VAT for a day too much… or too little?

Something else: Umm… I dunno, is there something in my blind spot? Something obvious to everyone else but not visible to me because of where I’m sitting?

All thoughts very welcome (preferably publicly here in the comments so we can all learn, but by e-mail if you want to be private)

What I think, What I'm doing

What do we need managers to do better?

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IMG_9266I spoke at Social Media for Business ’10 the other week and in the panel session afterwards we were asked what we thought social media in the enterprise meant for leadership and management. Big question. I flannelled off some stuff about leadership through service, that the leader needs to encourage and facilitate what’s already going on rather than decide what needs to happen and then make others do it.

(Oh man, I wish I could take my own advice sometimes…)

It ties in with some of the work that’s been stuck up on the wall at #c4cc for a while – a bunch of statements of value that Frankie noted down when I was speaking about Tuttle2Texas at TEDxTuttle. They summarise the value an organisation might get from interacting with “us” whoever we are – tuttle, tuttle consulting, me & Brian & Heather, just me? That’s all for another post.

But when I’d finished writing them out it seemed to me that there was something else to it. These things are only valuable if you have a particular mindset about the people you work with. So I wrote the following things on the end, intended to summarise our assumptions about the sorts of organisations we can deliver value to. If someone is going to buy from “us” they probably will share these assumptions – that managers or leaders need to:

  • be more comfortable with their own creativity;
  • let go of the myth of control;
  • work more effectively in groups;
  • report on what they’re doing in an engaging way;
  • be more responsive to changes in a market or organisational environment;
  • lead people in audacious acts of innovation;
  • better understand the cultural implications of what they do.

so, each of those probably needs a blog post of their own but I think that if you’re looking for ways to get the people around you to do some of the things on this list and you’re struggling then you should come and have a chat about how we can help.

What I'm doing

Art art

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Art in #c4ccIf you’ve been into the Centre recently, you’ll have seen some of my drawings that I’ve been putting up on the walls. This has turned out to be an extremely effective marketing strategy (people see them, say “oh those are lovely” we get into conversation and then they say “can I buy one” – funny, it’s almost as if markets were conversations…) and so I’ve been working today and yesterday on my first commissioned pieces.

w00t!

It strikes me there are two bits of progress here: 1. I’ve been willing to put my work up on the wall; and 2. I’ve been willing to talk to people about them and own up to them being mine.

Actually there’s also a 3. which I’m not so inclined to admit, which is that when they ask if they can buy one, I’ve said “yes” rather than flannel and bluster and look at my shoes.

So if you like them too, let me know if you’d like to commission one. They start at postcard size, but the largest one I’ve done is about 2′ x 4′

You can see some earlier studies for these on my flickr