Growing Senses for Co-Creation
A workshop facilitated by Stephen Bau for Creativity Festival, a pARTnership of the Design Science Studio, the Vision Train, and The Institute for Aliveness
Creativity Festival
Design Science Studio
Vision Train
The Institute For Aliveness
You are an infinitely creative being.
Can you imagine your thriving future on a healthy planet?
Imagine technology freeing up humans to be more creative.
We practice imagining beyond what we think is possible for ourselves, each other and the world.
We are facing a crisis of imagination.
How is your creativity? Have you been aching to nourish it?
Want a chance to awaken it inside of you?
Join our Solstice Creativity Festival December 21 free at bit.ly/creativityfest
For culture change artists always lead the way.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
11:00 AM PST
A workshop from the builders collective
facilitated by Stephen Bau,
founder and director of BLDRS Collective Inc.
Growing Our Sense of Creativity
Welcome to this workshop on growing senses for co creation. My name is Stephen Bau. For the past few years, I’ve been learning how I fit in this world, because I had the feeling that, in so many ways, I didn’t fit. My sense of worth and value seemed dependent on what others thought about me and how my accomplishments measured up in comparison to others. My sense of value was compensated based on how well I could serve the business model of extraction, exploitation, growth and profit.
On December 31 of this year, it will be 10 years to the day that I left a web agency and I chose to do something different with my creativity. Looking back on that decision, I sometimes call it the best worst mistake of my life.
Now 10 years later, I have been asked by my friend Roxi to be part of this Creativity Festival as a member of the Design Science Studio, an artist on the Vision Train, and a workshop facilitator in this event of The Institute for Aliveness.
Looking back on that decision I made 10 years ago, I could ask myself the question, “Did I make a mistake?” As I was wondering about today’s workshop, I've been asking myself, “What if I make a mistake?” The first question is about the past. The second question is about the future. Perhaps I’m asking the wrong questions. “Did I make a mistake?” I’m focusing on my regrets about the past. “What if I make a mistake?” I’m focusing on my worry about the future? What decision can I make now? This question brings us back to our sense of agency and possibility and creativity. We have the power to choose and to act in this moment in the here and now.
Let’s enlarge the scope of our senses to a soccer pitch, where two teams are playing the final game which will decide the World Championship in the sport. The players have been working, practicing and playing the game of soccer for a significant part of their lives. This is the decisive moment when all that training will be realized and all the hopes for the accomplishment of the dream will be fulfilled. And the dedication, commitment and love of the sport is embodied in the teamwork and synergy of the players on the field. This is the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. The human drama of athletic competition.
Let’s enlarge the scope of our senses again, to a nation whose capital had been the site of a plot to overthrow the rule of law and the democratic institutions of the nation.
In each of these scenarios, we might feel as though our individual contribution to these events is incidental or even irrelevant. Each of us is merely a spectator to these events, an audience of the drama playing out on the grand stage.
Yesterday morning, I watched the snowflakes fall on my community. Each snowflake that fell became part of a blanket of snow that covered Metro Vancouver and brought the entire area to a standstill. The YVR Airport was closed to air traffic and the police recommended that people stay home and stay off the roads. I spent the morning shoveling snow that fell overnight that was up to my knees. A single snowflake might not have a significant impact, but many snowflakes together can change life for an entire city.
The Earth exercises creativity at scale. The Universe exercises creativity at scale. Water molecules, when they form snowflakes, each one different from the others, exercise creativity at scale. A rainbow is the effect of multiple drops of water, refracting light at scale, splitting white light into the visible spectrum of colors that we see when we look in the direction opposite the sun.
This is the spectrum of colors I play with when exploring how our perceptions, cognition, emotion and action are the raw materials for the process of design. When humans design at scale, we have the power to build cities, transform landscapes, share the experience of a soccer game around the world, and create global economies by believing in stories about money and the sense of value and worth that is created by a shared story about how a number in a bank account or the assessed value of a corporation can make one human more powerful than another.
Humans exercise creativity at scale. If you have a chance to experience Veronica Anderson's workshop on inner and outer architecture, you might learn how we heal the earth from the inside out.
As human beings who have suggested a new name for this geological moment, the Anthropocene, we are now waking up to the impact of human beings exercising creativity at scale. We can change the weather.
Now let’s ask another question. What is the creative capacity of one human being? I'm going to answer this question from my experience as a designer who began as an artist as a child 54 years ago. I was born to a father who had wanted to be an artist and was a talented painter, but he felt compelled by his family and upbringing, in a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong to earn a degree in medicine.
I've been an artist for as long as I can remember. I was told or somehow I learned in school. There are two types of artists, starving artists or commercial artists. So I took commercial art classes in high school, took a two year graphic design diploma at a local college and found my first job as a designer in Vancouver in 1980. I worked in a video production company, worked on corporate communications, branding, designing and building websites, and teaching design at a local university. And sometimes I mentor UX designers for Designlab now.
In that process, I found that every human being has the capacity to be creative. We lose that sense of creativity, very often at an early age, because, as Ken Robinson has pointed out in his TED talks, the industrial model of education tends to diminish a child's sense of creativity. By the time a child leaves school. They have long forgotten they were once artists.
Roman Mars created a podcast called 99% Invisible on the premise that if designers did their job well, design is 99% invisible. He also said that design is “everything a human touches.” And if that is true, then we're all designers.
So how do we restore and nurture our sense of creativity? I’ve come across a few books that have been helpful for me, after years of people devaluing my own sense of creativity to such an extent that I felt my art was worthless and my contributions to society irrelevant.
So there's a book by a writer called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
There's a book by a scientist, The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller.
And there's a book by a game designer, Imaginable by Jane McGonigal.
For this workshop, I hope you’re all able to experience how we can grow together into our ability to co-create by gaining a new appreciation for the senses we already have, of a sense of agency, a sense of possibility, and a sense of creativity. These senses may need a little bit of exercise. When we practice using the senses we can feel ourselves growing in capacity. We go from being an audience in the stands of the stadium, to being players on the field. In this game, we all get to play. If the Earth has given us breath, we are here to play. The field is as wide as our imaginations.
So in this world, we are imagining what is possible. We cannot break the laws of physics. We are limiting ourselves to the reality of this human life in this universe that we inhabit. But maybe what we can do is first of all, introduce yourselves to each other in the chat by answering one or both of these questions.
What keeps you up at night when you think about the future?
What makes you leap out of bed with excitement in the morning when you think about the future?
Growing New Senses
We are growing ancient and new ways of sensing into our collective consciousness and creative capacities to rediscover our role in co-creating our own experience of life.
This is a sort of journey map for humanity as it reorients itself amidst multiple systemic crises to discover the imaginative possibilities that are emerging in the process of becoming more and more aware of our creative potential as a collective, as the living Earth.
What if we think in terms of physical (past), metaphysical (presence), and pataphysical (possibility) as ways to merge experience with quantum science and emergence? How might this matrix of human experience expand our sense of the possible by recognizing the principles of syntropy at work in a living universe?
A matrix of human experience. Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design by Stephen Bau.
Inspired by Julia Cameron and The Complete Artist's Way, I noticed that there is an opportunity to expand on the three volumes that have become classics in the movement to recover our sense of creativity. Cameron explores the process of recovering, discovering, and uncovering 36 senses. These days, there is a movement to transcend and include. How might we transcend these senses, even as we are learning how to fully embody the senses we already have?
Perhaps, we are growing new senses and new neural pathways in our collective consciousness as a way to feel into our newfound recognition that we are intimately interdependent with all the living beings of the Earth and one with the living Earth and her physical, chemical, biological, and ecological cycles and processes.
What, then, are the artifacts of our co-creation with the Earth and with the Universe?
A matrix of human experience. Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design by Stephen Bau.
This is a journey from the physical to the metaphysical, the tangible to the intangible, the mundane to the transcendent.
Objects
Growing a Sense of Gratitude | Food
Growing a Sense of Motion | Clothing
Growing a Sense of Place | Shelter
Growing a Sense of Wonder | Art
Growing a Sense of Immersion | Music
Growing a Sense of Impermanence | Culture
Processes
Growing a Sense of Mystery | Wisdom
Growing a Sense of Connection | Ecology
Growing a Sense of Process | Work
Growing a Sense of Imagination | Imagine
Growing a Sense of Intention | Design
Growing a Sense of Inspiration | Build
Reality
Growing a Sense of Intuition | Concepts
Growing a Sense of Play | Prototypes
Growing a Sense of Form | Products
Growing a Sense of Synchronicity | Time
Growing a Sense of Synergy | Energy
Growing a Sense of Synarchy | Matter
Being
Growing a Sense of Appreciation | Past
Growing a Sense of Presence | Present
Growing a Sense of Anticipation | Future
Growing a Sense of Awareness | Cognition
Growing a Sense of Equilibrium | Emotion
Growing a Sense of Agency | Action
Knowing
Growing a Sense of Value | Meaning
Growing a Sense of Devotion | Purpose
Growing a Sense of Harmony | Belonging
Growing a Sense of Discernment | Truth
Growing a Sense of Grace | Beauty
Growing a Sense of Trust | Good
Doing
Growing a Sense of Illumination | Mind
Growing a Sense of Influence | Spirit
Growing a Sense of Balance | Body
Growing a Sense of Courage | Faith
Growing a Sense of Perseverance | Hope
Growing a Sense of Compassion | Love
Climate One
Yvon Chouinard: Giving It All Away
Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, in his conversation on the Climate One podcast, said that the corporate structures have few incentives to change.
Greg Dalton: Do you think that sustainable purchasing, green living, is that legitimate? Can corporations be a force for the sustainability changes that you want to see? Or is that just greenwashing?
Yvon Chouinard: Well, it has to be forced by the consumer. I don’t think corporations are gonna change on their own, public corporations. I mean, Robert Wright wrote a book on capitalism and he devotes two chapters to why public corporations can never be responsible. But you know, all of us here are no longer citizens. We’re consumers. That’s our brand now. And I used to think that maybe designers had the most power because they decide what color car you’re gonna drive, you know, what clothes you’re gonna wear and stuff. But you can just say no, that’s pretty powerful. And so we have the power and corporations will only change when we force ‘em to, and the same thing with government…
Growing Senses for Co-Creation
A Workshop
Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Notice the air entering your nose or mouth and flowing into your lungs, where the air is absorbed into the blood and circulated around your body to nourish the cells of your body with oxygen. An exchange happens as the cells release carbon dioxide as a byproduct of the organic process of expending energy. The gasses formed by this work are released from the lungs into the air around us.
We eat food, organic plant matter, biological products of animals, including milk or eggs, or the flesh of once living animals. For us to live, something else needs to die. There is no way for us to avoid this basic fact of our existence as human beings.
Now, open your eyes.
This is where I began with my model of our collective senses. We think about collective sensemaking as a cognitive process.
A #senseof VALUE. Image courtesy of Mark Smith.
Much of our sensemaking revolves around a product of our imagination called money. We make up currencies, markets, and economies, out of nothing. We tell each other stories about who has value because of a number in their bank accounts. Others are worthless, because they have no bank account, and, as a result, no home. But these are just stories we tell each other about the value of a life.
This is a crisis of imagination.
This crisis is the result of a lack of feeling, an inability to sense the pain and suffering of another and to be able to respond to those sensations.
It is overwhelming to deal with the feelings, sensations, emotions, and thoughts of one human being, ourselves. How can we be expected to deal with all the experiences of a larger group of people? Who could cope with all the stimuli?
This is the reason we separate ourselves from each other: to avoid the overload of sensory stimuli.
In the midst of multiple systemic crises, this is the sense I have of our predicament as a species. We have reached a moment of collective sensory overwhelm. Stress can be a way of growing stronger and more resilient.
I was recently listening to Maria Selting speaking with Amit Paul about anti-fragility. Maria Selting told a story about some scientists who had created the ideal conditions for growing a tree inside a sealed box. The tree fell over. The tree could not grow the strength and resilience in the fibres of its being to withstand the possible stresses in its environment. Even without the winds and the storms, the tree fell over.
It is through stress, pain, and suffering that we learn and grow.
Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that every subatomic particle or wave is actually a quantum switch in the mind of the universe, a universe-sized living brain.
The physical layer of the artifacts of life. This is the world of human experience as it connects to full spectrum of the faculties of perception, cognition, emotion, and action.
The metaphysical layer of the senses. There are senses and emotions that align with each of the artifacts of the reality of human experience in the physical world. For example, the sense of wonder aligns with the artifact of art in the physical layer of artifacts in the previous diagram.
I feel like there are three layers: the physical (past), the metaphysical (present), and the pataphysical (future). I can know the past with my mind, I can feel the present with my heart and body, and I can intuit the future with my senses of proprioception. That’s the gooey, imaginal substance of the not yet. When we project our intentions into the future, it is possible for us to create our own reality, to design our own experience.
That would be my inquiry for the Creativity Festival workshop. I have done my best to discern and feel the first two layers of the physical (particles | artifacts) and the metaphysical (waves | sensations). What does this third layer look like?
The pataphysical layer of the imagination and collective proprioception. The future is our blank canvas of possibilities, the medium on which we create in the here and now, in the realm of presence and awareness, interacting with the substrate of the past formations to bring about the adjacent possible.
Proprioception
Proprioception (or kinesthesia) is the sense through which we perceive the position and movement of our body, including our sense of equilibrium and balance, senses that depend on the notion of force (Jones, 2000).
From: Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2013
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/proprioception
Collective Proprioception
I found that there is a tendency toward specialization in corporations that helps to simplify the job of the managers in their ability to direct the labour of the workers. The specialization is of no particular benefit to the employee. The tendency of specialization leads to boredom and burnout.
Buckminster Fuller recognized the need for the limited cognitive faculties of a human being to process stimuli and sensory information to focus on what is relevant for the immediate requirements of navigation and decision-making. Radio became the metaphor for tuning into a specific frequency to decode and interpret the signals as coherent information for decision-making. Radiation in the form of wave energy was the medium for transmitting information, or communication, between two or more entities.
The human body is processing multiple sensory inputs at the same time to orient itself to the environment and to move within it. There is a need to take measurements of many different environmental stimuli to effectively move and act with integrity, coherence, and agility.
Ah, this is interesting. These are the collective sense of proprioception necessary to navigate a complex and changing and unpredictable future. The unknown can be known in part based on past experience. We reduce risk by repeating what has worked in the past. In a time when we recognize that the past is a very poor measure of where we need to go, there are ways of acting that we will need to let go of. The addictions of the past no longer serve us, so we have to admit that our lives have become unmanageable and recognize that there might be a Higher Power that can take care of the things that we can’t think how to solve. When we cut ourselves, we can apply pressure to stop the bleeding. Beyond that, we need to slow down, rest, and heal to allow the injury to heal as the body unconsciously, but intentionally and instinctually is able to manage without taxing the conscious, cognitive faculties of the individual.
Let’s continue this thought experiment with the assumption that the Earth has similar faculties of self-organization, self-regulation, and self-regeneration.
The Earth would be able to act in a similar way as our own individual bodies.
A Dream Tree
I am watching Mariette Papic’s presentation this morning, and I am inspired to share my dream of a world that works for 100% of life.
My dream is to combine what John Liu is doing with Ecosystem Restoration Camps with the need for self-directed learning environments that encourage and nurture a child’s creativity. We can build villages of treehouses that take up as little space on the earth as possible.
View the model of the Somatica IntegriTreeHouse on SketchUp
Climate Migration MASHup
Taking inspiration from Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) that could be moved where necessary to regenerate humans for military service, this idea would apply the concept of Buckminster Fuller to turn weaponry in to livingry.
To solve the challenge of climate change, we would make migration the norm and allow children to move around the world wherever they might like to live to regenerate the watersheds, the soil, the flora, and the fauna of an area. The land would be given back to the Indigenous people’s of each area, and children would learn to live in reciprocity with the people and the earth, as guests of each land.
