Creative practices are underused in the urgent task of changing cultures towards sustainability.

CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures is EU Horizon 2020 research project investigating the potential of creative practices in art, design, and related cultural fields to support positive eco-social change (a term that is used to signal an interlinked concern for ecological and social relations). The project responds to current social and environmental challenges and the urgent need to find new, more sustainable and nourishing ways of living and being together on our shared planet. Recognising that a major role in fostering this societal change is played by the cultural sector, CreaTures brings together diverse creative practices that aim to support eco-social change and examines their transformational processes and strategies.

The project sprouts from pilot research (Light, Wolstenholme and Twist, 2019) showing that creative practice has already demonstrated its transformational potential – for instance, by scaffolding people’s imaginations, providing equitable spaces for exploration and building new networks and capacities – but this potential has not been widely recognised. A central concern of the CreaTures project is to better understand the impacts of creative work that aims to question current everyday practices and create experiences for people of alternative, more sustainable and care-full, futures. 

The three-year project (January 2020-December 2022) involves three interrelated components:

• Observatory, identifying and mapping existing, fragmented and often hidden transformational creative practices.

• Laboratory, supporting new experimentation and direct collaboration with diverse stakeholders, by mounting several different scales and types of creative arts production.

• Evaluation, testing new and existing creative practices for their impact, in a systematic and concerted way.

These components are interwoven with a series of engagement events enabling broad access to the evolving outcomes of the project for different groups, including policy actors, scientific community, and members of the public. The project combines insights from these undertakings into an open-access, transdisciplinary, evidence-based framework demonstrating effective paths to achieving sustainability, social cohesion, and peaceful co-existence at a time of rapid change.

Key questions:

• What are the specific qualities of transformational creative practices?

• How might artistic and transformational aspirations and aims be aligned in practice?

• What are the ways to measure and communicate the impact of such practices?

• How might we encourage and support future transformational creative practices from the individual to infrastructural level across Europe and beyond?

If you have questions or ideas for collaboration please email: creatures[at]aalto.fi

EVALUATION

How to measure the impact of transformational creative practices?

How can we understand the ways in which creative practices engage with societal change? Discussions about the impact and value of creative practices are of high interest to policy makers, creative practitioners, researchers, and others. The experimental productions (ExPs) deployed in the CreaTures laboratory and recorded in the observatory are evaluated in generative and systematic ways, identifying and highlighting a number of factors that are core to harnessing the impact of creative practice in processes of sustainable future making. The evaluation of CreaTures ExPs offers synthesis-level insights into the power of creative practices in contexts of societal change – but it also allows for a critical investigation into how evaluation might, itself, be a leverage point for change. If creative practices are evaluated and valued differently, what happens to their potential for contributing to societal change?

The evaluation processes in the CreaTures project include three key activities:

• Developing evaluation theory and principles: this involves an investigation into indicators and methods that are used to assess transformational creative practice, and subsequent development of new evaluation principles.

• Co-researching together with creative practices gathered in the laboratory and observatory: drawing on interviews with creative practitioners and interactions with audiences, we identify diverse ways to talk about creative practice. Informed, we develop indicators for assessing the potential of creative practice to support eco-social change.

• Interaction with policymakers: moving from policy recommendations to collaborative engagement. This involves gathering evaluation insights from diverse cultural and institutional policy actors. We conduct interviews with policymakers from the cultural sector in multiple countries and organise ‘soft space’ policy sessions with the interviewees.

Together, these evaluation activities will contribute to the Open Creative Practice Framework (OCPF) – a transdisciplinary, evidence-based, open-access tool highlighting the strengths and opportunities for creative practices in stimulating action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. The OCPF will be delivered at the end of the project will offer a strategic research agenda for key stakeholders, a set of innovations addressing the cultures and conditions for delivering greater sustainability, and policy recommendations to focus and optimise work in mobilizing the arts for transformational futures.

creative Examples