Ma

kin

g G

oo

d W

ork

Samu

el Jo

ne

s and

She

lagh

Wrig

ht

Making GoodWork

Realising the values of youngpeople’s creative production

Samuel JonesShelagh Wright

Making Good WorkRealising the values of young people’s creative production

Recently much attention has been paid to creativity in education,reflecting wider concern with creativity in general.The creativeindustries are a hugely successful part of our economy andministers have pledged to ‘make Britain the world’s creative hub’.However, with this focus on creativity has come a degree ofconfusion: the creativity of the classroom is not necessarily thecreativity desired by prospective employers in creative industries.Furthermore, the means by which creativity has conventionallybeen judged, particularly in the public realm, have come to bechallenged.This has significant implications for the way thatcreative production is seen, particularly in education.

In creating a product, we express opinions and publicise parts ofour identities; when we view cultural or creative work, we canengage with those of others. Cultural and creative production istherefore a very powerful force that will be vital, from the school-room to the way that we engage with other cultures in general.

This pamphlet argues that young people will need the capacity tolink creativity to meaning in their own terms in ways that allowthem to match production and products to purpose andaudience. As creativity becomes central to the workplace andsocial lives alike, young people will need the skills to navigatebetween different expectations of their creative work. Creativeeducation must give young people the essential reflective andeditorial skills to combine the multiple perspectives on value thatthey will encounter.

Samuel Jones is a researcher at Demos and Shelagh Wright is aDemos associate.ISBN 978 1 84180 184 1Price £5© Demos 2007

Buildingeverydaydemocracy

Making good work cover 5/25/07 5:05 PM Page 1

About Demos

Who we areDemos is the think tank for everyday democracy. We believe everyoneshould be able to make personal choices in their daily lives that contributeto the common good. Our aim is to put this democratic idea into practice byworking with organisations in ways that make them more effective andlegitimate.

What we work onWe focus on six areas: public services; science and technology; cities andpublic space; people and communities; arts and culture; and global security.

Who we work withOur partners include policy-makers, companies, public service providersand social entrepreneurs. Demos is not linked to any party but we workwith politicians across political divides. Our international network – whichextends across Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Brazil, India and China– provides a global perspective and enables us to work across borders.

How we workDemos knows the importance of learning from experience. We test andimprove our ideas in practice by working with people who can makechange happen. Our collaborative approach means that our partners sharein the creation and ownership of new ideas.

What we offerWe analyse social and political change, which we connect to innovation andlearning in organisations. We help our partners show thought leadershipand respond to emerging policy challenges.

How we communicateAs an independent voice, we can create debates that lead to real change.We use the media, public events, workshops and publications tocommunicate our ideas. All our books can be downloaded free from theDemos website.

www.demos.co.uk

First published in 2007

© Demos

Some rights reserved – see copyright licence for details

ISBN 978 1 84180 184 1

Copy edited by Julie Pickard, London

Typeset by utimestwo, Collingtree, Northants

Printed by IPrint, Leicester

For further information and

subscription details please contact:

Demos

Magdalen House

136 Tooley Street

London SE1 2TU

telephone: 0845 458 5949

email: hello@demos.co.uk

web: www.demos.co.uk

Making GoodWorkRealising the values ofyoung people’s creativeproduction

Samuel JonesShelagh Wright

Open access. Some rights reserved.As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enablesanyone to access our content electronically without charge.

We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible withoutaffecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyrightholder.

Users are welcome to download, save, perform or distribute this workelectronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translationwithout written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos openaccess licence which you can read at the back of this publication.

Please read and consider the full licence.The following are some of theconditions imposed by the licence:

● Demos and the author(s) are credited;

● The Demos website address (www.demos.co.uk) is published together witha copy of this policy statement in a prominent position;

● The text is not altered and is used in full (the use of extracts under existingfair usage rights is not affected by this condition);

● The work is not resold;

● A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to the address below forour archive.

Copyright DepartmentDemosMagdalen House136 Tooley StreetLondonSE1 2TUUnited Kingdom

copyright@demos.co.uk

You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other thanthose covered by the Demos open access licence.

Demos gratefully acknowledges the work of Lawrence Lessig and CreativeCommons which inspired our approach to copyright.The Demos circulationlicence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ versionof the Creative Commons licence.

To find out more about Creative Commons licences go towww.creativecommons.org

Value is created through collective interestand action. Communities determine whatis beautiful and what is powerful.1

Gary Alan Fine,John Evans Professor of Sociology,

Northwestern University

Demos 7

Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Foreword 13

Introduction 17

1. It ain’t just the way you do it, it’s what you do 21

2. What makes good work? 27

3. An anthropological approach to creativity 33

4. Beyond the numbers: the importance of the creative product 39

5. The critical valuation of originality 47

6. The values of the workplace 55

7. The values of creativity in education 62

8. The values of creative and culturalproduction and democracy 72

9. Young people’s creative production and consumption 77

10. Developing the skills base: cultural and creative critique 85

11. Respecting the young person and the creative process 94

12. Recommendations: towards a morecreative education 104

Appendix: The research 110

Notes 115

Acknowledgements

Demos 11

We would like initially to thank the many peopleto whom we have spoken in the course ofresearching this pamphlet. In particular, wewould like to mention, in alphabetical order,Chris Horn of Broadway Primary School, GordonPoad of Theatre Cap-a-Pie, Judy Thomas of theBaltic Centre for Contemporary Art and SimonWoolham, who worked with the young people atBroadway. The biggest thanks of all, however, goesto the young people to whom we spoke and aboutwhose experiences and work this pamphletspeaks. The projects they worked on are listed inthe appendix to this pamphlet.

In writing the pamphlet, we are grateful for thecomments of Paul Collard, Lorna Fulton andDavid Parker of Creative Partnerships. Lorna, in

particular, was crucial both in helping to set upthe work and in developing the thinking within it.Her colleagues, Fiona Cowley, Fiona Lockwoodand John McGagh, at Creative PartnershipsDurham Sunderland were also generous withboth their time and support for this work. Thanksalso to Kristen Harvey, whose research during herinternship was valuable in the initial stages of theproject. At Demos, John Holden and Charlie Timsboth offered helpful comments throughout. PeterHarrington, as usual, helped the pamphletthrough to production with professionalism. Wewould also like to thank Professor Tom Jones forhis comments on the draft. As ever, all errors andomissions remain our own.

Samuel Jones and Shelagh WrightJune 2007

Making Good Work

12 Demos

Foreword

Lorna Fulton

Demos 13

Searching for ‘young people’s creative production’generated 3,370,000 references on Google, butwhat does this actually mean? In 2005, CreativePartnerships Durham Sunderland, together withour partners, began a dialogue and debate aboutwhat quality and values in children and youngpeople’s cultural production actually means.These discussions have provided an opportunityto deepen our understanding and refine the issuesthis then raises for education and culture, in bothpolicy and practice. This pamphlet is animportant contribution to that debate.

Many of the children and young people whohave participated and driven CreativePartnerships programmes in Durham Sunderlandwere involved in the research that went into this

pamphlet. Their views, thoughts and critiques arereflected throughout. This foreword has thereforebeen co-written with these children and youngpeople.

Over the past few weeks, I have talked to themany children and young people to whomShelagh and Sam spoke during the research. Iasked them what they thought about the workthey had done with Creative Partnerships andhow they felt about the idea that their work andvoices were being reflected in this pamphlet.

One response was constant: ‘We enjoyedtalking to Shelagh and Sam about our workbecause it’s important that lots of people knowabout what we’ve been doing.’ Some of the youngpeople added that ‘we are really pleased thatpeople are going to read about our work, peoplewe don’t even know, because we can get theiropinions on what we’ve been doing’. For them,this amounted to recognition of their work andprovided the opportunity to showcase theiraccomplishments and the opinions andexperiences that their work represents.

Making Good Work

14 Demos

Over and above the learning that they gainedin relation to making decisions, team work andproblem-solving, the young people look backwith pride at their work. This was a result of theexperiences that it represented, and also becausethey recognised it as a symbol of the learning thatthey had achieved.

For their part, the teachers and practitionersinvolved in the research are clear: workingcollaboratively with cultural partners at schoolhelps young people develop and learn to think indifferent ways. Young people collaborated on thework with peers and adults alike, negotiatingdifference and, on occasion, holding fast to theiropinions. These are skills that they can transfer toother parts of their lives, and when they go on tomake their livelihoods they will be vital in themore creative job market that they will enter.

In itself, this pamphlet provides a form ofvalidation for the work it discusses. Importantly,it also proposes a methodology and language thatrelocates the discussion of children and youngpeople’s creative production in terms that are

Foreword

Demos 15

shared and therefore meaningful to young people.In so doing, it draws in the many different valuesand qualities that can be associated with youngpeople’s creative work, values that are shaped bycontexts that vary from pedagogy to the everydayaspects of their lives.

With Demos, we at Creative Partnerships haveexplored how young people’s cultural productioncan be supported, and made a series ofrecommendations as to how practice should bechanged to reflect this. We will be able to achievethis only if we continue to innovate.

Lorna Fulton, director of Creative PartnershipsDurham Sunderland, in collaboration withchildren from Creative Partnerships schools acrossDurham and Sunderland.

Making Good Work

16 Demos

Introduction

Demos 17

In recent years, there has been much attentionpaid to the importance of creativity in youngpeople’s education. This reflects a much widerconcern with creativity in general. The creativeindustries are lauded as a hugely successful part ofour economy. Furthermore, as Jonathan Ive’sdesigns for Apple take the world’s markets bystorm, ministers back in the UK have pledged to‘make Britain the world’s creative hub’. This raisesan important challenge: we need to focus on howwe value the products that young people create,and how this equips them for a more creativeworld.

However, as recent research for CreativePartnerships has shown, with the focus oncreativity has come a degree of confusion. The

creativity of the classroom is not always the sameas the creativity desired by prospective employersin creative industries like advertising. That is notto say that either is more or less valid than theother, but it does illustrate the mismatch betweenthe different views of creativity that there can be.Equally, the means by which creativity hasconventionally been judged, particularly in thepublic realm, like originality or conformity inrelation to expected standards of quality, havecome to be challenged. A wider shift in patterns ofcultural engagement away from the authority ofthe critic and the expert to a more personallydetermined outlook on what we will or won’twatch, read, see and so on has come to influencethe way that we must see creative production,particularly in education.

This pamphlet argues that the main skill youngpeople will need will be the capacity to linkcreativity to meaning in their own terms and inways that will allow them to match productionand products to purpose and audience. Thismeans that the capacity to respond to the

Making Good Work

18 Demos

different expectations that there are will be vital.As creativity becomes a skill central to theworkplace and – through the influence ofperformative contexts like reality TV and socialnetworking websites – social lives, as well, youngpeople will need the skills to navigate betweendifferent expectations of their creative work. Thismeans accommodating critique and recognisingthe sense of identity and individuality that isinherent to creative production. As we conclude,the question for creative education is how tocombine multiple perspectives on value and giveyoung people the essential reflective and editorialskills to navigate, arbitrate and learn to makemore from these.

Doing so opens new potential. Government iscoming to realise the democratic meaning ofcultural and creative activity. Creative productioncan be a means of interaction. By making aproduct – be it a play in a theatre, an object or anyother cultural or creative form – we are expressingan opinion and publicising a part of our identity.Equally, when we view cultural or creative work,

Introduction

Demos 19

we have the chance to engage with someone else’sopinion and sense of identity. This makes culturaland creative production a very powerful force thatwill be vital right through from the schoolroomto the way that we engage with other cultures inmore general and global contexts. However, torealise this rich potential we need to reconsiderthe role that creative production has in youngpeople’s education. Further still, we need to findways of drawing different and multiple valuesinto the considerations around young people’screative work.

Making Good Work

20 Demos

1. It ain’t just theway you do it,it’s what you do

Demos 21

Bexhill Primary School is on the edge of ahousing estate near Sunderland in the north eastof England. The region provides an example ofthe skills crisis faced by many parts of the UK.Sunderland is the largest city in the region, with apopulation of just over 280,800.2 According togovernment statistics, it is one of the country’smost deprived areas.3 Over the past 30 years itsstory has been glum. It has been hit hard bychanging times and changing industry. Between1981 and 1997, over 110,000 people lost their jobsin primary and manufacturing work. However,the skills base has remained the same. Althoughless than 15 per cent of the workforce is stillemployed in it, doggedly, the manufacturing sectorremains an important element of the economy.

Near Bexhill is the town of Dipton, the homeof the professional theatre company, Theatre Cap-a-Pie. In 2005, the company put on a new show,The Amazing Adventures of Mary Lou and the IceCream Pirates.4 It was the story of two piratebrothers, one good and the other evil. The playexamined the dynamics of the pair’s relationship.It was performed to a paying adult audience whoexpected the professional standards that you or Imight of any production we see on the stage atour local theatre.

However, there was something different aboutMary Lou. The script was developed especially forthe production at Dipton. More than that, therewas no single playwright whose views and inten-tions could shape that production. As a result, theplay did not bring with it the heritage ofpublication or a writer’s reputation: it faced theprofessional challenge of attracting audiencesafresh. Instead, the pirates were the brainchild ofa crew of about 30 primary schoolchildren fromBexhill, all between the ages of about five andseven.

Making Good Work

22 Demos

When the audience members at Dipton paidtheir £5 and took their seats, they were watchingprofessional actors being directed by primaryschoolchildren in the performance of an originalplay on which they had all collaborated. In fact,although the play was not by a famousplaywright, there was a reputation at stake, that ofthe professionals of Theatre Cap-a-Pie. Whiletheir role in working with the young people was,as we shall see, part of an educational initiative,they also had a living to earn. The play had to begood, and it had to be marketable. At £5 a time,you need to sell a lot of tickets to fund aproduction and keep a theatre going . . . and youhave to rely on far more than friends and familyto fill the auditorium. In working with thechildren, the professional actors also helped themdevelop professional skills of critique. The youngpeople weren’t just passing through a process,they were establishing skills in relating to anaudience and using their own creativity toplatform their own ideas.

In the course of researching this pamphlet, we

It ain’t just the way you do it, it’s what you do

Demos 23

met some of the young theatre producers of Cap-a-Pie and Bexhill Primary School and talked tothem about how they saw their production ofMary Lou. They were very aware that many whocame to see the production ‘did not think we haddone it’. They were also able to look at their workwith pride, taking such disbelief as recognition oftheir achievement. What was important for theyoung people was not just the fun of participa-tion, but also the response with which theircreativity and the meaning that they articulated itwas met. More than simply producing anotherpiece of work, they had taken part in aperformance and an act of creative expression.

At the same time, the disbelief with which thequality of the production of Mary Lou was mettells another story. Although complimenting thework, such reactions follow a perspective verydifferent from that of the young person, adheringto a fixed scale of quality. As a result, they canmiss many of the values that the product mightrepresent because they do not take into accountthe role of the practitioner in the production.

Making Good Work

24 Demos

In their discussion of Mary Lou, two USacademics, Shirley Brice Heath and Shelby Wolf,have argued that ‘most drama advocates todayknow that the process of learning to create dramais far more important than the product or theperformance’.5 Although concurring with muchpedagogy today, this is not entirely the case.Young people can derive values from finishedperformances or products that can play a centralrole in their development. In all creative work,thinking about the product – be it a play, a film,an artwork, a design and so forth – helps us todraw out young people’s motives and purpose.

This is demonstrated by the story of one of theBexhill playwrights. He had worked with TheatreCap-a-Pie and his classmates on the productionof Mary Lou. After the play had been staged, heand his peers were given posters as mementoes ofthe project. He now has that poster pinned to hisbedroom wall. As a product of the project, it is amilestone of achievement. For him, it is also atouchstone and an artefact imbued with veryspecific meaning: he says that it calms him after

It ain’t just the way you do it, it’s what you do

Demos 25

he has woken up from a bad dream. The physicalpresence of the poster provides a point ofreflection on the memories that he associates withthe project. Clearly, there can be values associatedwith young people’s creative production that arevery worth addressing.

Making Good Work

26 Demos

2. What makesgood work?

Demos 27

This pamphlet examines the values associatedwith young people’s creative production. Newcreative contexts, from MySpace to reality TV, arechanging the way that we see creative production.People, young and old, can now find publicplatforms for their interests and activities moreeasily than ever before and, well nigh each day, wesee people from every walk of life performing foraudiences on live TV. We need to accommodatenew sets of values that relate to far more thaneither a level of attainment, a structure forvalidation, or the recognition of what is ‘good’according to conventional educational, aestheticand artistic standards.

Young people’s creative production, however,sits in a much wider context. When young people

draw, paint, dance, act, sing and so on, they do sowithin boundaries of expectation set byestablished fields. Often, and in general, quality isthought of as relating to superiority. However,before any reference to ‘excellence’, Chamber’sDictionary defines quality as being:

that which makes a thing what it is; nature;character; kind; property; attribute.

It is a broad definition, but that is where its valuelies. Creativity, culture and the arts have long beenvalidated in aesthetic terms. The skill toappreciate them has been the reserve of the few.In the eighteenth century, thinkers like the Earl ofShaftesbury equated the appreciation of the artswith sophistication and the capacity to recognisenuance, detail, order and balance, which theybelieved defined polite society. Cultural formsand the capacity to appreciate them came to beassociated with the ruling classes, while the termson which they were appreciated were fixedaccordingly. In many ways, they still are, certainly

Making Good Work

28 Demos

in the popular and journalistic imagination and,although habits of cultural consumption arechanging and more and more people engage indifferent ways with a wider range of culturalforms than ever before, the perceived distinctionbetween ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture still exists.

As we shall see, conventionally, we haveexpected experts to make judgements of quality.These are the professionals to whom the publiclook for guidance. In various fields, they arecurators, musicians, theatre producers, cinemaowners or artists. In particular, in the papers, ontelevision and online, we look to critics to judgethe ‘quality’ of a creative display or product.However, things are changing, and it is no longerso valid to think with such delineation betweenexpert and non-expert, people who know andpeople who must be told and people who produceand people who consume.

Changing publics and changing politicsGenerally, our approach to creative and culturalproducts shares much with wider changes in how

What makes good work?

Demos 29

we approach provision like the products andservices we consume. Writing of professionals as awhole, from sectors that include the arts, throughto medicine, John Craig has argued that while‘professionals play a greater role than ever inshaping our public realm and our daily lives . . .new professional legitimacy and culture will notbe generated by setting professionals free to do asthey please or by enslaving them to governmenttargets and consumer demand’.6

Similarly, expertise has become a vital part ofour society and economy, and ‘our everyday livesare played out through a series of technologicaland expert relationships’.7 ‘New rationales forprofessional action’, Craig continues, ‘will growfrom practical collaboration betweenprofessionals and members of the publicthemselves.’8 At heart, these changes stem fromour increased demand for more individualisedand more personalised services. They reflect apublic more willing to express its will and makeits preferences known – an utter turn aroundfrom Shaftesbury’s philosophy of polite society.

Making Good Work

30 Demos

The changes just mentioned have particularsignificance in the creative and cultural sector. Aswe have seen, cultural production exists within anestablished framework of criticism and expertise.However, now, alongside the experts, the publichave a powerful voice: if we don’t like something,we are increasingly confident in asking for ourmoney back, or else simply deciding not to engagewith it. In cultural consumption, this has – tosome extent – always been the case. In terms ofcultural creation and production, however, it isincreasingly important that we have the capacityand confidence to act with similar independence.Judgements of quality and the means of makingthem have become more numerous and varied.More and more, cultural and creative organisa-tions have sought to engage the public. As a result,we have growing licence and freedom to decidewhether or not we like or value cultural andcreative production based on the contexts of ourown lives. Alongside professional and con-ventional standards of quality, we have morepersonalised and individual expectations and

What makes good work?

Demos 31

more public forums on which to share them. It isnot that expert opinion has been invalidated. Infact, particularly in the case of young peoplecutting their teeth in a more creative world, thereis a role for experts and practitioners from whomskills can be learned. Across society, frombroadcast news to the museum and publicservices in general, we are seeing the boundariesbetween producer and consumer shift: therelationship is no longer one of provision, but ofcooperation, collaboration and community.

Making Good Work

32 Demos

3. An anthropologicalapproach tocreativity

Demos 33

Like all creative products, young people’s work iswell studied and carries with it a series ofestablished complexities. In a recent report forCreative Partnerships, Shakuntala Banaji, AndrewBurn and David Buckingham explore some of theproblems posed by the word ‘creativity’:

Academics, policy-makers and artseducators deploy a range of claims aboutcreativity which emerge from differenttheories of learning, different contexts(artistic, bureaucratic, pedagogic, political),different artistic traditions (fine arts,popular arts, different artforms,commercial art), different academic orquasi-academic traditions (liberal–

humanist literary theory, aesthetics,philosophy, psychology, communication andmedia studies, cultural studies) anddifferent policy contexts (social inclusion,vocational education, gifted and talented).9

This pamphlet will refer to all these differentinterpretations and, beyond those mentioned,there are likely to be many more besides. Thosementioned are just some of the most frequentlyencountered interpretations of creativity. As aconcept, it is encountered in a wide variety ofdomains.

This pamphlet focuses on the main areas inwhich creativity is discussed. Primarily, these arethe values of critical discourse and aesthetics, thevalues associated with creativity in the workplace,the values placed on creativity in education andan emerging set of values that link creativity andthe expression of meaning in social anddemocratic contexts. Finally, and as we shall see,the pamphlet also addresses the significance ofnew models of creative and cultural engagement

Making Good Work

34 Demos

that enable young people to bring very differentexpectations and values to the creative productsthat they encounter.

Amid all these interpretations, it would be veryeasy to get lost and it would also be all too easy todismiss creativity as a catch-all term. However,the validity of all the separate domains in whichcreativity is discussed warns us against this.Creativity in an advertising agency, for instance,has little in common with creativity in aplayroom – however, neither is more or less validthan the other, just very different. Rather thanseeking to define creativity, attempting to createstandards by which it can be judged that will meetall of these contexts, we face a new imperative tounderstand creativity as the capacity toaccommodate and negotiate between all thevalues that these domains bring.

Doing so presents a challenge that requires ashift in thinking. A creative workplace, forexample, brings with it assumptions that mayvary dramatically from the processes of critiqueassociated with various cultural forms. To take it

An anthropological approach to creativity

Demos 35

to an extreme, Ernst Gombrich conjures verydifferent images than those of the foyer ofGoogle. The challenge therefore lies in how thetwo can be related. In his investigation, Art andAgency, the anthropologist Alfred Gell identifiedthe capacity of anthropology to negotiate betweenthe values of different behaviours that might notseem readily squared. Specifically, Gell talked of‘art’ examining the different value sets to whichcreative production of societies, from the Yorubain what is now Nigeria to our own, play. Histheories, however, apply to creativity moregenerally.

Gell emphasised what he called the ‘“action”-centred approach to art’ in which he concentratedon ‘agency, intention, causation, result andtransformation’, viewing art as ‘a system of action,intended to change the world rather than encodesymbolic propositions about it’.10 In thispamphlet, we take creativity to be a definingquality of the work produced by young people.11

Amid all the definitions just listed, rather thanseeking to find a common element that can be

Making Good Work

36 Demos

defined as creativity, creativity in learningcontexts can be understood as the capacity tomake the bridges and links between the differentexpectations that different audiences can have ofcreative production.12 This element ofadaptability will be crucial to young people asthey grow up in a world that is less defined byconventional structures and patterns of work andby less structured models of progression anddevelopment.

Gell continues that:

the art object [or creative product] iswhatever is inserted into the ‘slot’ providedfor art objects in the system of terms andrelations envisaged in the theory . . .nothing is decidable in advance about thenature of this object, because theory ispremised on the idea that the nature of theart object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is embedded.It has no ‘intrinsic’ nature, independent ofthe relational context.13

An anthropological approach to creativity

Demos 37

One set of values that is associated with a creativeproduct is therefore subjective.

Speaking of the cultural institutions andprovision, John Holden has argued that ‘intrinsicvalue’ is just one of the values that can beassociated with cultural and creative products.14

Alternatively, there are institutional values ofcultural experience, which relate to the way it isprovided, such as the quality of display, andinstrumental values, which relate to the effects ofculture on health, society, the economy and so on.The crucial point is that creative producers havenow to play to different audiences that, as we shallsee, bring very new sets of values and expectationsof creative products. Just as Holden identifies inrelation to the cultural professional, young peoplemust also be given the skills to relate to thedifferent expectations of their creativity. Acreative education must therefore incorporate theteaching of skills to incorporate, play to andaccommodate both their own values and themore established value systems of others.

Making Good Work

38 Demos

4. Beyond thenumbersThe importance of thecreative product

Demos 39

When you or I set out to do or create something,we have an objective or an end product in mind.Whether we are making a meal, writing a letter, orbuilding a house, we are engaged in a creativeprocess. The way that we go about doing so isimportant but, ultimately, it is the end product towhich we are aiming. It is also the end product bywhich we will be judged and by which we willmake our own judgements of success. The sameapplies in creative professions, when a clientcommissions an artist or a designer to createsomething, although the means by which he orshe gets there are important, it is the product oftheir creativity in which the client is investing.

We know well enough by now that the creativeand cultural industries are a vital part of oureconomy. We tell the story of our success in thecreative industries with the oft-quoted statisticthat they account for 8 per cent of our GDP andare one of the fastest growing parts of oureconomy. However, these figures do not reallycount for much beyond their financial impact;what often matters more in driving that impactare aesthetic and qualitative assessments of ourcreativity. Where creativity is concerned, we needto look beyond the numbers.

As a result, we market our creativity using itsproducts. In 2005, the British Council and theBritish Embassy in Tokyo collaborated to produceDesign UK, ‘a showcase of the best of Britishproduct design, fashion, automotive design,graphics, interiors and architecture’.15 In hisforeword to the publication, the architect LordRogers of Riverside wrote that ‘British design haslong been regarded internationally as innovative,dynamic and above all, daring’.16 Looked at again,this is revealing: in Japan, a country renowned for

Making Good Work

40 Demos

its design and technology, how is it that the UKcan occupy such a prestigious position? Thecraftsmanship, innovation, dedication and all thevalues that comprise British design are inherentto creative individuals and their companies. InJapan, and all over the world, this creativity isread in the objects that British creativityproduces.

The pages of Design UK are illustrated with theproducts that showcase British creativity. FromTangerine’s designs for seats for British Airways toForm’s album covers and logo designs, these areall the finished product. We remember AlecIssigonis for the Mini more than we do for hisengineering. Jonathan Ive will be remembered forthe iPod, the Apple Mac and the iBook more thanhe will for the sketches, first attempts and designsthat went into making them. There is no doubtingthat the maquettes, sketches, plans, botchedattempts and versions one through to umpteenare all vital parts of the creative process, but theproduct remains the defining point.

Beyond the numbers

Demos 41

The lost of the UnicornThe importance of product notwithstanding, inmany learning contexts, there remains anemphasis on process. Paintings are left in drawersand on fridges. Models and objects get dusty andbroken. Plays are put on and often forgotten. Onestory reveals the problems of this focus ineducation. The Unicorn Children’s Theatre inSouthwark was built based on consultation withyoung people from the area.17 When it waslaunched, the designers, theatre professionals andarchitects who had worked with the young peopleon the project invited them to the launch. Thiswas a significant moment, providing the samelevel of recognition to the young people as mightbe afforded a professional. Many of thoseinvolved were the guests of honour at the theatre’slaunch and some have chosen to remain involvedin the theatre’s activities. However, in such alarge-scale building project that relied on theallocation and distribution of funding fromvarious sources, delays are inevitable and to be

Making Good Work

42 Demos

expected. Young people, on the other hand,progress quickly, and the school year moves onregardless. Six months might not be so long atime for a building project, but it is in the life of aprimary years pupil. With the launch delayed,some of the young people involved had alreadymoved from primary to secondary school and,sadly, the Unicorn had lost contact with them andwas unable to invite them.

As far as the education system was concerned,the young people’s involvement in the process ofcreating the Unicorn had finished. However, thereremained a mismatch. The validation of theirinvolvement fell short of the validation that theproduct itself received. For all the adultprofessionals concerned in the construction ofthe children’s theatre, the product was theultimate reflection of their creativity. The samekind of validation, respect and reflection was notextended to the children who fell through the net.For those pupils who were at the launch andcontinue to be engaged in how the product oftheir creativity develops, the whole process of

Beyond the numbers

Demos 43

designing and growing the theatre is a valuablelearning experience in how a new, more creativeeconomy works and how creativity is rewarded.Ultimately, this revolves around product. Theyoung people worked with the intention ofcreating a theatre and their continued involve-ment centres on the product of that work.18

The story of those pupils with whom theUnicorn lost contact tells a different story. Thereis a mismatch between the creative life that weincreasingly have to lead and the education thatprovides for it. While creativity figuresprominently in young people’s education, theemphasis is clearly on process rather thanproduct. In September 2006, an Ofsted inspectionof Creative Partnerships schools concluded thatalthough ‘some of the attributes of creative peoplewere . . . developed: an ability to improvise, takerisks and collaborate with others’, one of the keychallenges that faces creative education is thatpupils are ‘often unclear about how to apply thesequalities independently to develop original ideasand outcomes’.19 Ultimately, this is about how

Making Good Work

44 Demos

young people develop the skills to apply creativelearning to a world that is becoming increasinglydefined by the different value sets of creativity.

Creative engagement in schools and withprofessional practitioners is central in helpingyoung people to develop the skills they will needto operate in later life. In schools and otherlearning contexts throughout the country, youngpeople are engaged in making, painting,producing, acting, playing and otherwise creatingwork of all sorts. Quite often, they do this inassociation with professional practitioners.Through this, they learn skills that vary fromcollaboration, cooperation and planning, tosociability and flexibility. More than that, theyoften produce work that has an audience in theoutside world and is part of the professional’sown practice. Just like the Unicorn Theatre andjust like Jonathan Ive’s iPod, the product of thatengagement has a good deal of significance andmeaning – however, in the ways that youngpeople learn and develop creative skills, thisremains little discussed. If we are to prepare

Beyond the numbers

Demos 45

young people efficiently and adequately for amore creative world, then we must both developtheir skills in recognising and valuing product,managing and reflecting on a critique of theirown production, and also factor their ownexpectations and value systems into the way thatwe judge and estimate their work.

Making Good Work

46 Demos

5. The criticalvaluation oforiginality

Demos 47

As Alfred Gell argued, creative engagement andproduction are subject to aesthetic judgementsand these, quite often, have remained the reserveof the expert. However, as an anthropologist, Gellalso recognised his licence to avoid defining ‘theart object, in advance, in a way satisfactory toaestheticians, or philosophers, or art historians, oranybody else’.20 Creative producers, be they youngpeople or professionals, do not. As we shall see,the expectations of aesthetics, commercialmarkets and pedagogical systems remain. Educa-tionalists set levels of assessment accordingly, andprofessionals and public pass judgements that aredetermined by comparison to these expectations.These judgements also influence how young

people and their peers see creative work. Thechallenge is in how we develop the skills in youngpeople to respond to and accommodate thesevalues and at the same time retain theindependence and attachment that will enablethem to connect their work to individual senses ofpurpose and meaning.

Aesthetic values are communicated in termsthat relate to practice and praxis in comparativeterms. Rembrandt’s brushwork, for instance, is onoccasion thick, daubed and scumbled: it expressesthe earthiness and intensity of his world and,latterly, a rejection of the precision, conformityand confidence of the wealthy burghers whosetaste in portraiture had left him behind. To giveanother example, Fellini’s direction is heady,exotic and whirling, expressive of the hedonism,confusion and sensuality of the worlds hecaricatured. Criticism of this kind is based onjudgement and assessment of quality onfamiliarity with given domains. The same is truefor young people’s creative production. Creativityis judged more in terms of conformity to a given

Making Good Work

48 Demos

standard than the individual purpose of thecreator. In 1999, the National AdvisoryCommittee on Creative and Cultural Education(NACCCE) and the then Department forEducation and Employment (DfEE) published AllOur Futures: Creativity, culture and education.21

The authors’ definition of creativity is brokendown into four characteristics:

First, they [the characteristics of creativity]always involve thinking or behavingimaginatively. Second, overall thisimaginative activity is purposeful: that is,it is directed to achieving an objective.Third, these processes must generatesomething original. Fourth, the outcomemust be of value in relation to theobjective.22

Following Gell’s approach, it is important thatthese terms are not seen as prescriptive qualitiesto be assessed according to prior expectations.One of the central components of young people’s

The critical valuation of originality

Demos 49

creative learning is the capacity to connectproduction to him or herself in a way that createsmeaning. It is in the way that young peopleposition this meaning to various audiences that itgains purchase and relevance in the wider world.

In this light, NACCCE’s definition of creativityis important because it emphasises freedom fromexpectation and convention. However, it alsocreates a new set of values that cannot beapproached in a deterministic way. Ultimately,creativity is the application of a personalapproach to a task in hand and the innovationthat it represents. We apply that approach inorder to create an outcome that reflects ourpersonal outlooks and beliefs and makesomething for others to value in some way.

We need to reconsider how we think of thequality and value of young people’s creativeproduction. While maintaining concepts of skilland practice, it needs redefining in ways that bothempower young people to imbue their work withtheir own meaning and give them the capacity toaccommodate different critiques in order to

Making Good Work

50 Demos

develop the quality of their practice. Work is ofvalue when it meets the expectations, needs andattitudes with which people approach it. Thepoint is that those expectations and needs can bevery different and many remain beyond the scopeand reach of conventional curricula. As a result,many young people are unprepared for thejudgements that they will have increasingly toface. The practical skills of creative productionand the social and cooperative skills associatedwith creative processes are all important, but theymust also be accompanied by the capacity torecognise and reflect on different valuesassociated with what you have produced and theconfidence in those valuations. In particular, wemust find a way in which young people can beencouraged to recognise that the validity of theirown judgement and that of others can co-existwithout necessarily concurring – in fact this iswhere creative learning and practice developmentbest occurs. In young people’s cooperation withprofessional practitioners, creativity must beunderstood as combining levels of skill

The critical valuation of originality

Demos 51

appropriate to the student, and an originality ofcontent that allows them ownership of the ideabehind the work. It is this ownership that givesthe capacity to see work as an expression ofidentity and develop clearer notions of value.

Fitting value into practiceIf learning practice is to emphasise the moreindividual values just described, the questionbecomes how we ensure that young people havethe skills by which to see creative production as away of expressing their own point of view andoutlook. The challenge lies in how this can fit intoeducational models.

Initially, there is a category of confusion thatmust be clarified. Creative education is too oftenthought of in relation to the creative arts, likepainting, acting, singing, dancing and so on. As aresult, the skills developed in everything from artclasses through to the engagement of youngpeople with creative practitioners like those ofTheatre Cap-a-Pie, mentioned at the beginning ofthis pamphlet, are seen in terms of developing

Making Good Work

52 Demos

skills directed towards set creative careers. Theseskills must be seen as media: they provide ways inwhich people, from schoolchildren through toadults, can express themselves and their opinions.When they are successful, the value of projectslike those supported by Creative Partnerships andothers is that they encourage young people to seetheir creative engagement less in terms ofpursuing a given practice, than in terms of havingthe opportunity to communicate in different waysthat can be shaped to purpose.

Conventional, practice-oriented models ofcreative education have tended to focus onunderstanding how to create something. Indrawing, young people learn how to create imagesthat represent something on the page. In acting,young people learn the skills to portray a givencharacter. As we develop practical skills, we alsolearn how to use those to present and managemeaning. The skills of drawing can be applied tomanage content, and the skills of dramaticrepresentation can be used as part of a story thatconveys meaning.

The critical valuation of originality

Demos 53

However, the difference is that, in the past,these skills have too often been confined to thepractise of given artforms. As we shall see in thefollowing chapters, creativity is becoming muchmore central to our wider lives and society.Creative education must be about far more thandrawing, painting, acting, filmmaking and so on:it cannot be pinned down to given domains.There is a real need to shift the emphasis to theuse of different media to express identity andmeaning in relation to different audiences. Ratherthan looking at the values of the creative artssimply in terms of conventional skills, we needadditionally to look at the value of creativity as awhole. The main skill young people will need asthey grow up will be the capacity to link creativityto meaning in their own terms and in ways thatwill allow them to match products to purpose andaudience.

Making Good Work

54 Demos

6. The values ofthe workplace

Demos 55

What powers economic growth? It’s nottechnology – technology is a raw material.What makes human beings unique is onething – creativity. All else are subsets.Creativity powers economic growth.23

Richard Florida

Creativity and creative production fit into thecontext of a changing society. Just as critics andothers look to creativity in certain ways andaccording to pre-supposed norms, so potentialemployers – and, increasingly, educationalistsresponding to the changing contexts in whichyoung people will grow up – will look at creativityfrom their particular perspectives.

Again, Alfred Gell’s discussion of the anthro-

pology of art provides a starting point forthinking about creativity more generally.‘Anthropologists’, he noted, ‘cannot ignoreinstitutions; the anthropology of art has toconsider the institutional framework of theproduction and circulation of artworks, in so faras such institutions exist.’24 This applies as muchto the institutions of the creative economy as toinstitutions associated with the creative arts, likemuseums and critics.

Setting the agenda: All Our FuturesAll Our Futures placed creativity at the heart ofthe educational agenda. ‘Creative and culturaleducation’, its authors outlined, ‘are not subjectsin the curriculum, they are general functions ofeducation.’25 This reflected the widespreadrealisation that a new way of working haddeveloped and presented a new challenge toeducation, established industry and public policy.

Creativity is now firmly established as anessential skill. In 2006, a poll of human resourcedirectors conducted for Demos research into the

Making Good Work

56 Demos

workplaces of today and tomorrow revealed that,of all the skills looked for by prospectiveemployers, the most desired arrive through acreative education (see table 1).26

Although creativity comes in nominally atfourth on the list, all of the top six categories areintimately associated with creative practice and

The values of the workplace

Demos 57

Table 1. Human resources directors:What are the top three skills, qualitiesor aptitudes that you look for in agraduate employee?

Communication/communicating ideas 68%Problem-solving 40%Team-working 36%Creativity and innovation 28%Ability to work under pressure 26%Flexibility and multi-tasking 22%Customer handling 22%Numeracy 14%Literacy 8%

Source: GfK NOP polling

creative methods of working. In the past, pro-fessions required a prescribed set of skills. Youngpeople left school or university and embarked ontraining schemes to develop and build these,which they would then put to use and hone intheir chosen career for which they had now beentrained. However, now such conventionalpreparation for the workplace is increasinglyinadequate. We aspire to different, more flexibleways of working:

Employees want more human organisationswith greater autonomy and flexibility. Theywant an experience of work that is alignedwith their values. They want a workplaceforged in an image of their identities, not aworkplace that tries to define them. Theywant organisations that can let go, andgrant them a greater say in how things arerun.27

Such flexibility goes hand in hand with a changeto a more creative workplace. The description of

Making Good Work

58 Demos

work just given connects with creativity andwider changes in our society. ‘For the first time inour history, technologies allow us to gain theeconomic benefits of large organisations withoutgiving up the human benefits of small ones, likefreedom, creativity, motivation and flexibility.’28

These both fuel our appetite for control andindividuality, and create a new set of needs andskills. As Kimberley Seltzer and Tom Bentleyargued in The Creative Age, there is a need ‘toemphasise a whole new range of skills, fromproblem-solving and communication toinformation and risk management and self-organisation’.29

These new skills represent a further applicationof the term creativity and have become both partof the vocabulary and structure of Britain todayand central to the governmental agenda. TheDepartment for Culture, Media and Sport(DCMS) and the Department for Trade andIndustry (DTI) have jointly instituted theCreative Economy Programme, as ‘the first step inachieving our goal of making the UK the world’s

The values of the workplace

Demos 59

creative hub’.30 The phrase was used by JamesPurnell, the first person to occupy the role of thenewly created Minister of the Creative Industriesin June 2005.31 It reflects a political emphasis oncreativity as a power in the workplace. Accordingto the DCMS, the department in which the newpost sits, the creative industries contributed £56.5billion – some 8 per cent of the total across allindustries – to the UK economy in 2003.32

Globally, the UN reports that the creativeindustries account for 7 per cent of annual GDPand are likely to account for 11 per cent by 2015.33

Around the world, they are also the fastestgrowing sector, rising from a worth of $831billion in 2000 to $1.3 trillion in 2005.34

Furthermore, the importance of creativity isrecognised across government: in 2006, forexample, HM Treasury commissioned Sir GeorgeCox, chairman of the Design Council, to reviewthe implications of the creative agendaimplications for industry.35

James Purnell’s pledge was ambitious, butconfident. It also raises a number of significant

Making Good Work

60 Demos

questions and challenges: How is Britain tobecome ‘the world’s creative hub’? What skills dowe need to become that hub, and how we will beable to maintain that position? The answers donot lie solely in boosting and nurturing industrieslike advertising, design and broadcasting. As theRoberts’ Review of Creativity36 – commissioned byDCMS – implies, a significant part of the answerlies in a more confident and imaginativeapproach to our future, and how we prepare ouryoung people for it. The value of creativity in theworkplace must therefore grow from thecreativity encouraged in education.

The values of the workplace

Demos 61

7. The values ofcreativity ineducation

62 Demos

As the NACCCE report recognised, creativity inyoung people grows out of their imagination.Teachers, the professionals with whom they workand educational contexts all combine to stimulatethat imagination. In assessing the quality ofyoung people’s creative engagement andcreativity, teachers, practitioners and othersaround young people – including young peopleand their peers themselves – deal with aspects ofwork and products that are closely associated withthe young person’s conception and expression ofthings individual and sometimes very personal tohim or herself.

This does not mean that creativity cannot betaught, but it does emphasise a significant quality

in the way that it is taught. A creative education isone that encourages the young person to channeltheir own understanding towards theirdevelopment and enables them to express ideas intheir own terms. It also allows them to realise andaccommodate subjectivity. So, if a young person isencouraged to associate their work withexpression, then there must be a comparablefocus on their capacity to manage the differentvalues of critique that might be applied to theirwork.

Educationalists and commentators have drawnattention to the increasing gap between educationand the life for which it must prepare ourchildren. The thinker on creativity and leader ofAll Our Futures, Ken Robinson, has identified the‘major problems facing all organisations inrecruiting and retaining people with creativeabilities, powers of communication andadaptability. Yet there is an inconsistency: youngpeople have these abilities in abundance but, bythe time they emerge from formal education,many of them do not.’37 For Tom Bentley, ‘schools

The values of creativity in education

Demos 63

and classrooms resemble less and less the situationsin which the rest of us live, work, and learn’.38

Targets of assessment in education andlearning mean that young people learn to judgethemselves and their attainment by standards.However, these are set by others and, in particular,general educational bodies. At heart, this is a verysimilar pattern to that discussed earlier in relationto criticism. In individual terms, the purpose ofinquisitiveness and experimentation is satis-faction and learning derived from personalavenues of exploration. This is at the very heart ofunderstanding how creative production fits intothe wider world: the independent assessment ofnovelty and the taking of risks in relation tosurrounding conventions. The challenge is that,although educators and professionals collabora-ting with young people might encourage themand help shape a sense of purpose, the satisfactionand sense of achievement to be gained is uniqueto the pupil.

What this does not mean is that standards ofattainment and assessment are irrelevant. Far

Making Good Work

64 Demos

from it, there are areas in which a teacher’sassessment and expertise is essential. Theteacher’s judgement and praise remains apowerful form of validation, as does that of theprofessional practitioner collaborating withyoung people. Indeed, particularly in relation tovisual arts education, there is a long history ofinvestigation into how creativity can be taughtand assessed. In the 1960s, and earlier,educationalists considered, specified andadvocated approaches and methodologies forrecognising and assessing the creative componentof young people’s learning.39 These, however,focused primarily on the field of visual artseducation in schools. The problem is not that wehave failed to recognise the importance ofcreativity in young people’s learning but that theadvances that have been made in this field havebeen confined within narrow curriculumboundaries. The challenge now is not only topromote ways of ensuring that creativity is aninherent and fully recognised feature of all aspectsof the curriculum, but also that the curriculum as

The values of creativity in education

Demos 65

a whole encourages and enables young people tolink creativity to meaning in their own terms inways that will allow them to match products topurpose and audience.

To do this, we have to recognise a simple fact:there are values in a young person’s creative workthat are not accessed by conventional structuresof educational assessment and cannot beexpressed by anybody other than the youngperson. These are the values based in thechanging models of cultural consumption andengagement that we mentioned earlier. They arealso the values associated with the newtechnologies that young people encounter anduse everyday, like the performance-basedjudgements of reality TV and the user-definedcontent of social software, each of which areaddressed in the next chapter. We need to identifyhow we can access these different viewpoints, andunderstand and articulate what they might meanto young people and those with whom they arecollaborating. There can be no single point ofvalidation but the maker of a piece of work must

Making Good Work

66 Demos

be able to synthesise and reflect on multiplesources of validation.

Equally, the validation of young people’screative production cannot simply be a matter ofretrospective judgement made by a teacher or anassessor. It must also take into account aspirationand senses of progress. Just as the poster for MaryLou provided a reference point for the youngplaywright at Theatre Cap-a-Pie, the product isboth something to look forward to and, subse-quently, to look back at. It is both a satisfactionand a platform for progression. This applies to theyoung people themselves, the professionals withwhom they collaborate and the publics that theyaddress.

Creativity is an act of makingAlthough creativity is a skill and aptitudedesirable in the modern world, it would be easy tofall into the trap of simply placing it alongsideother subjects or the three ‘R’s of reading, writingand arithmetic. Instead, it is something ratherdifferent. Reading, writing and arithmetic are all

The values of creativity in education

Demos 67

actions with a specific end – they go into creatinga finished product, be it understanding a text or acorrect answer. To be sure, they are learned asactions, but this is taught with a specific end ofcompetence in mind. Creativity, on the otherhand, describes the capacity to predict andanticipate response to production.

But what does this look like to young people,the creators themselves? Take the example ofyoung people collaborating with practitioners tocreate a performance piece. Just as we would inthe same situation, they work towards thatperformance piece: it is the finished product.Skills learned or developed in negotiation,collaboration and problem-solving are incidental.Of course, they are important, and theirdevelopment must be encouraged, and theenjoyment of the process of production can, initself, be a prime motivation. However, thepurpose, in terms of intent and direction, of theyoung person is the finished product.

Nevertheless, in focusing on the achievementof particular ends in relation to individual

Making Good Work

68 Demos

purpose, there are important caveats to be made.Just as discussion of the creative industries isdominated by instrumentality, there are alsoqualities that remain unaddressed by currentmodels of assessment and expectationssurrounding product. The nation’s creativesuccess is in the mass of individual creativeenterprise at all levels, and not the result of a neweconomic drive. Creativity is not simply a newway of working: it has become as important as ithas because people in their everyday lives havecome to see it as a better way of working that fitsmore with the attitudes and principles thatgovern modern life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading thinker oncreativity, has defined it as being:

when a person, using the symbols of a givendomain such as music, engineering,business, or mathematics, has a new idea orsees a new pattern, and when this novelty isselected by the appropriate field forinclusion into the relevant domain.40

The values of creativity in education

Demos 69

This also applies to the uptake of more creativemodels of thought itself. As we have seen,creativity is also about devising new means tomeet different ends. Where Csikszentmihalyiconcentrates primarily on what he calls ‘domains’– topics, areas or subjects – it is the generalapplicability of creativity that is important. Theexperience and background that young peoplegain in collaborative practice in schools is vital.Creativity enables the articulation of meaning inways that are better suited to individual purpose.

To make the most of creativity, we need toapproach it less as a process and more as a meansto creating different ends. It is not simply a case ofencouraging young people to be more creative.Rather, young people must have skills to create apurpose and decide on how to achieve it. For this,we need to reconsider how we think of quality inyoung people’s creative education. We need tomove from a model of set attainment, to a modelin which young people are able to determine andassess suitability of purpose themselves.

As a guide to what this might look like, we can

Making Good Work

70 Demos

turn to another book by Csikszentmihalyi. InGood Business, he proposes that ‘leaders mustmake it possible for employees to work with joy totheir heart’s content, while responding to theneeds of society’.41 It ties together the concepts ofindustry, identity and self-fulfilment. Applied toyoung people’s creative education, this takes onnew relevance because it also connects creativeproduction to expression. It also contributes tothe idea that creativity is intrinsically rewarding.Its validity is determined not solely by externallyimposed expectations, but also by a sense ofindividual purpose and applicability. As such, it isalso a potent form of expression that opens newpossibilities in a world in which we are strivingfor meaning.

The values of creativity in education

Demos 71

8. The values ofcreative andculturalproduction anddemocracy

72 Demos

In March 2006, the Minister for Culture, DavidLammy, spoke of cultural and creative productionas ‘exploring expectations and boundaries, settingout ideas, explaining reasoning and thoughts . . .shaping and informing the other’s views and thefinal outcome – this is the bedrock of “culturaldemocracy”’.42 He went on to say that the publicis hungry to engage in cultural and creativeactivities, announcing that some two-thirds of ustook part in an arts-related activity in 2005. Put inperspective, that is as many as voted in the last

general election. We need to develop suchengagement and unlock the democratic meaningand involvement that it represents. The challengelies in identifying how cultural and creativeprofessions and others can go about doing this.43

David Lammy also referred to the involvementof young people in the arts: ‘Over 1000 schoolsare directly involved in Creative Partnerships,with many more benefiting from the learning andknowledge that that programme is generating. Todate, over 400,000 young people have had thechance to make the most of their talents and torealise the potential they probably never knewwas there.’44 That word ‘potential’ is the key. Itrefers to the potential in the young peoplethemselves and the opportunities that they canrealise in their creative engagement. Furthermore,it is potential for our future. By encouraging andhelping our young people to engage in culturaland creative production, we can help themdevelop the capacities with which they canidentify the value and meaning of the cultural andcreative forms that they encounter.

The values of creative and cultural production

Demos 73

The creative product expresses and makespublic meaning and opinion: it is a way ofparticipating in and connecting to the worldaround us. We need to give young people theskills to take advantage of these opportunities andcontexts. Young people’s creative production isabout far more than simply the learning of skillsand techniques. It is about developing thecapacity to create and understand meaning. It is aform of editorial capacity that is at once cultural,creative, social and democratic.

It is important that young people are able tocreate expression for themselves, understandingand interpreting the creativity of others as a formof expression. As the goal and manifestation ofthe projects that they undertake, the product isthe lynchpin of young people’s own creative workand engagement with that of others. Takingcreativity as a means of expressing opinion, it isthe point at which that opinion is made public.

There is also a new domain in which creativityplays a part. With digitisation and the spread oftechnologies and platforms like MySpace, Bebo

Making Good Work

74 Demos

and YouTube, the chances to create content arebecoming ever more diverse and gaining greateraudiences. At the same time, these platforms arealso central to young people’s leisure. They, farmore than the generations that precede them, arebest placed to take advantage of these opportuni-ties. In a recent pamphlet calling for thereinvention of education in the digital age, HannahGreen and Celia Hannon have argued that:

the current generation of young people willreinvent the workplace and the society theylive in. They will do it along the progressivelines that are built into the technology theyuse everyday – of networks, collaboration,co-production and participation. Thechange in behaviour has already happened.We have to get used to it, accept that theflow of knowledge moves both ways and doour best to make sure that no one is leftbehind.45

Young people can flick easily between work and

The values of creative and cultural production

Demos 75

play, tying their creative output to the activitiesthat they own, share and enjoy. We mustencourage them to use their creative skills in thiscontext and to recognise cultural and creativecontent as a diverse and meaningful form ofexpression. At the same time, young people alsorequire the skills to reflect, from the perspective ofboth craft skills and content, on the value of thework they are creating and consuming; it is onlyby doing this that they will learn to makeinformed critical judgements and improve theirpractice.

Making Good Work

76 Demos

9. Young people’screativeproduction andconsumption

Demos 77

While the new cultural forms just mentioned, likeMySpace, YouTube and others, have enabled newlevels of particularisation and personalisation,they also represent a new context for creativityand cultural practice. It is not just that such formsare fashionable – they have become paradigmaticof success. Young people witness their closeseniors, people between 15 and 20, earning six-figure sums by building and selling open-content-based websites. The Arctic Monkeys, the mostprolific musical success of early 2006, sold some360,000 copies of their first single via internetdownloads driven by new forms of marketing and

word of mouth: at the time, the average age oftheir four members was just 19.

The play ethicThe popularity and public hunger for the arts andculture mentioned by the minister for culturereflects a changing society with shifting priorities.Something has shifted in the way that weapproach and see cultural and creativeproduction and engagement in general. Thewriter and musician, Pat Kane, has argued that wenow approach our lives differently. Where,previously, we operated by a ‘work ethic’, now westrive towards a ‘play ethic’, in which there ‘mightbe some consistent principles to adhere to, somerules of thumb whereby the openness andunpredictability of the times might beconfidently, rather than fearfully, faced’.46 Thearts, culture and creative production occupy ‘aprimary place within a play-centred society’:

A play culture regards the arts as creatingthe good player. It promotes the arts as a

Making Good Work

78 Demos

means of developing one’s subjective agency,emotional literacy and aliveness to forms ofexpression. By producing or consumingculture, individuals face the informationage with renewed vitality and imagination.For players, art is not a private pleasure, butan input into the daily practices of collectiveliving.47

As much as the production and consumption ofcultural and creative activity enable us to readmeaning, they enable us to create it, too. Thismakes the values associated with them muchmore open-ended. Cultural and creativeorganisations have had to respond to thischanging environment, and this has reinforcedthe trend towards individual preference. Fundingdemands have stipulated that more diverseaudiences are attracted and so new, morepersonalised means of engaging people have beendeveloped. Museums use digitised displays thatare more open to personalisation and aligned asmuch with the PlayStations in our homes as with

Young people’s creative production and consumption

Demos 79

the cabinets of Sir Hans Sloane. The Royal OperaHouse now broadcasts ballets and operas on bigscreens and in the open air, free to be enjoyedsitting on the pavement rather than having to payfor a seat at Covent Garden. Cultural practitionersare having to respond to wider audiences and inmore diverse ways. It’s not that people areengaging in culture less, it’s that they are engagingdifferently in ways that are more in tune with thecreative contexts of their lives. Gamers, forinstance, can now download exhibitions fromLondon’s Institute of Contemporary Art straightto their handheld games machines.48 Put simply,no longer confined to opening hours, culturalproduction is well on its way to becoming as plugand play as Lara Croft.

These changes are far more than simple marketresponse and this has particular relevance foreducation. Young people are growing up withvery different conceptions of cultural and creativeforms from those that existed even a decade ago.They have scales of value and judgement thatolder generations simply would not think to

Making Good Work

80 Demos

relate to cultural and creative products.Increasingly, our culture is determined less by thetraditional experts, and more by applicability tothe self. In 2005, we voted for the ‘nation’sfavourite painting’, and we voted for whichheritage site a TV programme would help to save.Formerly, such decisions would haveunquestionably been the reserve of professionals.Now, it’s down to all of us.

The very ethos of cultural and creativeproduction is also changing, and along similarlines. In 2006, over 10 million people voted forShayne Ward to win X-Factor and three millionvoted for Chantelle Houghton to win CelebrityBig Brother. For the first time, in 2006 thedecision between nominees for the Turner Prizewas influenced by an online public vote.49 At thesame time, Charles Saatchi and the Guardianoffered readers the chance to curate their ownexhibition. Websites like steve.museum andothers – for instance, that of the ClevelandMuseum of Art – have experimented infolksonomies and social tagging software.50 These

Young people’s creative production and consumption

Demos 81

modern forms of engaging in cultural andcreative activities give us increased confidence inasserting our own opinion. Shayne Ward andother participants in reality TV talent showsperform and they win or lose because we wantthem to: given the freedom to curate collectionsonline, we are also given confidence in our ownpreferences and likings. Sample categorisationsfrom the Cleveland Museum include not onlyconventional art historical terms like‘impressionist’, ‘pre-Raphaelite’ or ‘Mannerist’, butalso ‘brown hair’ and other user-definedkeywords. If this trend continues, soon it will nolonger be so easy to dismiss the winners of theTurner Prize as elected by the privileged few andspeaking to none but the cognoscenti of Hoxtonand Millbank.

All this means that the very idea of creative andcultural production is changing. Young people aregrowing up in a climate of performance and peercritique that is shaping the world around them.Shows like Pop Idol tie creative production closelyto the self: they rely on performance and appeals

Making Good Work

82 Demos

for approval. It is an environment in whichindividuals seek advancement by taking creativerisks. At heart, this is the creative economy. Dayin, day out, millions of people young and oldwatch as young creatives try to ‘make it’ and faceeither the praise or the criticism – often harsh andpersonal – that they receive. Young people arefluent in forms of critique and judgement thatprime them for the use of creative talents in thewider world. On one level, this gives them thecapacity to see wider and later use of their creativeproduction. On another, it gives them a means ofvalidation based on their own opinion and peervalues.

Young people bring to their work a morecreative outlook, reinforced by the popularcultures that they see around them – as much aslearning from the professionals, they will seek toshape the work that they do. However, this is notat the expense of the more traditional values thatare associated with professional opinion. Theknowledge and skills of the professional arevalued, and so the recognition that they give to

Young people’s creative production and consumption

Demos 83

young people’s work has relevance. So, too, isrecognition by teachers and others who make upthe work’s public. We need to recognise thatyoung people can assess quality in a range ofways, each of which associates new meaning withtheir creative work and that of others. The waysthat they engage with cultural and creative formsoutside their education can augment the learningthat professional practitioners and teachers canprovide. New ways of incorporating andcombining these values offer a model of thinkingabout the quality of young people’s creativeproduction that both puts creativity at the heartof their education and runs with the grain of theways that they lead their lives.

Making Good Work

84 Demos

10. Developing theskills baseCultural and creativecritique

Demos 85

Tim Bailey is an architect who has worked withyoung people on several projects. In hisassessment, ‘one level of production is promotedby pre-imposed structures, another by thestructures you allow to evolve’.51 Some values aredetermined by the judgement of teachers,professional practitioners and others; some growaround the product and are influenced by theyoung person’s own experience, judgement andperceptions, many of which develop through theirexperience of working on the project.

This draws attention to an important aspect ofyoung people’s creative production: creativeproducts have different values in different

contexts. As young people work, so the valuesoutlined in the previous chapter will come to havebearing on their work. The challenge lies inaccommodating these in the learning process. Theanswer lies less in factoring these into means ofvalidation, and more in developing youngpeople’s skills of self-assessment from the fullrange of sources and critical reflection.

In one of Tim Bailey’s projects, he worked withyoung people to design a skate park. Although thedesigns were hypothetical, the point of the workwas to enable young people to cooperate andcreate a design that could fit the requirements ofplanning and sustainability: the young people, forinstance, had to consider and meet the require-ments of the local council. The project was alsoan opportunity for young people to experienceand learn how to impart their own views andconsiderations through a creative process. WhatTim learned as he worked with the young peopleon plans for the skate park was that, as theyprogressed, the values that the young peoplebrought to the work were vital in defining the

Making Good Work

86 Demos

success of the project. Rather than the applicationof those values being the purpose of the work asmight be seen from an educational perspective,the young people came to define and judge thesuccess of their own creativity by the valuesthemselves.

Such projects have implications for widersociety in the future because, for it to work, thecultural democracy outlined by David Lammydemands the recognition of a new set of valuesassociated with creative production. Thedemocratic element of creativity hinges on theindividuality and opinions that the workproduced represents. Creative work is both ameans of expression and a means of reading theexpression of others.

As we have seen, the growing emphasis oncreativity in work, in society in general and in oureveryday lives means that these forms ofexpression are both vital to getting ahead, and areencountered more and more frequently. We needto develop young people’s skills in reflecting andcritiquing product in ways that respond to both

Developing the skills base

Demos 87

of these changes. How is it that young people willcome to learn the value of creative expression,and how will they come to accommodate theexpression of others? We need to provide now fora future in which people can recognise in theobjects, images, sounds, performances andchoices that they encounter the opinions,outlooks, preferences, concerns and personalitiesof others.

As Tim Bailey has put it, ‘product is a result,something to see, touch, show off and use.Product is the end of a journey of learning,experimentation and creativity and the beginningof a sense of ownership.’52 Creative Partnershipshas developed a way of thinking about this (figure1). It allows for a more open discussion of qualityof product. As we have seen, All Our Futuresprovided a means of recognising, defining andpotentially assessing creativity. However, youngpeople must be encouraged to do this forthemselves.

Product remains the key element of theprocess, but within a wider arena. It is the stage at

Making Good Work

88 Demos

which the meaning that has been created isbrought to life by exposure to an audience. It isthe end point of one cycle of learning, and thebeginning of another.

� Knowing refers to the articulation of

Developing the skills base

Demos 89

Figure 1 Creative Partnerships’ modelof creative learning

Conceptual Practical

Product

Knowing Doing

Reflecting Showing

▲

▲▲

▲

purpose. Knowledge gives direction tothe work, and relates to the ends thatare to be pursued and theconceptualisation of a product thatwill meet those ends.

� Doing refers to the practicalmanufacture and design of theproduct, and incorporates the socialskills that must be used to achieve theends.

� Showing is the exhibition of theproduct, the stage at which itsmeaning gains voice and its success asa creative expression of the youngperson’s meaning becomes apparent.It is also the stage at which thereactions of those around the youngperson become integral in shaping thevalues of the product.

� Reflecting is the process by which theyoung person can develop both his orher practice and his or her potential tomake expressive contributions in the

Making Good Work

90 Demos

contexts of different domains. Byreacting to the response to theproduct at the point of exhibition, heor she is able to develop a sense of thecapacity of product as a means ofexpression and articulation. This sensefeeds back as the knowledge that willprovide the basis for future enterpriseand engagement.

All these components are important in shapinghow creative production can be used as a meansof interpretation and expression. The creativeprocess is cyclical and iterative. On one level,reflecting back on work gives creative processesthe scope for improvement and, when done fromthe point of view of the individual, it allows forthe inflection of personal and particular values ona given piece of work.

Over and above this, thinking of the model asoutlined above reinforces the values associatedwith process. Writing in a different context, JakeChapman has said that:

Developing the skills base

Demos 91

Systemic learning involves practice andreflection on one’s own experience; as suchit is often an essential complement toacquiring new skills and knowledge.Systemic learning requires people to bewilling to work jointly with those who haveother perspectives, but most importantly itrequires those involved to reflect onoutcomes of their actions and modify theirbehaviours, beliefs and interventions on thebasis of that reflection. This type of learningis a continuous, on-the-job process and isdistinct from the skills and knowledgelearning that require instructors andattendance at relevant courses.53

Chapman was writing more widely of thesuccessful management of organisations, policy-making and public services. However, hisdefinition of ‘systems thinking’ – the managementof complex organisations in which ‘introducingnew policies without considering their impact onthe whole system’ can lead to ‘unintended and

Making Good Work

92 Demos

often bizarre consequences’54 – connects with thewider understanding of cultural and creativeproduction that we must now have. Focusing onthe product, and encouraging reflection back onthat product, is crucial in how young people seetheir work as sitting within wider contexts andhow it has value. Thinking in these terms is alsovital to the learning process. It enables youngpeople to relate skills to purpose and thusanimate creative production in the representativeand expressive ways that we have outlined. As weshall see in the next chapter, alongside audienceslike teachers, the professionals with whom theycollaborate and, as in the case of Theatre Cap-a-Pie, public audiences, this representation andexpression also draws on values that young peoplethemselves bring to their work. In light of thedeveloped expectation that we now have of beingable to shape, influence and comment on theculture with which we engage, this will becomeincreasingly important.

Developing the skills base

Demos 93

11. Respecting theyoung personand the creativeprocess

94 Demos

Ken Robinson has said that ‘we have wasted ordestroyed a great deal of what people had to offerbecause we couldn’t see the value of it’.55 Thevalue of looking at the process outlined in theprevious chapter is that, although it centres on thecreative product, the stages it describes aredefined from the perspective of the young personand their reaction to the domains in which theproduct sits. As a result, it incorporates bothvalues that they learn from education and theexperience of working on a project and the valuesthat they bring from other contexts.

Each of these is fed by reflection. By reflecting

on their own work, young people can assess valueand make judgements of its practicability,suitability to purpose and applicability tocontexts. Reflecting in this way on their own workis also a vital part of the democratic role ofcreative engagement because it allows for similarjudgements and contextualisation in relation tothe work of others.

Reflection, however, is a skill, and youngpeople have to learn how to look at their work indifferent ways. In part, this is the consideration ofaudience that was mentioned earlier. However,just like the recognition of value in relation to thework of others, reflection is also a vital part of thedemocratic potential of creativity. In a verypractical way, if creativity is to be givenrecognition, its results must be communicated tothe external world.56 By understanding howothers will relate to your work andaccommodating the perspectives that they willbring, young people will develop the skills withwhich they can participate in what is a creativeconversation.

Respecting the young person and the creative process

Demos 95

Conversations are about negotiating identityand relating to the position and standpoint ofothers.57 In a democratic culture, this is essential.The process of reflecting on your own creativeproduction in relation to the viewpoint of thosearound you and similarly seeing and recognisingthe meaning in the creative products that theyencounter will be vital to a cultural and creativedemocracy.

Young people must therefore be