Long ago, I wrote about the magic of eureka and how it was transitorily resident within moments of collective creativity (the expanded form of the word co-creation as used in the discourse of design research). Innovation, it seemed, was not the product of a solitary genius locked inside a garrett to starve or produce. Instead, it was built – bit by bit – in conversations, whether formal and facilitated in a group setting such as a workshop or informal and happenstance in a corridor or coffee room. An idea would be thrown out and then shaped and tweaked and sliced and reframed and described and manipulated by the collective voices of everyone who picked it up and rolled it around for a taste in their mind’s eye for a moment or more. Discarding some bits or adding an element, it rolls around and around until it takes its shape that makes everyone go ‘aha’ – the regular word for eureka, the shout of an ‘aha’ attributed to Archimedes in his bathtub at it overflowed displaced by his volume. Long ago, I left my own ‘aha’ at this point after blogging the merest wisp of an idea.
Some 20 years later, I sit here, once again, late at night (at least in the continent where I’m currently located) pondering whether we take this simple act of co-creation far too much for granted and emphasize instead co-design, (or co-development, co-innovation, co-et al. as the case maybe), that is, the outcomes of this mobilization of collective creativity (the “product” of co-creation) rather than the act itself (the “process”). Almost as long ago, Sanders & Stappers (2008) distinguished co-design from co-creation by saying “co-design is a specific instance of co-creation” referring to “collective creativity as it is applied across the whole span of a design process” (p.6). Perhaps, that is why we, as designers who would prefer to collaborate on creative works with others on our team rather than scribble alone in some remote corner, take it so much for granted since “collective creativity” is always preferentially “applied across the whole span” (Sanders & Stappers 2008) of our assumed model of a design process.
The featured image in this post is a Zoom session’s screen captured back in September 2020. I am facilitating a thematic analysis session for novices in collaborative design practices such as this sensemaking workshop conducted at the end of a co-creation project designed and implemented with vegetable vendors in the absolute last mile of Nairobi’s fresh produce supply chain; they kept the lowest income neighbourhoods supplied with nutritious perishables like leafy green veg (without refrigeration) by shouldering the risks generated by travel and curfew restrictions imposed due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Only when distance, disease, and digital screens separated me so profoundly from the rest of my team did I pause and then stop taking the “magic” of the collective “eureka moment” (co-creation generates its own creative energies and some of us have learnt to thrive on it) for granted. I don’t think I can ever take the chemistry which generates creative energy when a group or team is humming with ideas and throwing them out to stick against the way for granted again.
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