Story

Creativity, Care and the City (part one), by Ada Maymó Costa

Written byAda Maymó Costa
Published date 25 January 2023

Ada Maymó Costa, Post-Grad Community Ambassador and MA Service Design student at London College of Communication, reflects on this fascinating and inspiring event.

On Wednesday 11 January 2023, I attended Creativity, Care and the City at Central Saint Martins - an event including presentations, peer crits, breakouts, and networking around the relationship between creative practice, well-being, and health in urban contexts.

As a student at LCC currently enrolled in the MA Service Design course, I am participating in the Student Service Design Challenge (SSDC), a global design award initiated by Philips Experience Design. This year’s challenge is focused on well-being in its wider sense – from mental, emotional, and physical, to social, occupational, financial, and environmental.

As service designers, we embed our research into all facets of our work. Carrying out secondary research to define the design brief; doing user and expert interviews to build empathy; or interacting with people to build a network of people around our projects are examples of how we engage in research activities. Beautifully put by one of my lecturers, in service design “you design your research, and research becomes your design". Hence, a conference like the Creativity, Care and the City event was an opportunity to expand my knowledge, learn from existing projects, and finally talk about my projects, all through the refreshing lens of the creative practice.

When carrying out a research activity, it is essential to previously think about what you want to get out of your research. Throughout this article, I will present different ways to think about research in the creative practice, which I was able to explore during the conference.

Expanding my knowledge on the topic through expert presentations

The first block of the conference consisted of 4 presentations by key actors in the field of creative health – and health creativity – in London.

Anna Woolf, Director of London Arts and Health
Wendy Wyatt, Programme Manager at World Cities Culture Forum
Anna Landreth Strong, Creative Producer (Arts Practice) at Nesta
Clare Lovett, Lead for Culture, Health and Wellbeing Programme, GLA

Interesting concepts were discussed during the presentations, such as social prescribing to take a more holistic approach to people’s health. I would also like to highlight projects like the Oodi Library in Helsinki, which was a participative design project commissioned by the service design government team. Finally, speakers shared new leads on events taking place in the city, like Creativity and Wellbeing Week.

Creative, Care, and the City slides — **Image: Ada Maymó Costa**

Gaining new approaches from existing projects to envisage potential solutions

The second block of the conference consisted of a series of project presentations that brought attendants closer to different approaches to tackling health from a creative perspective.

Martin Percy, Interactive Filmmaker and Associate Lecturer (CSM) – Interactive Films
Megan Garfitt Christensen, Tia Buana-Cokes (LCC students) with Love Ssega, London-based musician, producer, and artist – Live + Breathe Festival
Chloe Asker (University of Exeter & UAL) – Culture Box
Ilga Leimanis, Associate Lecturer and Academic Support (UAL) – Hope Booths

In this block, I enjoyed hearing from peers and their projects. As a student, it is empowering to see that we are also equipped with the capabilities to deliver high-quality projects. Both projects by Megan Garfitt Christensen and Tia Buana-Cokes were great examples of high-quality projects delivered by students and were the result of collaborations across disciplines with other students at LCC.

Building a network of collaborators around the project

The third and final block of the event consisted of a World Café activity to allow for more informal discussions with the keynote speakers. I find the World Café methodology to be particularly useful for networking, as it allows participants not only to talk to the speakers but also to other attendants at the event.

I had the chance to share a table with keynote speaker Chloe Asker, one of my classmates, and two more people with experience delivering creative workshops for well-being. My classmate and I had a space to share our work as service designers and draw parallels between our practice and the Culture Box project. At the same time, we had an interesting discussion about in-person, hybrid, and online approaches to creative well-being interventions.

Other discussion circles tackled very different but equally interesting angles such as ways to capture data in a fun way and engage people differently than traditional surveys. This is very relevant to the work of a service designer, as one of our central tasks is research - and even co-creation - with real subjects, and it needs to be engaging so participants want to work with you.

Creative, Care, and the City speaker — **Image: Ada Maymó Costa**

Learning from the format of the event in itself

Finally, I want to add a last section that goes beyond the content of the research activity. Events are also a great place to be inspired by the format of the designed activities and the types of engagements proposed by the design team. Some interesting formats were:

A Padlet link, which was shared before the event and allowed participants to start networking during the previous two days
A poem (Wonder Woman, by Ada Limón) to kick off the event, which was narrated while participants had their eyes closed and were attentively listening
A World Café activity, which can both be used as a networking activity in an event, but also as a research activity in a project

Creativity, Care and the City (part one) was convened and facilitated by Kate Keara Pelen (k.pelen@csm.arts.ac.uk)

Part two will take place on the Wednesday 1 March 2023 at Central Saint Martins and is open to anyone interested in these themes and working in Higher Education and Research, the Cultural, Public, and Health sectors, and the Creative Industries. Find out more and book your space.