Take A Rare Opportunity To Review Others’ Reflections

Back in August I called attention to a transmedia project in Reading, PA, “This Is Reading,” that playwright Lynn Nottage and a host of others worked on creating to help the community tell stories about itself.

I had initially learned about the project via a post by Margy Waller and must credit her again for tweeting about a follow up conversation that occurred.

With such a push for placemaking and community building projects like “This Is Reading,” having access to the reflections of project participants is of great value to others engaging in similar work.  There are a number of observations and lessons learned that can provide guidance about what worked and what needed to be done better.  It is rare to have this type of material shared publicly so take advantage of the opportunity.

Not only does the newspaper article provide a summary of the report, the report itself is embedded in the webpage and is available for download.

The first thing that caught my eye was that the meetings from which the feedback was collected appeared to be driven by the participants’ desire to continue the momentum started by the project.  The impression I got from the article was that a post-mortem conversation hadn’t been planned, but the project leadership were wise enough to recognize the need to do so.

“The reason we wanted to do this meeting is because this was a more than five-year process,” he said of the installation. “A lot of the volunteers and a lot of the participants expressed interest in what’s next. To me, it was ‘Let’s debrief, let’s talk about it.’ “

The fact of Reading’s decline plays a large part in the content of the project and the subsequent feedback. (Recall the railroad was famous enough to be included in the Monopoly game.) There are multiple times in the report that the investment young people have in the community is called into question. This is in tension with the perception that the nostalgic project content had a greater resonance with older attendees than younger.

The article mentions that the phrase “Reading was…” kept coming up in conversations during the development phase of the project so the title “This Is Reading” was an attempt to emphasize the need to break from a focus on the past and dated thinking.

Given that this exactly mirrors the conversation occurring in the arts (perception youth are not committed, content only relevant to older generation) there are any number of lessons here for the arts and culture community.

Here is the summary listed in the newspaper article:

• Being a person of color in Reading is wrought with stress, tension and discomfort.
• Reading can be a vibrant center of arts and culture if there are significant outreach efforts to invite and welcome; the art is interesting to people of different ethnic, racial or economic backgrounds; and obstacles that prevent or deter participation are eliminated.
• Its self-perception impedes the city’s ability to move forward.
• There is a strong interest and desire in the resurrection of a rail system that would connect our community with nearby communities.
• Long-held community “stories” or narratives can be rewritten by the arts in public spaces.
• There is a desperate need for a shared downtown public performance arts space.
• The city needs a vision that focuses on what Reading is and can be, not what it was.
• Youth and young adults in Reading need to be encouraged, developed and engaged.
• Leadership is needed to champion efforts to build on “This Is Reading,” and the most effective champion would be the city.

Hey Buddy, You Want To Share A Creative Experience?

Back in August I presented material in a pre-conference session at the Arts Midwest (AMW) conference alongside AMW President/CEO David Fraher; Creating Connection Program Director Anne Romens; and my friend Nick Sherman. (Slides on the AMW site, scroll down to “Messages that Matter: Tapping into What Audiences Value + Creating Connection: What Does Your Community Value?”).

For my part of the presentation, I spoke about some of the programs we had instituted in our community based on materials from Creating Connection, or as I often refer to it, Building Public Will For Arts and Culture.

One program I hadn’t talked about was our Arts Buddy program which we developed to respond to the problem of having no one to attend an event with which is often cited as a major impediment to event attendance. Long time readers will remember I started developing the idea back in 2015 after being inspired by a program instituted by a Brazilian bus company.

Anne Romens wanted to know more about the program so they could discuss it in workshops they were conducting in September. We ended up turning our discussion into an interview which Anne posted on the Creating Connection blog last week.

Anne told me she presented the idea at 5 workshops in September and people loved the idea. They pulled out their pens and started scribbling. One person apparently asked if I had legal rights to the idea or if she could use it.

I had I known it would be so popular I would have patented it and started a licensing program!

(The idea was developed with feedback from a number of people both through my blog and emails so neither I, nor anyone else should be looking to patent it.)

You will have to read the interview to see what all the excitement was about.

You May Be Dead, But Thanks To A QR Code Your Memory Can Last Forever

Over on ArtsHacker today, Ceci Dadisman wrote a post suggesting that the dreaded/derided QR code may be making a comeback thanks to improved functionality on Apple’s new iOS11.

I have been keeping an eye open for close to a year to see if QR codes might return given that they are used on and for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G in China. With that sort of massive usage, it isn’t hard to foresee that companies will recognize the utility in transactions and encourage people to use them. When I say they are used for  everything in China, I mean beggars on the street have signs with QR codes on them so you can donate.  A village planted trees in the shape of a QR code that can be scanned from the air.

There are some other interesting uses like the shopping mall with a giant code on the side of the building so you can discover the hours as you drive by rather than pulling up and squinting at the sign on the door. QR codes also allow all those people waving signs on the side of the road/middle of the sidewalk get paid for catching your attention when you scan their sign to learn more.

The one use that really caught my eye, and you almost miss it in the article, is putting QR codes on tombstones so that people can learn more about the person.

But QR codes appear for dead people, too… Since people in China believe that QR codes are here to stay, even tombstones are engraved with QR codes that memorialize the life-story — through biographies, photographs, and videos — of the deceased. From the leadership of the China Funeral Association: “In modern times, people should commemorate their deceased loved ones in modern ways”.

While some obvious uses for QR codes in the arts would be to provide information about art works in museums and performers and their characters in performances, (especially interactive ones where a printed program might get in the way), I wonder what innovative uses for storytelling people might come up with.

One idea that just popped to mind is a quest that wasn’t dependent on the presence of physical objects. If you scan a treasure chest or information source without having first found and scanned a key/preceding information source, you won’t receive the treasure/solution. That way you can have multiple people play a game without having to make multiple versions of an item for people to claim.

Anything else pop to mind for people?

Stuff To Think About: The Profitability Equals Value Assumption

You haven’t been working in the non-profit arts and culture sector long enough or you haven’t been paying close enough attention if you haven’t heard/read someone say that an arts organization shouldn’t exist if it can’t be self supporting.

If you have found yourself at a lack of response to this argument, you might read up a little on a blog post Seth Godin made earlier this year where he addresses the mistake of equating profitability with value.

Profit is a good way to demonstrate the creation of value.

In fact, it’s a pretty lousy method. The local water company clearly creates more value (in the sense that we can’t live without it) than the handbag store down the street, and yet the handbag store has a much higher profit margin. That’s not because of value, but because of mismatches in supply and demand, or less relevant inputs like brand, market power and corporate structure.

[…]

I hope we can agree that a caring nurse in the pediatric oncology ward adds more value than a well-paid cosmetic plastic surgeon doing augmentations. People with more money might pay more, but that doesn’t equate to value.

The best way to measure value created is to measure value, not profit.

The purpose of society is to maximize profit

Well, since profit isn’t a good measure of value created, this isn’t at all consistent. More important, things like a living wage, sustainability, fairness and the creation of meaning matter even more. When we consider how to advance our culture, “will it hurt profits?” ought not to be the first (or even the fifth) question we ask.

Pay attention to the last line of this next quote from Godin because it is basically verbatim a core point made by the Potter-Warrior-Philosopher Carter Gillies.

The only purpose of a company is to maximize long-term shareholder value.

Says who? Is the only purpose of your career to maximize lifetime income? If a company is the collective work of humans, we ought to measure the value that those humans seek to create.

Just because there’s a number (a number that’s easy to read, easy to game, easy to keep track of) doesn’t mean it’s relevant.

Okay, so Carter may not be a warrior, but he does fiercely fight to advance the notion that just because we can measure it, it doesn’t mean the measure is relevant.

One of my favorite quotes from Carter that runs along these lines is in a guest post he made on Diane Ragsdale’s blog.

The way we mostly talk to these people is we have found that our ends, the things we value in themselves, can be the means to their own ends. They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.

Just as Godin says, concepts like economic impact and cognitive development can produce numbers that are easy to understand, game and keep track of which helps when making the case for funding and policy. But none of these numbers are expressions of the core value of arts and creativity. Why those of us in the field value it.

It takes more effort to explain a complex concept like the value of arts and culture which is why Arts Midwest and others are engaged in a long term project to build public will for it and create an environment in which a similarly shorthand expression of value is possible.  I don’t think anyone will necessarily equate the value of arts and culture with clean water and pediatric nurses. The goal is an environment where the value of arts and culture is generally assumed.

Back in June Diane Ragsdale made a similar post exploring the different concepts of value and cited an idea that there are different types of “economies” that exist, each with a different “currency” that serves as a valid measure of value and relevance. In this context, we wouldn’t equate the value of clean water and pediatric nurses with that of arts and culture any more than we would equate the winner of the World Series with the most effective Coast Guard cutter crew.