My Creative Coffee morning yesterday was a great opportunity to bring together a variety of people I know in different areas of my life who do think creatively; some didn’t realise just how much they do this. I had three teaching colleagues (each from a different subject area), a midwife (who works in health management), a director of a company who provides administration services for non-for –profit organisations and a colleague’s sister (who I hadn’t met before) who manages a post office. This seemed to be a good mix of teachers and non-teachers, people that work in service industries and also people who make management decisions and those that don’t as much. As well as getting to know each other we had a lengthy and interesting conversation about creative cultures.
I had some noted some points to keep the discussion going:
▪Benefit s of a creative culture.
▪Features of creative workspaces.
▪Successful creative and innovative work spaces.
▪Do our environments allow for creativity?
▪How does learning happen in social interactions?
Throughout the meeting I introduced them to mind mapping and we shared our thoughts by creating mind maps as we talked. I did do this to collect their ideas but also just to do something creative together. This activity did attract a bit of attention in the café.
We ended up discussing
▪User-needed designing processes compared to just discussing types of buildings.
▪The effect of technology use on people’s creativity and learning – can be a positive and negative influence.
▪How policies and management can stifle intuition and creativity.
▪ The positive aspect of multidisciplinary teams; respect, support, trust, ability to take risks
▪What creative workspaces feel like and look like; colourful, welcoming, efficient, ’homely’, enjoyable, confidence biding, opinions are valued, sense of ownership.
▪What is creativity; not just artwork- it is problem solving, coming up with new ideas, adaptability.
The feedback received from the group following the coffee morning was very positive; great coffee and conversation, learning while socialising was enjoyable, enjoyed meeting new people and we knew more about creativity than we thought.
I have made a comment on these other Blog #4 posts