Our Blog

Recently I was having an interesting conversation with a friend who had travelled a lot. By travelling, I mean a 4-month road trip across 2 continents. He was telling me how he was held at the Kenyan border; not allowed to cross until the daily armed-convoy arrived. Bandits regularly attack people in the area so no one is able to cross unassisted.

The convoy was scheduled every day at 10am. And every day at 10am bandits attacked it. So, with this in mind, my friend paid the local authority $10 to get a convoy on the spot for his car and cross the border straight away. No bandits attacked him but his 4×4 broke down in the middle of the journey!

The point is that danger is not always where we think it is – and that’s why it is sometimes worth taking a risk.

Far from Kenya, in the world of online creativity, what kind of risk can be taken? How can it be managed?

In my last community blog I explained how creativity flirts with chaos. It is important to leave some unanswered questions in order to give users the freedom to tell their own story, either with the actual web application or within the co-creation task plan, to get the most of their creativity.

This uncertain space leaves two interesting areas to watch out for:

Managing the risk induced by creative tasks/environment

It’s perfectly fine to use your live community to test pilot ideas. However, it’s a massive source of uncertainty and risk, as you cannot plan for how long your pilot idea will need in the test environment.

For example, a new type of task to be performed online, across different cultures, may need lots of time in order to fully understand its strengths and weaknesses.

You can foresee the risk but, at the same time, you can manage it: it’s very important to keep a log of issues and document the lessons learnt.

The community and its users may teach you much more than any theory as each project and group of people will have different behaviours, especially if your work is cross-cultural. For instance, we noticed that Brazilian users were using the commenting feature on blogging tasks much more than our UK community usually does.

Miles Davis - Helping Us Be More Creative Online

Enhancing creativity through risk and facilitate improvisation

On the other hand, there are interesting components when opening the door to risk and leaving some space for users’ creativity.

As explained by Liz Danzico during her lecture at UX London 2010, in the situation of a co-creation session, there is an overlap between the creator’s actions and the consumers. This overlap is the place where improvisation happens.

Illustrating improvisation with the example of Miles Davis’ Modal Jazz, Danzico explains that the improvisation performed by the jazzman isn’t exactly what one would compare to a boundary-free space where anything is possible.

She explains that improvisation must have a proper frame that she defines by the following elements:

Improvisation is in the present – as a real-time co-creation with the audience that must be involved all the time

Improvisation is detectable – it requires no pre-knowledge (think about Davis jazz versus Chopin’s work)

Improvisation is responsive – it defines its own parameters

Improvisation is additive – all offers are accepted

Having set this frame, the major challenge that is left is to break with the traditional focus on design (as web app interface design) and turn your attention to the users.

As No Pants Day proves people are ready to improvise.

Because, in the light of the social movements or happenings (for example No Pants Day – see above) people are ready for improvisation and it’s our mission, or even duty, to facilitate it and allow them to release their creativity.