#1. How I got here and why: my Creative R&D origin story
Why experimental creativity, new ideas and emerging technology matter to me, and four must-do events next week in the Creative R&D ecosystem.
This is the beginning and end of a long journey.
Back in 2016, I was leading a digital transformation programme at the British Museum, and looking for a language to describe a new process of creative exploration I wanted to start.
But when I looked, I couldn’t find the words that described what I wanted to do.
I wanted to set up an innovation space inside the British Museum’s Reading Room, where we could experiment with new technologies and new ways of telling the story of the museum’s remarkable collection through different forms of creativity. I wanted thinkers and artists, technologists and audiences to all come together and work together to make something new. It was going to be called “The Brain of the World”.
I went out and talked to people to try and shape it - consultancies, researchers, technologists.
But the message kept coming back with a cynical note: the arts, creatives, they don’t really DO R&D or innovation.
Despite what seemed to me a perfect alignment of a place with incredible historic resonance and a moment of real content opportunity, there was just no way to make this happen.
Then I read a paper that changed things.
I left the British Museum to become Director of Digital, Communications and Technology at the National Gallery in early 2017, and later that year, I read a paper that quite profoundly changed my life.
Written by Hasan Bakshi, now Director of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, with Elizabeth Lomas, “Defining R&D for the Creative Industries” told me not just that creative and cultural organisations could do R&D and Innovation at the intersection of technology and research, but that they should, that they must, and that policy needed to radically shift to better help that happen.
It remains a great and urgent read, and if you haven’t read it, go to it.
I made doing and understanding Creative R&D a kind of quest
The idea of Creative R&D got its hooks into me.
As I took the National Gallery through a wide ranging process of digital transformation, the need to introduce Creative R&D into the Gallery and start to see its benefits was an itch I had to scratch.
In 2019, opportunity struck. When a restaurant on the Gallery campus closed, I saw a chance to make a space for innovation and R&D, and thanks to the support and patience of other Gallery Directors and Trustees, I got the chance to prove that experimental creativity could help reshape a critical global cultural institution.
In six months we’d put together a distinctive take on Creative R&D. I brought together partners - King’s College London, Google Arts and Culture - and we technologised a space just enough to stage residencies and events and projects. With my amazing friends and co-founders Ali Hossaini and Graeme Earl, and the matchless delivery skills of Irum Ali and the teams at the Gallery, National Gallery X went live in September 2019. The video below is from our launch event with Sir Tim Berners Lee and the archive of what we did is on the Gallery website.
It was, honestly, the most fun thing i’ve ever done, but also where I’ve learnt the most, creating the context for artists, technologists, thinkers, curators and audiences to come together and think out loud about the future.
Two years later, I started working on Creative R&D at scale
As we came through and out of the pandemic, I was asked by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to take up a Fellowship to apply the lessons I’d learnt from National Gallery X towards a national investment in Creative R&D, CoStar.
I was delighted to do it, but often couldn’t help thinking how far we’d come. From 2016 when barely anyone knew this discipline existed to now helping plan a national investment of nearly £100million for dedicated centres to shape the future of our different creative sectors was a big leap. Huge credit to the AHRC and their Creative Economy champion Andrew Chitty who’d helped build strategic investments towards this point.
CoStar went live earlier this year, and I can’t wait to see what Storyfutures, Goldsmiths, Belfast, Abertay and York do with the money and the opportunity.
This is truly a significant moment.
But still, the story of Creative R&D is not being told.
I left the National Gallery last year to start my own consultancy and advisory business, and to work with great and inspirational friends at Bolton and Quinn and Human Economics. I had a brief, amazing but weird stop off at the Reel Store in Coventry on the way where I staged immersive shows by Refik Anadol and Marshamallow Laser Feast.
But seven years on from when I first started thinking about doing Creative R&D, and six years on from first encountering Hasan’s big idea; four years from launching my own Creative R&D lab, and two years from working on the biggest public investment ever in what Creative R&D can do, I still don’t feel the story is properly out there.
Two weeks ago I launched a piece of Creative R&D with the excellent Sysco Productions, UCL, Goldsmiths and Outernet Global (and readers from all of them are subscribers to this newsletter). The project asked what Generative AI means for the future of immersive experiences. It answers it through artistic and technical experiment. It is everything I think Creative R&D can do - making good work through diverse creatives and technologists working together, and carving new directions for policy, technology and creative development.
It was a forceful reminder of how much Creative R&D means to me, and how important I think it is we tell its story. I was delighted that the brilliant Blooloop covered the project. You can watch the digital simulation fly-through below:
But to capture the brilliance of Creative R&D we need more coherent, continuous storytelling.
We need to capture the range of new creative work, new companies, new people, new technologies, new research and new policy as it happens. And draw on inspiring work from the past that can help shape new direction for the future.
Seven years on, no one else is doing it, so I think i’ll try.
So I’m launching this newsletter to tell the story of Creative R&D
All of that leads to this: what’s going to be a weekly newsletter that shares links, makes observations, talks to people, and provides a focus point for this still emergent but most critical of areas.
Please, if you care about this stuff, come on the journey with me. Let’s build a community around Creative R&D that helps its growth. Tell me what’s happening, comment on what you see, share it with your communities.
Thank you. I hope it will be a good journey.
EVENTS // Next week’s must-do-go-to’s.
Looking for some glimpses into the future next week? Here’s four hot events you can get to, in person or online. (GOT AN EVENT - LMK!):
FUTURE SCREEN & CONNECTED PERFORMANCE: Digital Catapult are launching an Advanced Media Production studio network on Wednesday. You can join live online here. I’ll give you my take on the future of connected media labs next week.
FUTURE DESIGN #1 London Edition: Also on Wednesday, brilliant ex-Googler and Creative R&D subscriber Suhair Khan’s Open-Ended Design host their second Technology and Design Lab as part of the London Design Festival at London’s Cafe Koko. Beautifully described as “a front row seat to the dreams, anxieties, & projects at the forefront for London’s futurists”, tickets are on sale and going fast. Suhair also got a great profile in the FT recently.
FUTURE DESIGN #2 New York Edition: And somehow also on Wednesday, albeit in New York, the also brilliant Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, is demoing his new “The Accelerator” an immersive experience to change behaviours around climate change. I spoke to Jake last year and he described how this is putting into practise detailed research learnings from 20 years of Local Projects work on how to nudge immersive experience visitors towards positive behavioural change. Jake’s been heading down this path for a long time as his Ted X as far back as 2012 shows:
FUTURE FASHION: It’s also London Fashion Week - how can we have so many week’s at once?? - and over at Artsect Gallery in uber-cool Hackney Wick, there’s a ton of events on the digital future of fashion. AND SOME WILL BE ON WEDNESDAY!! This is such an interesting area - much more to come here on digital fashion in this newsletter.
