The Pursuit of Creative Lived Learning
Bowen Sun is preparing to meet the entrepreneurs, one of the final presentations which hones six months of knowledge. Think TEDx and Dragon’s Den. This is today’s employer’s calling card, a chance to impress your bosses and viewers. Bowen is now working for HSBC — as part of their graduate scheme.
In films such as The Matrix, Westworld, Ready Player One, science fiction reveals the secret of sentients. We are generally pre-programmed to undertake tasks. We readily complete patterns of behaviour. We adhere to codes of conduct which mature into conventions. We didn’t need science fiction to know this.
I’m deeply curious about patterns and interpretation as laid out by David Bordwell’s ground breaking book on “Making Meaning”. The photo at the bottom is me prepping to take a class on digital storytelling whilst I was a visiting professor at University of British Columbia. I’d laid down all the paraphernalia I use in cinema journalism and content making — an assortment of mobile phones ( one too many) a DSLR, drone and 360/VR camera etc.
But amongst all of that, my underlying message has been the manner in which we ruminate, think, perceive, turn abstract ideas into meaningful stuff is determined not through the lens of a camera but through our own patterned thinking.
We effectively learn to illustrate reality, a process that happens earlier on in our lives. Different people in a group can share their perspectives towards a matrix, an interesting patterned planar of reality. We then learn to amplify our message using tools e.g. phone whilst in the process devising patterned levels of self perceived correctional control.
I’ve found myself in trying and interestingly difficult situations that include international journalism, reporting conflict and bombings in Apartheid South South Africa (1994), creating award winning websites or working with young Syrian filmmakers on the Syrian border. Everyone of them is guided by a simple honed pattern, which I now teach on our creative digital storytelling course, disLAB.
It goes something like this:
- Curious. Study the problem and try to understand. Think through an approach. Be cautious of classic brainstorming.
- Experiment. Look at wide number of exemplars (text/video/people). Focus on finding patterns. Each era and culture elides with a style. Hint! If you look back to the 1920s the comparison with approaches today is striking.
- Confusion. It’s a natural phenomenon. You’ll need to rely on resilience. You can learn techniques for resilience problem-solving. Map out thoughts
- Expert. Show such ideas to an expert or gathering ( audience). In all likelihood, you’ll go have feedback.
- Humility. Your ideas being critiqued require you listening and being aware of your limitations. What I did wrong and perhaps next time how it would be different. Go back to 2, if all fails. Now you’re on the creative cycle.
- After each attempt write up notes weavinga convincing and truthful account of this process reframing my account based on feedback from audience e.g. friends, partner, consulting FB friends, etc.
This approach is what some experts liken to ethnographic process of discovery and design thinking which can be observed in books like NYT best seller Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
One of the new sins of digital is the erroneous myth that because something can be undertaken by one person it should. For instance, making a video or podcast is deemed “easy”, so we jettison any patterned process that has proven to work time and time again.
The consequence of this is we expend energy and time fabricating new themes, unaware the wheel’s been built somewhere and we could do well looking to build ideas on the very shoulders of giants who’ve served us knowledge in the past. Podcasts originate from radio, a medium with diverse exemplar experts. Read Michel Chion on sound.
Mobile phone filmmaking has not created a new language yet in video making per se; that came in the 1960s when the transition from fixed 50-inch-television-sized cameras was reduced to the size of an A4 paper and even smaller with the Richter. Social Media’s knowledge lay in, among others, behavioural and psychological theories such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Narrative dynamics in different writing styles for that blog can be eked from an unlimited supply of literary giants e.g. Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Joyce’s Finnegan Wake or my favourite Lowry’s Under the Volcano.
Even our politics and cries of “fake news” that seems freshly pressed is not without precedent. August 1941, US Senators Gerald P. Nye, Bennet Clark, and John T Flynn’s drafted resolution 152, and stood behind America First’s doctrine to investigate Hollywood as the dangerous fifth column of the country. TV News had not been invented for republicans to attack as the enemy of the people. Then it was the film industry.
These patterns that can be reused in learning knowledge and patterns of life provide a robust platform to innovate. They’re there to be mined. If you’re interested in learning more, please join me here @universityofwestminster
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah lectures in a myriad of multi-disciplanary areas and leads the disLAB, a course designed to incorporate next generation journalism. He is a communications expert, artist, filmmaker and public speaker. He’s voted (36) one of the most influential Ghanaians in the UK
