Capturing insights and learning
An intensive 24 hours in Amsterdam provided an ideal context for the first formal gathering of the partners participating in the Arts and Tech programme, being run by Arts Council England, Innovate UK and the KTN. Graham Hitchen describes a hugely valuable educational visit to the Dutch capital…
Visits to The Tolhuistuin, the Eye, and A-Lab — in buildings which were formerly on the site of Shell laboratories and which are becoming one of Amsterdam’s new cultural zones — to Fab City, Makerversity, and the Waag, provided the backdrop for a discussion on innovation challenges across arts and technology.
We’d been struck by the ease with which Dutch innovators crossed boundaries between art and science, and the extent to which established companies appeared to support grass-roots and sometimes very crude innovation projects.
Fab City hosted clean-tech projects funded by major energy utilities alongside small maker companies testing quirky new product recycling ideas. The optimism was refreshing, as was the commitment to collaboration.
It’s this energy and optimism which has helped Makerversity choose Amsterdam to open its new maker space. Located in an old Naval building (echoing the origins of its original space in Somerset House by the Thames), Makerversity Amsterdam will provide extensive co-working space, together with a range of hardware and tools.
The Waag is an established centre, bringing together artists, scientists and techies — hosting projects on bio-diversity (in its wet-lab), mobile phones and smart cities.
The site of Rembrandt’s famous Anatomy Lesson, the Waag works with schools and various community groups, to explore complex technology challenges such as ‘identity’ and data-privacy.
A key insight was the extraordinary and unapologetic commitment to research and learning. All of the projects we saw were driven by a sense of ‘curiosity’, creating projects to test ideas and explore possibilities.
As Callum Lee from BOP Consulting, who organised the study visit, says in his short blog, there was a very clear sense of co-operation and learning, backed-up by a rich cross-over of innovators from different disciplines.
The Waag, for example, describes itself as an institute for art, science and technology. It brings together innovators from a broad cross-section of disciplines to experiment, to learn and to pass on that learning. It creates a virtuous circle of learning and ideas which cuts across our traditional assumptions and silos.
It’s what Frank Boyd (KTN) calls ‘anti-disciplinarity’:
“the notion of ‘anti-disciplinarity’ comes from MIT’s Media Lab director, Joi Ito who describes it as very different from interdisciplinary work: it’s about working in spaces that simply do not fit into any existing academic discipline — a specific field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods.”
Navigating this space, outside of traditional disciplines, is one of the key challenges the Arts and Tech pilot programme will address in its final six months. Those of us the that visited left with a much better idea of what lies before us — and exactly how exciting that future might be.
— Graham Hitchen, 19th April, 2016
