Creativity at Social Scale Part 3
Designing for Scale
Check out Part 1: Creativity as Public Good and Part 2: Building Creative Societies
Steven J. Tepper and Terence E. McDonnell
As discussed in parts 1 and part 2, there are inspiring examples of creative initiatives, often led by charismatic artists or arts leaders, that have managed to scale and achieve impact. We contend that such examples – whether in education, government, or the nonprofit world – have not, cumulatively, become a routine part of our approach to creativity in the U.S. While we see gains in creativity at social scale, we have a long way to go to achieve similar levels of scale and diffusion as the non-profit arts model introduced in the late 1950s. Then, W. McNeil Lowry, Vice President at the Ford Foundation, designed a new model for supporting orchestras, museums, theaters, and dance companies across America. The model was centered on the arts grant – investment by national funders in nonprofit arts organizations to help them become financially stable (eliminate debt, establish endowments, build or buy facilities) and to take root in smaller cities across America. Critically, the arts grant was often established as a matching grant to leverage local philanthropy or government support. And importantly, Ford also invested in service organizations to help build professional capacity for non-profit arts managers; and they invested in university-based education to support a labor pool of highly qualified artists. In Rip Rapson’s language, Lowry designed the machinery that allowed the sector to grow from a few hundred organizations in the 1950s to more than 100,000 fifty years later, making the nonprofit arts model one of the most successful innovations (and interventions) ever advanced in any sector.
But what other models have scaled and diffused since the Lowry model? As discussed above, the creative placemaking movement was designed for scale. Rapson lays out the questions he and others put to themselves when advancing arts-led community development practices: “What is the machine we are thinking about? What are its component parts? What are the replacement parts when some stuff wears out? How do you add to it? How do you retrofit it? How does it live on after the initial machine goes away?”
These are the questions arts leaders must take up – whether at the neighborhood level, the city level, the national level, or globally. Scale does not simply mean that something replicates across time and geography. It is not about reaching some arbitrary number – a certain number of views, tickets sold, classrooms served, or participants and partners activated. Scale is about impact. Are your ideas reaching the right people? Are they serving everyone they can usefully serve? Are they becoming institutionalized or integrated into the fabric of your community, your profession, or your field? Do your ideas for innovation and change get traction?
Lessons for Scale
In the arts, we are really good at creativity– generating far more good ideas than we have the capacity to sustain or advance. And, in many ways, we are addicted to the next, the new, the one-off project or initiative. We start things. We add to our portfolios. We are relentless experimenters. We pilot. We launch. Metaphorically, we treat many of our ideas as “world premiers.” But, while we are good at creativity and content, we are less skilled at innovation and policy – the design of the “machinery” to enable ideas to take hold and become so useful or compelling that they diffuse or stick around or attract new investment and additional resources.
Based on our research about scale for our forthcoming book, we are learning that designing the machinery (or the systems, infrastructure, platforms…) requires asking some key questions for those who are trying to advance creativity for impact:
What are productive adjacencies – people or organizations in adjacent fields or geographies or sectors who might invest in or help activate your innovation?
What are existing flows of capital, investment, revenue, sales, and service contracts across the economy – locally and beyond – that you can tap into? Can your idea help advance or achieve an outcome toward which resources are already being directed?
How can you intervene upstream in order to create demand or visibility or support for your idea downstream? For example, building creative placemaking courses or modules into policy, planning, and business school curricula is a great way to seed future policymakers who understand the benefits of working with artists and designers.
Where is the latent energy and passion? What are existing habits, passions, and activities that might link naturally to your idea and innovation? The Maker’s Movement didn’t create demand; rather, its leaders simply harnessed existing energy that was already in place in garages across America.
Who are your influencers? Surround your idea with credible advocates and evangelists, especially people who are not just preaching to the choir, but who can get beyond the church and advocate for you in the statehouses, firehouses, and clubhouses.
Have you provided these influential people with strong language, stories, and research – what Rapson calls “narrative legitimacy” – so that they can incorporate your ideas into other credible outlets– important magazines, journals, forums, and conferences?
How do you lower barriers for new adopters – how do you make your work and your innovation easy and relatively costless to test and try? The AIDS Quilt did not require deep quilting skills or expensive materials and tools to create.
What existing infrastructures can you leverage? Are there networks, associations, clubs, or platforms that might adopt your innovation? (e.g., the vast network of libraries and library professionals that helped scale the Maker Movement);
How can you open up your idea or organization for co-design by key stakeholders? What can you learn from the open-source software movement or Wikipedia or Mel Chin’s Fundred Project that can help you grow engagement and commitment from an army of passionate supporters?
Are you giving people a platform for voice so that they can tell their own story? V-Day has become a platform for tens of thousands of different stories across the globe. Creative crowds give people a platform for expression, which concatenates into movements.
When it comes to creativity, in an attempt to elevate the best, we have created gates that limit the most. In order to train the most talented, we have rejected too many of the most promising. In order to recognize individual genius, we have ignored the power of collective creativity. And, importantly, in order to treat creativity as special, we have made it all too rare. If we want creativity everywhere and for everyone, then we need to design for it to operate at scale; and if we don’t, it will largely be absent from the main grooves of social life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwood, A., & Purcell, D. 2014. “Curating inequality: The link between cultural reproduction and race in the visual arts.” Sociological Inquiry. 84(2): 238-263.
Greenland, Fiona and Patricia Banks. 2021. “Race and Sociology of Art.” Sociology of Culture Newsletter. https://asaculturesection.org/2021/03/15/race-and-sociology-of-art/
Jackson, Maria Rosario. 2021. “Addressing Inequity Through Public Health, Community Development, Arts, and Culture: Confluence of Fields and the Opportunity to Reframe, Retool, and Repair.” Journal of Health Promotion Practice. Volume 22, Issue 1.
Kreidler, John. 1996. “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit in the Post Ford Era.” Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, February 1996.
Kulinski, A. R. 2023. “Threads of the White Web: Exposing and Contesting the Hegemony of Whiteness in Art Education.” Studies in Art Education. 64(2): 169-180.
List, John. 2022. The Voltage Effect. Currency.
Pearson, Tamara. 2017. “How creativity is killed in the Majority World.” The New Internationalist, November 15.
Phillips, Katherine W. 2014. “How Diversity Works.” Scientific American. 311(4): 42-47.
Seelos, Christian and Johanna Mair. 2017. Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It. Stanford University Press.
Talk of the Nation. 2013. “A Valentine's Campaign To End Violence.”
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/14/172017169/a-valentines-campaign-to-end-violence
Uzzi, Brian, and Jarrett Spiro. 2005. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” The American Journal of Sociology. 111(2): 447-504.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven J. Tepper is dean and professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest, comprehensive design and arts school at a research university. Tepper is a sociologist and leading writer and speaker on higher education and U.S. cultural policy, and his work has fostered national discussions around topics of cultural engagement, creative work and careers, art and democracy, and the transformative possibilities of a 21st-century creative campus.
Terence E. McDonnell is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a cultural sociologist who studies the role of art, media, and creativity in everyday life. He examines how resonance and persuasion shape behavior by examining cases as diverse as HIV prevention campaigns, protest art, awareness ribbons, art installations, images of President Obama, virtual reality experiences, and junk drawers. He is the author of Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns (University of Chicago, 2016) and Measuring Culture (Columbia University 2020).
