Leave guns at the door

Nicky Marchant comes away inspired from the Spark on Art, Media and Metaphor – How to bring creative workshops to life

"Are you participating?"

"Yes!" I gleefully replied as the helpful assistant showed me up to the comfortable facilities at Spectrum. It is amazing how far you can travel in a couple of hours immersed in coloured card, pens, tape and artists’ postcards. Sitting ready in our small groups, creative facilitator Pia Jones relaxed and warmed us to the subject of the creative process for this, the latest Spark.

We parked our thoughts and fears onto the flipchart:

• "all ideas equally valid",
• "need to be happy with gaps and spaces",
• "can be very unstructured and uncomfortable",
• "leave your guns at the door" (as one participant was told in all seriousness at a Texas event),
• "need a sense of fun, be childlike, feel free".

We then got to play "draw around your neighbour’s hand and introduce yourself". The cacophony was deafening: a bunch of qualitative researchers given the chance to talk about themselves! It proved hard to rein us back, as she urged us to build on this by exploring what we do with our hands.

Group names reflected some beautiful themes.

• "The Yin and Yangers" – hands are givers and receivers of energy and creativity;
• "The M&M’s" – hands are celebrated for their diversity of ability and dexterity;
• "Purple Carrot" – hands are capable and receptive to environment
• "Human Doings" – hands enable doing to then let us be.

Then the subject at hand sort of crept up on us, "now go on an inward journey and explore your memories of the creative process, then make a collage of that". The key take outs were:

• Facilitation and moderation are two very different activities, requiring different techniques.

• Creativity can be a misused word and diversion thinking (taking the respondents/participants on a little side tour to take away the anxiety and "focus on the problem" mindset) may be more fitting to springboard to a new territory with the use of random images (such as postcards rather than socially laden images from magazines) and metaphor to disassociate.

• What is your relationship to creativity? If you are not prepared to jump, neither will the participants.

• It's all in the set up and preparation. Think carefully about the target audience, what the goal is and appropriate diversion activities both emotional and physical – feeling safe and held is paramount for free thinking – Korean businessmen may not take to emotionally flying on a trapeze.

• Minimum resources: maximum imagination – allow yourself to create within the process.

Thus in the words of Dante Alighieri – "A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark" and we all left feeling truly ignited from this Spark session! Thank you Pia.