Last May, I wrote an email to Artscapes putting in a request for media accreditation to attend the Creative Spaces + Places conference taking place in Toronto. Much to my surprise, my request was accepted (what would I do without that powerful social network that is also my workplace?) and I was able to attend an event that would have otherwise been way out of my means, with the “early bird/not-for-profit” fee set at a whopping $600-700. I kid you not.

So then the months went by” I traveled to Sweden, Denmark and Italy; I returned to Canada; read more literature on the topic of social innovation and collaborative services than is advisable, and got a pretty good idea of what is meaningful collaboration and what is not.

Day 1 of CP+S started with a middle-aged woman with a big, white box on her head escorting me and a few other participants up to the seventh floor of The Carlu. The elevator doors opened to a room bustling with activity: volunteers with fancy headset equipment coordinating behind-the-scenes operations, delegates registering, David Miller chatting with a few attendees, and all around us,  boxes with “create”, “think” and “collaborate” written on them and music, live and recorded, playing in the room. (Later on I was told that Darren O’Donnell’s [boxhead] was the inspiration behind, the boxes on people’s heads.)

The energy in the room was definitely vibrant, but to me it was a little disturbing to see musicians playing in a corner of the room with boxes on their head. The boxes weren’t so much the issue, but it felt like the musicians were there as an ornament, on display for us to go “ooh” and “ahh” about the presence of “ARTISTS” in the room. This impression lived on as I was escorted up to the balcony in my super-powered ‘media corner’, where I had a central view of the stage and its three big screens. The stage was populated with: yoga instructors doing planks and warriors and stretching far beyond my capabilities; a duo chanting and drumming; two tap dancers tapping on a cube; an acrobat contorting on a rope, and two break-dancers. It was a mish-mash of disciplines, a cacophony of cultures… interpreted mostly by white people. Behind the dancers, images of supposedly creative places and people rolled by, sometimes in conjunction with inspiring quotes. Unfortunately, some of the images included Angelina Jolie, two punk-rock girls kissing, and a car. After the ‘mashed up’ performance, the conference was kick-started with a Stars-Wars like announcement that urged us to “fasten our seatbelts” and get ready for the real thing.  Fortunately enough, the ‘real thing’ was a vast improvement from this contrived zoo of “plastic art” that was the warm-up.

Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio 1’s Here & Now, introduced us to the morning’s agenda, speaking briefly to the value of leadership in collaboration and innovation. He was followed soon after by Mayor David Miller, who spoke about Toronto’s role as an aspiring green city and mentioned the city’s membership to C-40, which he is currently chairing.

Later on, Tim Jones, president of Artscapes, came on stage to share the history of CP+S and discuss some of the organization’s current projects with TIFF, Evergreen and MaRS, to name only a few. He spoke about Artscapes’ mission and the revitalization of the Wychwood Barns in my old ‘hood (♥) as an example of what community-based arts and enabling ‘third spaces’ can achieve.

The first keynote speaker caught me by surprise. I really was not anticipating to be inspired or entertained during Day 1, after all, what attracted me to CP+S was Day 2. Nevertheless, Sir Ken Robinson had a multitude of interesting things to say, mostly about how the education system squelches our creativity and how we should make innovation a habit. I love how he pointed out that “if we are serious about creativity, we must have a strategy, not a blind hope that things will naturally happen.” Word to that, Sir Ken.

During our first break, I rushed downstairs to interview Charles Landry and we had a pleasant chat until Richard Florida interrupted us (hilarious!) Florida was next on stage, but his talk was so self-congratulatory and self-centered that there is really nothing much to report. During lunch, I hung out with a couple of acquaintances from Spacing and talked about biking.

The second half of the day was more directly related to art and collaboration… and it was mind-blowing. Collaboration is, first and foremost, blurring the boundaries between participant and observer, audience and creator. Consider Canada’s National Film Board’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) program, which has been producing innovative, multi-media documentaries to raise awareness on health issues through a collaboration between filmmakers, patients and health professionals. By employing progressive approaches to filmmaking such as “Video Bridge”, filmmakers are able to give visibility to vulnerable groups and help them make their voice heard. At the conference, we had the pleasure of hearing some of FIR’s key players discussing the impact the project has had on their lives and their community. The audience was also excited to hear that the National Film Board has now launched yet another ambitious global project called High Rise, a multi-media production which will focus on 10 high-rise buildings in 10 fast- growing suburbs across the world. Using local community members, High Rise will bring a variety of actors together to re-think our cities and contribute to social change in a way that is at once community-based and global.

Katerina Cizek, the filmmaker-in-residence, made some insightful comments during her panel. She described collaboration as a process of trust (a process of imagination that takes you from dark to light) and expanded on the concept of ‘interventionist media’. Interspersed throughout her talk were clips of her work and conversations with various stakeholders, as well as the media-makers’ manifesto she helped create. As the manifesto rightly points out: “If the right stake-holders are collaborating, what’s the point?” She concluded by urging us to break free from ‘mental segregation’ and get out of our comfort zone. When we are collaborating, we need to find people we don’t know and be open to being changed by the process, and letting the process change our direction.

Facilitation and deliberation play an important role in multi-stakeholder collaboration, and design, as I wrote in my Sweden report, is “more than just a matter of visual elegance and nice fonts”, design is also a process, an interface.

We all have something to learn in terms of how to collaborate. To address complex challenges like poverty and sustainability we will need to find ways to work together to catalyze meaningful change. Collaboration will need to be increasingly more diverse and dynamic, engaging global perspectives and connecting them back to local change-makers. In other words, we need to make sure that collaboration does not become the latest “buzzword” du jour but that it remains meaningful to its purpose and principles. So put away the powerpoint and bring out the whiteboard. If you are interested in innovation, cultivate imagination. Most importantly, redefine value, be innovative with your definition of actor, expand the conversation to not just to the economic-, policy- or government-level. After all, as one participant commented, “just imagine what we could accomplish if we did not need to take credit for it.”