Create with your audience
This week around 70 representatives from leading cultural organisations in Denmark met in the theatre Camp X in Copenhagen to discuss and share their experiences around people-centred innovation. The Danish Ministry of Culture have recently published a report about involvement of the audience in creating or improving cultural offers. Johannes and I participated in the conference and got the chance to meet the people behind 5 of the 29 cases presented in the report – very inspiring.
A student from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture told about a project, where she was given the assignment to develop something for homeless people. She decided to do observations and went to live with the homeless people for 24 hours. She found that they are not interested in material things. She also found that in the public space the homeless see the bench as their couch, the public rest rooms as their bathrooms, the phone booth as their office etc. At the end, she decided to improve their couch and created a cover for the bench that made it into a comfortable couch. The homeless people loved it.
A developer at the Danish Radio (public broardcaster) develops a number of online products to create traffic on their website. Among others he described an online game/virtual world, which was hacked by lead users. They hacked their way to optimize the game. He turned the hackers into important co-creators of the game.
I’m convinced, that there are many more success stories to come, when more cultural institutions invite their audience to challenge them and give their input. It works very well in the business world. Some people raised the question: Who is to decide which cultural offers the population should be exposed for? Who are the experts? I believe the questions to raise is: How do we re-new ourselves and make excisting or new offers even more relevant and attractive for the audience?
