Michael Hanchett Hanson
StoryTANK, the European Think Tank dedicated to storytelling for film professionals and screenwriters throughout Europe, carries its exploratory approach into this new season, delving deeper into Le Groupe Ouest and lim’s methodology, designed to accelerate creativity and developed hand in hand with the applied research team of LA FABRIQUE DES MONDES (France 2030).
We interviewed 5 international researchers from complementary fields — cognitive neuroscience, cognitive ergonomics, the psychology of serendipity, social sciences, and anthropology — inviting their expertise to shed light on what they observed unfolding within this methodology, and on what is really at stake in its experimental setups.
Michael Hanchett Hanson is a developmental psychologist, Director of the Masters “Concentration in Creativity and Cognition” at Teachers College, Columbia University; a founding board member and Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI); Executive Editor of the Routledge Creativity in Practice series; and President of Contexts R+D Inc. Michael is one of the leading advocates for the participatory framework of creativity, which looks at development of creativity within complex social and material systems. He has written on educational practices, the history of the construct of creativity within psychology; the ideological uses and dangers of the construct; creative practices in the construction of the self, and the pros and cons of educators’ use of the idea of creativity.
THE WORLD AS ALPHA AND OMEGA
“The world is sort of the alpha and omega of this continual dynamic that we are working within.”
I think of creativity developmentally as the systemic integration of new ideas over time. And within that, within that systemic integration, thinking becomes something different. It’s not in here that you think, it’s out there. We think within and through the world, the sign systems we use, be they language or art or music. We get that from the world and we integrate it. We internalize, integrate and then externalize so that ultimately what we do, is in the world again. So the world is sort of the alpha and omega of this continual dynamic that we are working within.
BACK INTO THE TENSION
“You help them think again and anew.”
What I love about Story Tank, and what I was so impressed with when we did the research, was the way in which you help people think. You help them think again and anew. The renewal of this thinking process. You put them back into the tension within which we think, because again that tension is: we are a part of the world, but we are also individuals.
THROUGH THE STRUGGLE
“But through that struggle, they then reestablish the tension.”
They struggled and they really struggled because they wanted to get back to the linearity. It was like something they wanted to keep. And I trust their struggle because again, they don’t want to lose the tension. They don’t want to fall off into: this is just a fun experience and it doesn’t mean anything. They don’t want to do that. They’re professionals, they’re serious. But through that struggle, they then reestablish the tension ultimately because the process helps them with this opening up, this, putting them back in the tension and then opening the breadth of the attention.
REORGANIZING THE BOX
“We always think inside our box. The whole thing is the box can be reorganized.”
Usually you undo the idea of the thinking outside the box, right? Because none of us do that. We always think inside our box. The whole thing is the box can be reorganized. It has way more stuff in it than you think. And it can be reorganized in all ways. It is a cache of resources that you are continually reorganizing and reusing in different ways.
THE LEADING EDGE
“You don’t invent something new. Something new comes out of it that we haven’t seen.”
You don’t invent something new. Something new comes out of it that we haven’t seen. But you’re using the resources you have at hand and in the world. And this is where the snowball is particularly good, because inside the snowball those resources are set. But it is what the world is then giving you anew in relation to that as you roll. So it is this edge with the world and everything else that helps you think here. It’s the leading edge.
HOLDING THE FIELD TOGETHER
“What’s holding the field together is lots of people, lots of different levels doing the work for the love of the work.”
One of the things that we have difficulty in currently is that we have defined creativity in the scale issue, where only at the upper scales are you successful. Only if you make it, only if you’re big. But actually what’s holding the field together is lots of people, lots of different levels doing the work for the love of the work. People who are making films locally, people who are small documentary makers, many of whom come here, who are making real projects they love and they are committed to and they think are important, that will have audiences, never huge, usually not huge audiences, but audiences. But that makes the field rich, that gives the field a history, that makes the field a resource that the rest of society can access over time as it needs. And it’s a process that you can’t predict.
