How does your creative accounting mindset grow?
Research Centre for Creative Economies, Coventry University
Research Centre in Creative Economies, within the Institute for Creative Cultures at Coventry University.
Last week was the Creative Accounting event featuring an immersive creative experience developed during the previous “Sent to Coventry!” project event.
The January event launched the “Creative Accounting” report, and discussed ways in which creative methodologies can open awareness, change behaviour and provoke new ways of thinking about present and future challenges.
As the final report notes:
"Artistic perspectives stimulate innovative thinking and offer novel approaches to global challenges, fostering integrative mindsets as the basis for future value creation."
The interdisciplinary project explored how the creative arts and playful methodologies can disrupt traditional business mindsets. Art installations were used to prompt different ways of thinking about value, and connections with nature as another way of doing this. And why the mushrooms, you might be thinking? Mycelium thrives by connecting individual plants together to transfer resources across a mycorrhizal network, and this is used as a metaphor for complex systems design in other contexts. It certainly prompted conversation throughout the project, as one participant summed up:
"It was incredibly impactful and totally not what I was expecting... How do you use curiosity in a playful way to stimulate the thought process? How can I use it with my team at work?"
Thanks also to Roshana Arasaratnam for this reflective piece on the event. Overall it was a great way of bridging traditional divides between the environmental sciences, economics, and the arts & humanities, as well as between multiple ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it.
So what's next? Hopefully more immersive events, new approaches to training and professional development, and arts-based activities that support the profession both now and in the future. Watch this space!
Research team
Further acknowledgements in the report linked above