With eyes wide open: the facilitator at the centre

The paper was presented in the panel “Tending the tensions in co-creation: A critical, reflexive approach to co-creative methods” at the 32nd IHSCR.
This paper highlights different forms of tension involved in facilitating creative processes and argues that tension is a necessity for change and that vulnerability and discomfort are often overlooked as transformative forces. The analysis draws on data from a classroom context in which university students tested methods for facilitating creative thinking in a course on data production and creativity. The data stem from a session on the method “Lego Serious Play”. One of the authors was present as facilitator, the other as teacher/observer. Among the tensions analysed are tensions between our own planning and improvisation in the classroom context, tensions produced by different social positions (of student / teacher) and tensions involved in constructions of group identity when an external facilitator disrupts a context. We argue that the facilitation of creative methods calls for keeping our eyes wide open for tensions, for they are the mulch that improves the soil.