There are many reasons to use Creative Methods in your work. Here are a few reasons that we use them!
Support Collaboration and Connection
- Engage diverse people with different styles of learning and participating
- Flatten hierarchies, encouraging all voices in the room (and sometimes outside the room!) to be heard and valued
- Expand spheres of empathy (i.e. for other humans, for non-humans, and for future generations)
- Co-create knowledge
Surface Inner-Dimensions
- Uncover and make visible hidden elements of systems and structures
- Bring to light beliefs, values, worldviews & paradigms
- Reveal and engage with emotional and affective dimensions
- Acknowledge and give space to uncertainties
Spark Fresh Perspectives
- Disrupt habituated ways of thinking and doing
- Evoke cognitive frames that open new spaces of possibility (i.e. more than human perspectives, complexity thinking, expanded sense of time)
- Imagine new futures
- Inspire creative and innovative ideas and solutions
- Address complexity and support complexity thinking
Empower Adaptation and Transformation
- Creative practices can open new spaces of possibility, which can support new pathways of action.
- They can help people confront and process the realities of social-ecological crises, not just intellectually, but also emotionally and affectively.
- Creative practices can be used to access hidden layers of emotion and meaning and create context for people to surface unspoken issues or fears, which then leads to increased capacity for action.
