Category: Blog

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Charting a Greener Course: How Your Museum Can Build…

 

In an era defined by profound environmental shifts, cultural institutions like museums, galleries, and gardens are stepping up. No longer just custodians acting as custodians, museums are increasingly recognized as vital catalysts for change, uniquely positioned to inspire action and foster resilience in the face of the Earth Crisis. But how do you ensure your commitment to sustainability goes beyond good intentions and translates into measurable, impactful progress? The answer lies in a robust, integrated evaluation framework.

This isn’t just about ticking boxes for funders; it’s about strategically embedding environmental responsibility into the very DNA of your organisation. Flow Associates have worked across research, culture and education to understand what works. If you’d like to explore how Flow can help you with your planning for a sustainable future, then get in touch, we’d love to share our experiences with you.

Drawing on our research into best practices, let’s explore what it takes to build a framework that truly drives sustainable transformation.

Why Your Museum Needs a Holistic Sustainability Framework

Think about your institution. You have public-facing exhibitions and programs, but also complex operations behind the scenes: collections care, facilities management, procurement, and more. True sustainability isn’t a siloed “green project” run by one department; it’s a philosophy that permeates every corner of your organisational ecosystem.

A comprehensive evaluation framework helps you:

  • See the Full Picture: It consolidates data and insights from both public engagement and internal operations, revealing strengths, weaknesses, and interdependencies. For instance, if your public engagement programmes advocate for reducing waste, your internal waste management practices must align to maintain your credibility.
  • Make Informed Decisions: By collecting consistent, robust data, you move beyond assumptions. This evidence empowers you to make strategic choices about resource allocation, policy changes, and program development.
  • Drive Iterative Improvements: Sustainability is a journey, not a destination. A framework provides a cyclical process of planning, evidence collection, reflection, and learning, ensuring your efforts are always evolving and becoming more effective.
  • Grow Your Impact: Cultural institutions have a unique capacity to influence. A well-structured framework helps you articulate and demonstrate this impact, not just in reducing your own environmental footprint, but in inspiring broader societal change for your communities and local area.

This holistic approach is crucial because the environmental challenges we face, from climate change and biodiversity loss to pollution and social injustice, are interconnected. Your museum, with its collections and community reach, can play a profound role in helping people understand these complexities and respond creatively and positively.

Defining Your Sustainable Vision: Goals and Principles

Before you measure, you must define that transformation you want to see. What does “environmental responsibility” really mean for your institution? This isn’t a one size fits all definition; it should be tailored to your unique context, encompassing not just carbon reduction, but also ethical procurement, adaptation to climate impacts, and your role in advocating for systemic change. Involving staff across all levels in this definition setting process fosters greater ownership and accountability.

At the heart of any effective framework are two complementary concepts:

  1. Lighter Footprint: This focuses on minimizing the direct environmental harm from your operations. Think measurable actions like reducing energy consumption, diverting waste from landfills, or promoting sustainable travel for staff and visitors. These are often quantifiable with clear targets.
  2. Stronger Handprint: This emphasizes the broader, positive influence your institution can exert. It’s about engaging, exciting, and inspiring people to take action. Cultural institutions are uniquely positioned to foster learning, behavioural change, and even help communities process the psychological burdens of environmental anxiety. Many initiatives will naturally blend both footprint reduction and handprint expansion.

To guide your journey, consider these core principles:

  • Shared Purpose: Foster a clear, collective understanding of why environmental responsibility matters to your institution. This shared vision will unite efforts across departments.
  • Shared Process: Develop consistent methods for auditing, planning, and improving. This encourages transparency and continuous learning across your teams.
  • Growing Positive Impact: Prioritise initiatives that not only reduce harm (footprint) but also maximize positive influence (handprint) through public engagement and intellectual leadership.
  • Outcomes for People and Communities: Focus on tangible changes in attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours, both within your staff and among your public.

Setting SMART Goals for a Sustainable Future

Translating these principles into action requires clear, measurable objectives. This is where SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) become invaluable. They provide a roadmap for progress and enable effective tracking.

When setting your goals, remember to:

  • Establish Baselines: Many institutions start without comprehensive environmental data. Make “establishing a baseline” a primary first year objective. This allows for realistic, data informed target setting in subsequent years.
  • Think Holistically: Set goals across all relevant areas, from operational efficiency to public engagement.

Here are some examples of SMART goals that can be adapted for any cultural institution:

  • Sustainable Travel: By, achieve [X]% of public facing activities with sustainable travel information communicated to visitors.
  • Buildings & Grounds: Annually review and implement [X] low energy options in collections care and facilities management.
  • Procurement & Resource Use: By, ensure [X]% of new tenders and contracts include sustainability statements and supplier expectations.
  • Intellectual Leadership & Public Engagement: By, [X]% of visitors agree that the institution should engage the community on environmental issues, or [X]% feel hopeful/inspired about environmental change after an event.
  • Governance & Impact: By, [X]% of staff have received environmental literacy training, pledging work-based actions.

These show how you can quantify impact, even for qualitative “handprint” goals, providing tangible evidence of your positive influence even if they may be attitudinal.

Measuring What Matters: Your Evaluation Toolkit

An effective evaluation framework isn’t just a set of principles; it’s a practical toolkit that integrates seamlessly with your existing practices. The goal is to enhance, not burden, your current methodologies and integrate into reporting for funders, particularly those such as ACE and NHLF where it may be extensive.

A should framework champion a cyclical approach to evaluation:

  1. Plan Activities: Embed sustainability considerations from the outset.
  2. Collect Evidence: Gather data on outcomes for people and the environment.
  3. Reflect & Learn: Analyse data, discuss findings, and identify improvements.
  4. Strengthen Future Work: Use insights to inform subsequent initiatives.

A cornerstone of measuring public engagement impact is Flow’s concept of Generic Environmental Outcomes (GEOs). Adapted from established learning frameworks, GEOs provide a standardized way to assess how your public facing activities foster pro-environmental attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours. They typically progress from broad engagement to deeper, more active participation:

  • Enjoyment, Connection & Curiosity: Fostering a general appreciation for nature and a desire to learn more.
  • Environmental Attitudes & Values: Inspiring personal motivation and care for the planet.
  • Knowledge in Environmental Topics: Increasing understanding of environmental issues and responses.
  • Green Skills for the Future: Developing practical skills for a changing world and potential green careers.
  • Activity & Progression for Environmental Change: Enabling active citizenship and community well-being through environmental action.

These GEOs help you design programs with specific impacts in mind and measure whether you’re achieving them.

To put this into practice, your framework should include a suite of practical tools that align with existing planning and data collection processes, such as environmental sustainabity checklists for delivery and planning, reflective tools, and action audits.

Your Path to a Sustainable Future

Embracing an integrated evaluation framework for environmental sustainability is a powerful statement of your institution’s commitment to a greener, more resilient future. It moves you beyond reactive compliance to proactive leadership, forging your unique position to inspire both civic excellence as an insitution and profound societal change for your publics.

It’s an actionable blueprint for making a lasting difference, one exhibition, one program, and one sustainable practice at a time.

 

 

Wellcome Gallery, with one person sitting wathcing a screen with a person wearing prostehtic gloves. Another man is standing on the left looking into a glass case. Blog

Social Model of Disability

Thinking and practice around access and inclusion in cultural life has evolved significantly over the last 20 years. The push for greater representation of difference and diversity has seen museums, galleries, television, music, theatre and dance all showcase the incredible talent of those that have traditionally been sidelined and marginalised from popular culture. By framing disability as a societal issue, the Social Model empowers people with disabilities to demand their right to participate in cultural life, fostering a sense of belonging and community, highlighting the value of diverse perspectives in enriching cultural experiences for everyone.

In terms of Flow’s work, we place access and inclusion at the centre of what we do. We are driven by the conviction that art and culture is for all and so we thought we’d share a few of the models that guide us when we work with consultation, evaluation and design.

The social model of disability is an approach which was developed in the 60’s, with the specific term emerging in the 80’s. It is a framework that distinguishes between impairment and disability.

It proposes that disability is not inherently caused by an individual’s physical, sensory, or cognitive impairments, but rather by societal barriers that restrict their participation. These barriers can be physical (e.g. inaccessible buildings), attitudinal (e.g. stigma or discrimination), or systemic (e.g. policies that exclude people with disabilities).

 

There are three key areas in understanding how it can frame participating in a cultural life:

Disability is a social construct: The model shifts the focus from “fixing” the individual and their disability (the Medical model) to addressing the societal structures that create exclusion.

Barriers are the problem, not the person: It emphasizes that society, not the individual, needs to change to enable full participation.

Empowerment and inclusion: The model advocates for the rights of people with disabilities to participate equally in all aspects of life, including cultural life.

 

The social model has had a profound impact on how people with disabilities engage in cultural activities, such as art, music, theatre, and heritage.  A maxim we often used when I worked at the V&A was that, “Good design changes lives” – making accessibility integral to the way we approach design shows how it benefits everyone, sometimes in unexpected ways. Here’s how:

Accessible Cultural Spaces 

The model has driven the push for physical accessibility in cultural venues (e.g., ramps, elevators, accessible seating, and sensory-friendly environments) and engrained this into law for new and public buildings. For example, museums and theaters are increasingly adopting universal design principles to ensure everyone can enjoy their offerings making spaces more useable by not only D/disabled people, but also people who are neurodiverse, elderly, carrying an injury, carrying a child and so on…

 

 

Inclusive Programming

Cultural institutions are creating programs specifically designed for people with disabilities, such as sign language-interpreted performances, audio-described tours, and relaxed performances for those with sensory sensitivities. Our work with Divergent Sounds, a newly commissioned piece of music to convey the experience of neurodiversity, applied the Social Model not only in the creative work itself, but also in the visitor experience, co-creation and evaluation. See our case study and article by researcher Virginia Carter Leno at KCL. This ensures that people with disabilities are not just passive observers but are active participants in cultural life.

The cover of "Building Up" - D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent museum professionals thriving in role.
© Accentuate, Building Up Report

Representation in Culture

The social model has encouraged greater representation of people with disabilities in cultural productions, both as creators and as subjects. This includes films, books, and art that reflect the experiences of people with disabilities, challenging stereotypes and promoting understanding.

The cultural sector’s workforce has long faced accusations of exclusivity with research showing that it is in general much-less diverse than the general population. Along with barriers the global majority and working class, disabled people have been excluded from representation in the sector due to attitudinal and systemic factors. I was lucky enough to be a mentor on Accentuate’s “Curating for Change” which was a project to bring about step change by partnering emerging D/disabled curators within museums to produce exhibitions which explore disability through their collections. They have produced excellent guidance on supporting D/disabled staff, how to present their stories and ambitions for the sector. Their current project, “Curating Visibility“, builds on its success and some of the tools and learnings which emerged from it and will be running until the end of 2026.

Multi-Platform Experiences

Technology can be a huge enabler for inclusion, however it can also place barriers in the way for people with disabilities to be able to use them. Building in multi-sensory elements, assistive tools and parallel ways to engage offer not only the opportunity to open the experience to more people, but also challenge artists and creators to push the boundaries of technology and think about it from multiple perspectives.

Two participants are seated in a blue neon lit space with crosses, triangles and circles on the wall. They are wearing white VR headsets and holding VR controllers in their hands.
© Fact, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats

 

“In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats” is a VR experience that transports participants back to the heady days of Acid House and raves. As a highly visual, physical and sonic experience if presented challenges as to how it would be accessible to all. However, this opened new doors to exploring the subject and form of the piece. The experience includes a seated version for wheelchair users, subtitles, haptics (vibration), access packs, VR explainer, scene descriptions, and a touch tour for d/Deaf audiences. Visitors can also use haptic vests to enhance the multi-sensory journey, making it inclusive for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.

When we carry out consultation we ensure that everyone has the chance to participate. This can include things like us preparing different types of materials, ensuring that there are screen readable resources, providing remote access or one to one sessions, and pre-session information on what to expect.

Policy and Advocacy

The model has influenced policies like the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which emphasizes the right to participate in cultural life (Article 30). Governments and organisations are held accountable for ensuring cultural inclusion in UK law through the Equality Act 2010 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

By better understanding and being open to, reflective on and critical of the barriers that people face, we can support the cultural sector to be more responsive to what D/disabled and neurodiverse people are telling us. It all begins with listening, creating a space to be heard and respect. There is fantastic work happening across the UK which is shifting the needle on systemic change and it’s such a privilege to be part of that conversation and action.

 

Further Resources

https://www.scope.org.uk/social-model-of-disability

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language

https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/FDN-218144_Introduction_to_the_Social_and_Medical_Models_of_Disability.pdf

 

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Flow Theory and Experiences

Our name, Flow Associates, is in honour of ‘flow theory’ created by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who died last month aged 87. He was a Hungarian-American psychology professor, interested in mental states for creativity and productivity. He wrote the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience after 10 years of international research. The core theory can be explained with this diagram below, which shows the different mental states around the flow state, which can be achieved with the right balance of challenge and skill. It shows that the opposite of flow is apathy – not wanting to engage at all. 

 

I founded Flow Associates in 2006, when I realised that I can’t work full time within an institution. I work very well when I am intrinsically motivated and free to do it in my own way, but I become very stressed when working under conditions set by other people. I need to spend plenty of time doing activities that get me into a flow state, such as drawing from my imagination, expressive dancing and singing.

I was reading this book at the time of founding Flow, so the company naming was partly about timing and chance. But, the theory does guide us. For example, we (myself, Susanne Buck and Alex Flowers) always make sure to choose work we are challenged by, and that we are equipped to do. We particularly enjoy projects where outcomes for people develop:

  • Their sense of agency to effect change in their world
  • Capacities of knowledge, skill and meaning-making
  • Positive and compassionate values and behaviours. 

Flow theory hinges on the development of capacities, and how conditions can be designed to enable people to achieve their full potential. This thinking can apply to all the people we might work with, whether staff in client organisations or their audiences. It isn’t the only theory we use, and our thinking is growing all the time, but flow theory offers a basic and motivating concept to help anyone designing experiences and services that will engage people and develop their capacities. 

Flow theory lies behind our Engagement model, as we view engagement as more than boosting numbers or reaching certain groups of people. What matters most is the impact that this engagement has on people and communities. As people pass through each threshold they develop their skills and abilities to improve or cope with their context. If any activities intended to engage people are not designed with some components of flow theory in mind, they are less likely to succeed. 

This article goes into more detail into the nine components to achieving the flow state, to provide inspiration for designing successful experiences.

The best known is achieving a good balance of challenge and skill. Enough challenge might mean that the activity offers lots of room to keep improving skills, or to be creative with its forms. Good enough skills might mean having resources or the right place, time to practice, confidence, dexterity or knowledge. Without enough challenge you become bored, and without enough skills, you will become anxious. I used to be very anxious about painting because I got the lowest possible mark for my A level Art exam, but I have found methods and materials that suit me so that I can get into flow when doing it. 

The merging of action and awareness is all about learning through doing. It’s about laying down muscle memory through thoughtful practice. Doing could include speaking, writing or thinking with others, not just acting with your hands and body. It involves a balance of just enough action and just enough reflection on what you are doing. If you overthink you will get stuck, and if you rush at action without checking on yourself, you will struggle to do a good job. 

Clarity of goals might seem an obvious one. However, you need to approach this the right way. If your goals are too limited and closed, or too unachievable, you will lose motivation. A good goal might look like “I will build a chair that my children will want to sit in, and it will be safe for them”. You might not know how to do it, but you have the tools, and this is where the exciting challenge lies. A less clear goal would be “I fancy building a chair like a rocket that rocks and spins around.” If you start with the goal to build a safe, attractive thing for a defined user, you can still shape it like a rocket and add fun features, but you have to ground the goal in real needs.  

Immediate and unambiguous feedback is related to component number 2, the merging of action and awareness. But this is particularly about ensuring you get feedback from others and think of their views. Imagine you’re a costume designer for a big themed event. You can enjoy the creative process on your own but you have to ask the opinions of your clients and co-workers, at the right time, to be able to keep moving on in your task. These voices can tell you what you need to know, especially if you ask clear questions: will people want to wear the costumes? Do they fit the theme? Will they bring the right balance of humour and elegance? 

Concentration on the task at hand is all about creating the right conditions for focus. This might mean creating a defined space or time for an experience, or removing distractions and deciding to tackle only one task at a time. It’s a basic practical component, but one that can be quite hard to achieve. Some people are much better than others at blocking out all disturbances to focus – and this is very likely to be because they are highly motivated by their chosen activity. 

Paradox of control is a really fascinating component. Have you ever tried something like dancing and singing at the same time? If you are too conscious of all the steps and lyrics, and are determined to stick to the exact routine, you are in control. BUT, you will feel tight and are likely to stumble or forget your place. If you tell yourself that it’s OK to lose your place, and let the sense of enjoyment take over, you can move more towards a state of arousal. But if you aren’t in control of your routine, you might improvise too much and lose it all. It’s a paradox. So, what works is a constant pulsing of letting go and coming back to the plan, letting go to enjoy yourself, and back to the plan. 

Transformation of time is all about how when you’re in flow you don’t notice the time passing. You’re not thinking about when you can have a break or what else is on your To Do list. You’re not worrying about something in the past. Without those two markers of the past and future as barriers in your mind, you can immerse yourself in the process of the moment. I go to an expressive dancing class for three hours on Saturdays, and the time goes by in a flash, whereas if I spent three hours running it would feel like 12 hours instead!

Loss of self-consciousness is very similar to losing track of time. You might lose a sense of embarrassment. You might stop worrying about an issue that has been preoccupying you. You might not think about your appearance or what others need from you. You almost become the task, or the experience, for a while. 

Autotelic experience is all about enjoying an experience for its own sake, because it’s enjoyable or fulfils people’s own intrinsic needs, rather than being required or expected from outside (or extrinsic) demands. Some people can be more autotelic than others. Autotelic means self-motivated. Autotelic people don’t need to be rewarded, as they find their own rewards in their chosen activities, and they might refuse to do activities they don’t enjoy. A well designed experience is autotelic, and also encourages people to find experiences for themselves where they can feel the same again. Good experiences might create more autotelic people – which can be a challenge to our society if education or work requires people to do things they don’t want to do. And then again, if there are more autotelic people, education and work will have to change to accommodate their highly motivated personalities!

What have you taken from this set of components? Can any be useful for you in your role, or in the design of experiences that really engage people? 

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Flow’s Engagement Thresholds Model

There are many models that illustrate different levels or modes of engagement, but at Flow we find it more useful to think about engagement as a series of thresholds that are passed through en route to a deeper impact. A lot of our work involves supporting our clients to enable and sustain transformative change for people, communities and organisations, through learning, participation and deeper involvement in arts, heritage, science or local citizenship. We have developed our Engagement Thresholds model to facilitate how this work is planned, delivered and evaluated. In its simplest form this can be visualised as a wedge-shaped graph, with number of participants on the y axis and depth of engagement on x.

© Flow Associates

This model ensures we view engagement as more than boosting numbers or reaching certain groups of people. What matters most is the impact that this engagement has on the people involved, their lives and communities and the organisation itself. As people pass through each threshold they develop their skills, capacities and abilities to improve or cope with their context. While fewer people pass through each subsequent threshold those few are able to do so in a deeper way, until those at the narrowest end become the champions who will support and influence those behind them.

We are often asked to share the thinking behind our Engagement Thresholds model with clients who have found it helps them to design better experiences, assess the depth and reach of engagement, and identify barriers along the way. So here we have brought together a potted history of engagement and participation models, along with more detail on our own thinking.

What follows isn’t a definitive history, and we would love to hear from you if you can fill in any gaps.

The First Rung of the Ladder

Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 article A Ladder Of Citizen Participation has been referred to by many as a starting point for thinking about participation in terms of a series of levels. She wrote the article while she was director of community development studies for The Commons, a non-profit research institute. She had previously worked for the US department of health, education and welfare, and had been chief advisor on citizen participation for the US department of housing and urban development. She was frustrated by what she saw in these roles and wrote her article as a provocation, describing the various ways that people referred to a process of ‘citizen participation’.

Arnstein’s Ladder (1969) Degrees of Citizen Participation

While the top 3 rungs of her ladder could be described as participatory, the others are more of a one-way process where people she describes as the ‘haves’ are in control of those described as ‘have-nots’. The middle three rungs are tokenistic at best, and the bottom three represent non participation.
In the article she referred to a French student protest poster from 1968, a year which had seen worldwide unrest, to illustrate how damaging this pseudo-participation could be:

“The poster highlights the fundamental point that participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless.” Sherry Arnstein (1969)

Reaching New Levels

Arnstein’s ladder of participation has become the basis of multiple models since, although many have taken her ideas literally as a hierarchy of goals rather than a question around the validity of these methods.

Roger Hart’s Ladder of Youth Participation
Scott Davidson’s Wheel

By the late 90s there were several useful iterations including Roger Hart’s 1997 ladder of youth participation which focused on a specific audience, and Scott Davidson’s 1998 wheel which highlights the ‘shades’ within each level, for example breaking ‘consultation’ down into three states: limited, customer care, and genuine consultation.

(These images were taken from nonformality’s timeline of participation models that starts with Sherry Arnstein and ends in 2011. If you are like me and enjoy looking at different diagrams and charts you should check it out )
One of the best known and often referred to is the 1999 International Association for Public Participation’s ‘spectrum’ model, designed to identify levels of participation that define the public’s role in the process. Levels depend on the goals, time frames, resources, and depth of impact for the public.

 

While this is widely seen as a useful model, criticisms include the lack of reality in some of the categories. People have asked questions such as: Is ‘informing’ collaborative? Is ‘Empower’ possible? Where does ‘Listen’ fit in?

© International Association for Public Participation www.iap2.org

Public Engagement with Research

Many of the more recent participation models, such as the Wellcome Trust’s ‘Onion’, focus on public engagement with research (PER). This model shows how different activities can enable publics to influence research and policy to different extents, and is used by organisations such as Oxford University to inform their PER activity. The outer layer of the onion is made up of one-way interactions designed to share information, but as you peel away the layers the opportunities for dialogue grow until at the centre of the onion the power is transferred to the public.

Wellcome Trust’s Public Engagement Onion

Wellcome’s Onion inspired Edinburgh University’s Beltain Public Engagement network to develop their own model which goes one step further to consider the number of people involved at each level. Shaped like a wedge, this model helps to show the value at both ends of the scale. Lighter touch activities only designed to inform can have wider reach, while more intense projects with smaller groups can have a deeper impact.

Beltain’s Public Engagement Spectrum

Designing Better Experiences

Flow’s Engagement Thresholds model builds on all of these examples, but instead of defining different levels of engagement as goals to aspire to, we have drawn on our expertise in Experience Design to focus on the qualities of an experience, and how these enable people to pass through the thresholds necessary to reach new levels.
As an emerging field, the starting point of Experience Design is the changes you want to enable for people in terms of how they think, feel and act, so that your designs are based on impact rather than resource. The more detailed version of our model below sets out some of the indicators that people are passing through these thresholds.

© Flow Associates

People may enter or exit the experience at different thresholds depending their personal context, and their experience of the event, activity or service you are offering. For example, thinking of participants in a workshop, people who arrive looking for information or help may leave feeling confident and motivated if they are given the tools to apply their new knowledge which in turn enables them to make changes for themselves. For others less confident about attending the same workshop then the welcome experience will be most important, and if it feels relevant to them they may leave feeling they have learned something useful.

‘Empowerment’ is also not the end goal, it is simply another threshold through which someone must pass in order to feel the deepest impact. This impact might come from a person being empowered to create changes in their life, through accessing your resources. Designing an experience that helps people to pass through these thresholds makes impact more likely because you are creating the conditions for change.

If you would like a high resolution PDF version of this model or arrange a call to talk through its uses please get in touch. We would love to hear your thoughts, and if you would like to use it please credit Flow Associates and link to our website.

By Susanne Buck

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Flow Sustainable Art Award

Last week, I had an enjoyable afternoon judging the Flow Sustainable Art Award for a student graduating from the Wimbledon Master of Fine Arts course. The award was for a student who could demonstrate commitment to art practice that engages with ideas that help people and planet thrive. Last year there were 12 applications, and this year only 4, which made my task easier. I don’t think this generally corresponds to a drop in interest in art geared towards big ecological challenges, but was probably due to other factors such as stretched resources to put in a pitch for the award. 

Ines M. Ferreira (Inês M. Ferreira) was the recipient of the award, and she will come and spend a day or two with us at Flow later in the summer, shadowing or working on a particular project. 

Below are the statements of all four who applied, starting with Ines.

My practice forwards proposals on the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, which focuses on the symbiotic relationship between man and nature as culture, but it doesn’t ignore the complexities of interconnecting socio-political systems, may they be inherent to art itself or in the real world. I explore the local en global, by articulating how local harmful practices to the planet have an impact in the loss of an ecological way of life, which affects the planet as a whole. My work also embodies the ethos of its critique by using recycled metal, as a way of counter-acting harmful mineral extraction.

Qianqian Cai

My creative practice focuses on reconstructing a harmonious existential relationship in the context of time, imbues the most ordinary events or objects with a metaphysical and ceremonial sense. Through sculpting time, depicting the inner sense and exploring the authentic self, my artwork shifts the narrative past into an introspective present, makes the spectators reconsider their existential relationship with the other things around.

Poetic harmony and mysterious romanticism are the aesthetic foundation in my practice, which is influenced by the anciently oriental philosophy about creating a balanced world of mutual tolerance, respect, and appreciation.

Cara Jean Flynn

The natural world is my source of inspiration, focusing on the orders and structures within it, as well as searching and synthesizing new ways to redefine our relationship with nature.

This incorporates the sustainability and awareness of materials and processes I use and the fundamental ideas behind the work. My aim is to address common misconceptions that nature is an autonomous entity existing independently from the human race. By doing this my aim is to try to understand the human condition within nature and by doing so understand it’s balance of fragility and strength in light of current environmental issues.

Yuting Wang

The main media of my work is oil painting. My work explores the people ‘s destruction of nature and living situations, and how these issues impact people’s psychology and emotions. I also consider how modern technology damages both humanity and the environment as a consequence of post-civilisation. In my painting, I express the post-civilisation scene as a dystopia. I hope to convey an uncanny feeling of the dystopia to remind people of the environmental situation. Through concerning the pollution issues to improve the state of the planet.

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Making it: future skills and creativity

The Government clearly recognises the recent growth of creative industries and sees them as a key part of their Industrial Strategy. This piece of research by NESTA (link here) explores how skills need to be developed to boost all the sectors within the Creative Industries. It shows quite how much the Creative Industries are calling for skills other than artistic ones, such as technical, organisational, relational and teaching skills. The research also highlights the importance of those skills that are associated with creative and design occupations right across the economy, for example in engineering or research.

Despite their acceptance of the value of the Creative Industries, the Government’s education policies are militating against their own Industrial Strategy, with their continued support for the compulsory EBacc and their White Paper that shifts vocational/technical pathways (T Levels) to start at Post-16. Their policy ignores how the development of creative skills, and immersion in cultural or imaginative activity, helps young people acquire the broader range of skills needed for roles both within the Creative Industries and beyond them.

Tom Bennett, director of researchED, and appointed by Government as ‘behaviour tsar’ gives an indication of this flawed thinking. He wrote this week in The Guardian a piece (link here) criticising the appointment of a Lego Professor of Play at University of Cambridge.  He argued that play is essential but that success takes hard work. He picks up on how this research, funded by a £4 million grant, will “ensure children are equipped with 21st-century skills like problem solving, team work and self-control”. But he challenges the concept of 21st century skills by saying that these are age-old needs, that we’ve got far enough into the 21st century without a radical shift in what humans need to be, and that we can’t know what future skills would be anyway.

He rubbishes play in learning, and disregards the rapidly changing landscape of work, and more widely, the rapidly changing…landscape.

Our experience of supporting projects about the future of learning, culture and creative careers has been informative on this. We’ve learned by consulting, reading and observing that there is a role for more play in learning and that major changes to the necessary capacities of future generations are on the horizon, if not already here.

One project we’re working on is the Crafts Council’s Make Your Future three year programme (see for more). We are evaluating it, looking for evidence of the impact of encounters with makers and mixing new technology with traditional crafts. These hoped-for impacts include increases in 21st Century skills: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Flexibility and Initiative-taking.

The teachers know that these are important. They can see how young people change when they can be immersed in a project that involves them collaborating, thinking through a problem, using their hands and bodies, experimenting, and expressing thoughts and feelings. Through the practices of envisaging ways to improve on a design or solve a problem, then trying and failing, asking for help, trying something new, and constructively criticising each other’s work, they are refining these skills.

Another of our projects has been Future Views (link), commissioned by three Bridge organisations, to help cultural education partnerships imagine and plan for the future of cultural learning.

Consulting researchers, cultural workers and young people, we found that economic, political and environmental change factors present unprecedented challenges. Although levels of understanding and concern varied, there was a universal sense that there are coming changes that will affect resources in a profound and material way. Young people are highly conscious of a challenging future, and they accredit pressures in their mental health to wider global issues, combined with an increasingly high-stakes academic curriculum and increasing social division.

We discovered that digital technology is only one of many drivers for change in education and future skills. Although some aspects of technology are perceived by young people to be a threat, particularly the automation of jobs, there are many positive opportunities for harnessing technology to develop creativity, empathy and problem-solving. However, progress in this area is potentially threatened by Government education reforms and the plan to the leave the EU.

Many felt that technological advances (e.g. spatial imaging, data analysis or Internet of Things) offer opportunities to creatively tackle many of these emerging problems. Schools and cultural organisations need to shift expectations of a future of continued bounty, while facing these challenges with hope and creative thinking. They will need to deepen their collaborations and think more systemically. They will need to open up to digital creativity and to ‘design for good’, integrating them into other areas of learning or arts activity.

In particular, in a world that is increasingly riven by ideological division – in conflict over resources – people in the future will need to collaborate, to respond calmly to unprecedented situations and know how to defuse tensions. To develop these capacities, play is essential. You can develop responsiveness to new situations and be motivated to practice skills by playing games and being involved in simulations. You can find ‘adjacent possibles’ – or new solutions to complex problems – by messing around with combinations of words, images and ideas. You can learn to control your emotions by expressing them in safe situations, through drama or exploring film and literature. You can learn how to manage your mental health by playful strategies, by developing a sense of humour, and by exercising your body.

We know that young people are aware of the importance of creativity in an unpredictable future, some intuitively responding to their experience of a lack of creativity in school, others more consciously unhappy about it. However, they reported many barriers to their creativity being fulfilled, including a lack of agency and choice in their education. They think that careers advice and guidance in schools needs to be updated, with more awareness of the need for creative, technical and people skills in emerging areas of work.

The young consultees also talked of the need to involve and empower young people as cultural leaders, not just offer arts as ‘enrichment’ or see young people as passive consumers. This call was supported by cultural workers we consulted too, who want to empower young people to take control of their own path. To achieve this, they know that young people need more exposure to people in the creative industries, not only to understand their creative practice, but the ‘whole person’ and the way they balance and manage their creative life. They want young people to understand that not everybody has had the same pathway into the industry, and the importance of having ‘other strings to their bow’ to help them find their own way as an individual. They said that young people shouldn’t assume that someone else is going to make change for them, that they need to be active and take control. But, of course they need to be invited and encouraged in taking control.

Another project that we have supported is Cultivate (link), a creative place-making programme in Wandsworth and Lambeth, part of London’s Cultural Education Challenge. Part of it is a creative careers education programme, responding to the priority needs of schools, who are now responsible for careers education and guidance.

In recruiting independent creative practitioners and small businesses to run ‘Cultivate Routes’ sessions, we asked them what advice they would give young people who want to pursue a creative path in life. We received responses from 74 people, so it gives a fairly good indication of the views of the sector. Their advice, overwhelmingly, based on their own experiences, was to be utterly self-motivated but also highly collaborative and flexible. They talk about ‘just doing it’, focusing on doing what you love, not expecting Higher Education to provide a clear professional route as you have to forge this for yourself, having to keep refreshing your skills and not expecting success to come quickly. It’s a tricky path between total self-driven passion and responsiveness to the changing needs of the world and the ideas of others.

Finnish researcher Esko Kilpi (link here) writes about the skills needed for post-industrial work: “…conventional jobs are increasingly inhibiting flexibility and contextual responses to new problem definitions or new technological solutions to old problems. To succeed in the new economic spaces, we need symmetric relationships, open assets and very open organizations.”

Are we up to the challenge of reinventing creative business and cultural organisations to be more flexible and open in the UK? And if leaving the EU means that many of the more open and forward-looking organisations shift to be based in Europe, or more virtual, what impact will this have? The more flexible and open that young people start to become, the more likely it is that they will not want conventional work, or want to contribute to businesses within the UK economy.

We need to start bringing creative thinking to this challenge!

Blog

Flow’s Thrivable Culture toolkit

It’s not always simple to describe what we do at Flow, when we respond to a wide variety of contracts and adapt very flexibly to what our clients need. Over the past 11 years we’ve been in roles that include ‘learning partner’, ‘evaluator’, ‘audience researcher’, ‘programme planner’, ‘critical friend’, ‘trainer’ and ‘change facilitator’. Central to all of these roles is our ability to help cultural organisations develop and narrate a Story of Change, and to help them design experiences that power the changes they want to create.

 

Through these many projects, we’ve built up a set of tools for planning and tracking change. A major resource that we’ve developed is the Thrivable Culture toolkit. We’ve called it this because we believe that ‘Cultural’ opportunities help people, places and planet thrive, and that in turn, a thriving world allows rich and diverse ‘cultures’ to grow. By ‘Cultural opportunities’ we mean a very broad set of things – having freedom and resources to learn and enquire, to cherish our shared heritage, to express feelings, be imaginative, make things and innovate for the future. This contributes to wellbeing in the wider ‘culture’ – in all the ways we communicate, celebrate, critique and create as a society. Cultural opportunity is driven by the public Arts and Heritage sectors, but also by the Media and commercial Creative Industries, by Science Engagement, and by the Education and Health sectors.

 

By the term ‘Thrivable’ we are referring to an approach to growth that favours wellbeing for the many over wealth for a few. So, a Thrivable Culture is one where people and places flourish by pursuing what they love, helping each other and looking to the future. This is the big Story of Change that makes Cultural organisations so valuable. We hope that working with us using these tools will enable you to tell and realise your own part of this Story of Change, in ways that are meaningful to you.

 

The underlying philosophy of these models comes from our namesake, the idea of ‘flow’ or optimum engagement, developed by Csikszentmihalyi. This helps us analyse how people are both supported and stimulated by any experience, and what the barriers are to engagement. In order for organisations or their projects to inspire people, overcome challenges, and design for learning and change, we need to pay attention to how people can feel really absorbed, inspired and empowered. This is all about improving the qualities of experiences, places, materials, questions, processes and relationships so that staff, partners and audiences are both supported and challenged. From the zone between too much anxiety and too much boredom, people draw their energy to change. Improving quality in these conditions is just as important as impacts such as measurably increasing income or creating jobs. Or rather, in the Cultural sector, improving quality is the best way to achieve those quantifiable impacts.

 

Logic Models used in processes informed by Theory of Change can help organisations to define and evidence how inputs and outputs of any project result in quantifiable outcomes and longer-term impacts.

However, in cultural and experimental projects, or people-centred areas such as education, it can be hard to predict and quantify these outcomes. Rigid application of this model, seeing it as a narrow pipeline of change, can cause anxiety, an inability to pull together around common goals and a sense of inevitable failure. It can also be tricky to start at the end of the line and to think backwards from desired impacts. As part of our toolkit, we’ve designed a new version of the Logic Model format to help teams plan for and evaluate change which we believe overcomes these problems. It is more circular, makes much more clear how planning and evaluation activities sit together, and it encourages more pause to think through the early steps of learning about your context and creating conditions for change.

The following explains an element of our framework in depth: What you do at the start of Discover phase of a project.

 

An important part of our approach is ‘front-loading’, which means thinking before launching into the hard or expensive parts of any programme or new project, taking time to build relationships, to clarify common values and to research the context around you. This doesn’t have to mean a long vague phase before implementing any project. It means distinguishing between the WHY and the HOW, or the Aims and Objectives. It means ensuring that all stakeholders are agreed on what you want to achieve, holding on to that vision while you test and develop a project, and being prepared for unpredictable contingencies as you go.

At this Discover phase of a project, we help you use Three Lenses to clearly think about your situation, which will then help you design interventions or planned outcomes. These Three Lenses are:

  • External factors: How you work in your wider context. How you optimise your use of resources and overcome external challenges.
  • Relational factors: How you design conditions for people to interact with each other. How you help people to develop their capacities for positive change by learning from others.
  • Internal factors: How your experiences or services can inspire shifts in people’s values and character, including your own. (These may not be easily quantifiable in themselves but can potentially create quantifiable change in people’s lives or the wider world).

These correspond to the three ecologies, environmental, social and mental, described by Arne Naess. The diagram below shows how the three lenses interact with each other continually, and in both directions. Relational factors are in the middle, as these connect and maximise the potential of the other two, helping individuals and organisations relate to the world around them and other people.

 

 

Why is it so important to look carefully at your situation? Looking ahead, the wider world is becoming more difficult, and resilience in the face of this is the buzz word. In some countries such as the UK and USA, Culture and Science sectors are struggling to be fully valued due to political change. Some other countries are investing properly in these sectors, but wider environmental or economic conditions might threaten their progress. To be resilient, it’s vital to be hyper aware of external threats and opportunities emerging now and on the horizon. Being hyper-aware does not just mean vigilance. It means thinking about how all these change factors interact in an increasingly complex and unpredictable system.

 

The next diagram shows the tool we use to help organisations analyse their situation, combining the Three Lenses, and with eight external factors presenting the threats and opportunities to achieving desired outcomes.

 

The 8 external factors are used like the PESTEL or STEEPLE analysis frameworks, but we have added the factors of Culture and Wellbeing. This new approach to analysing threats and opportunities is loosely based on Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, but uses an ecosystem instead of a pyramid to illustrate how all the contributing factors work together. In this ecosystem, Culture and Ethics sit at the centre of the circle, and Relational capacities and Internal values fall out of them and feed them.

By identifying the factors that offer the most scope for opportunity you can look for ways to overcome threats in other areas, to recognise where your project can have most impact. For example, the solution to overcoming an External threat – such as a change in Government that reduces funding – might involve working on Internal values or Relational capacities. In turn, the solution to fundamental problems with Relational or Internal factors might lie in leveraging an External factor, such as interventions to improve physical and mental health.

 

Here, we’ve broadly identified the kinds of Relational and Internal factors that might be nurtured if you want to effect positive change on any of the External change factors, overcoming the threats and generating opportunities. These are examples of ways these factors can be articulated rather than intended as a single correct path. Being a Values-based organisation means inviting your communities to explore and debate how values should be expressed and lived.

Contact us on [email protected] if you’d like to talk about how our work can help you.

Flow-er needed Blog

Flow-er needed

Our team in Flow UK is looking for a ‘paid volunteer’ who wants early career experience in arts, heritage and science engagement. We’d like to hear from students or graduates, of any age, with lots of enthusiasm. You might have some knowledge of areas such as museums, market research, teaching, community arts, graphic design, experience design or science communication.

The main work coming up is supporting workshops where we consult with audience groups and evaluate events such as festivals.
The main skillsets for this are:
– able to chat sensitively and confidently with all kinds of people (while also being unobtrusive)
– able to take and transcribe notes, use a camera and document events as they happen
– able to help make posters, handouts, displays etc.
We can pay £50 per day plus travel costs when attending events (e.g. in London, Cambridge, Oxford). You will benefit from our insights based on decades of experience in the cultural sector. Because we are a business that depends on winning short contracts, there is no guarantee of work.
Please email [email protected] with an online CV, your website, or a CV attached, as well as a very brief note on why you’d like to work with us.
We are led by our values in Flow – and are committed to equality, social justice and environmental sustainability. We will not discriminate on any grounds.
Busy times Blog

Busy times

Here’s a long promised update on our latest work in Flow UK so far in 2015. We’ve been collaborating with established friends such as Vivienne Reiss, KCA London and Guerilla Science, and with new associates, including service designer Daniela Ivanova, and Anna Salaman, former Head of Formal Learning at Royal Museums Greenwich.

Some new projects include:

Developing an evaluation framework for Encounters Arts, for their Connect and Inspire programme of projects.

Evaluating Travellers’ Tails, the programme of exhibitions, events, volunteers and a digital tool, accompanying the funded acquisition of two Stubbs paintings of a kangaroo and a dingo.

In a similar vein, evaluating the programme of events, tour and community projects surrounding the funded acquisition by the Ashmolean Museum of Manet’s portrait of Mademoiselle Fanny Claus.

Evaluating the process and partnerships of the ACE-managed national Museums and Schools Programme, and developing an outcomes-based evaluation framework for the next phase.

Working with Guerilla Science, the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, and Ravensbourne on running the Super Human Academy for secondary school pupils to encounter exciting future technologies, supported by Intel.

Evaluating SMASHFestUK, a unique kind of science festival for young people produced by The Registry and hosted by Lewisham organisations such as The Albany Theatre and Deptford Lounge.

Supporting the Maritime Greenwich WHS learning group to sustain and grow its cultural learning partnership, working with schools and arts, heritage and environmental organisations across the borough.

Continuing to develop The Story of the Crick, the heritage activity programme for the new Francis Crick Institute.

We also have four or five more exciting projects in development, with Flow India and associates, and more news about these will come in due course.

A bit of history, looking to the future Blog

A bit of history, looking to the future

This new website heralds a new phase of sharing between Flow UK and Flow India, under a new umbrella of FlowGlobal.

This means building bridges to work on a more international basis and with a stronger mission of creating futures. In part, it’s a new phase as we’re delighted to welcome on board our new co-director Susanne Buck, with whom we will develop a strong foundation to the business and a new strand of Experience Design. Mark Stevenson will continue his association with FlowGlobal but is giving more time to an exciting new venture, We Do Things Differently.

It’s a clean slate in a way but we’re not eliminating our history. Between our small team in London and a bigger, growing one in Delhi, we have spent countless hours on Skype, email and in person, developing Creative Enquiry to suit education in both national contexts, forging methods for evaluation using Theory of Change, and adapting Service Design for digital projects in the Cultural sector.

We’ve delivered so many projects since we set up Flow in 2006 that it’s easy to lose track of the detail sometimes. However, there is still plenty of free-flowing knowledge between us, and it’s not trapped in the sediments of archived reports.

This is a bit of reflection on some of the cultural sector consultancy projects we’ve done in the past 2 years. As well as consultancy, and especially in India, we have also delivered courses, workshops, summer camps and culture labs in schools for many thousands of children and young people.

Bridget has led cultural consultancy projects working with Flow India’s directors and other associates including Susanne Buck, Mike Ellis, Rebecca Birch, Joanna Holland, Sarah May, Wendy Earle, Dr Lindsay Keith, James Aldridge, and others.

These are are our main consultancy and research projects in the UK over the past two years.

Currently we’re working on:

  • Co-ordinating the Learning partnership across the World Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich.
  • Evaluating the outreach and education programme supporting the Ashmolean Museum’s acquisition of Manet’s portrait of Mademoiselle Fanny Claus
  • Evaluating the Extending Innovative Digital Practice programme, led by Artswork South East, with clusters of schools, arts organisations and tech companies in Oxford, Margate and Eastbourne
  • Researching digital innovation in school and museum partnerships, exploring possibilities for a Remote model of digital learning

And recently we’ve done:

And a few highlights from the previous year or so:

  • Audience research and a digital strategy for the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, which led to a new brand, website and engagement plan
  • Audience research and evaluation of the Heritage100 website which serves museums and their audiences across Hampshire and the Solent
  • Scoping and market research towards a Digital Collections Prospectus for researchers for RAMM in Exeter
  • Evaluating the schools projects of Resident artists and designers at the V&A Museum in their work with schools
  • Recently, we’ve also worked for the V&A to evaluate a guide to African collections and to evaluate a training course for Indian museum professionals held at the V&A
  • Three research projects on making in museums, on libraries and creative literacy, and on creative outreach strategies, to help development plans for The Children’s Museum London
  • Producing Caring for Reef and Shore (educational films and resources) for St Abbs & Eyemouth Marine Reserve
  • Evaluating the Caribbean Through a Lens community projects and web collections for The National Archives.
  • Research into needs of educational users to scope the digital education offer for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, for English Heritage
  • Evaluation of the contemporary art programme of the Canal & River Trust, including research into evaluation of public art and environmental outcomes
  • INIVA and A Space, market research and marketing strategy for a new Creative Learning brand and an exciting toolkit of Emotional Learning Cards
  • A strategy for outreach, public participation and digital engagement for the successful HLF bid to develop the National Army Museum
  • Evaluation of a learning project called Spacemakers and the overall visitor experience of Kettle’s Yard, and a plan to evaluate their HLF-funded developments
  • Evaluation of the National Museums Online Learning Project. This is a major partnership project between 9 national museums, which resulted in Creative Spaces and WebQuests.

If you would like to find out more about any of these projects or discuss how we can help you with similar work, do get in touch. For a longer list of consultancy projects, see this.