Do You Know Where To Look For Great Deals at Labor Day Sales?

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10 places where anyone can learn to code

Technology TEDx Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.”

Fluency, Resnick proposes in today’s talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.

In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.

At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece from last March, on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.)
.One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”
.Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—including Introduction to Computer Science—available online for free. (See our post on free online courses for more ideas.)
.If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding.
.The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year.
.Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!)
.Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
.Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.
.Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes.
.Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”

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Where is your mind?

My BBC Future column from a few days ago. The original is here. I’m donating the fee from this article to Wikipedia. Read the column and it should be obvious why. Perhaps you should too: donate.wikimedia.org.

We like to think our intelligence is self-made; it happens inside our heads, the product of our inner thoughts alone. But the rise of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools has made many people question the impact of these technologies on our brains. Is typing in the search term, “Who has played James Bond in the movies?” the same as knowing that the answer is Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (… plus David Niven in Casino Royale)? Can we say we know the answer to this question when what we actually know is how to rapidly access the information?

I’ve written before about whether or not the internet is rewiring our brains, but here the question is about how we seek to define intelligence itself. And the answer appears to be an intriguing one. Because when you look at the evidence from psychological studies, it suggests that much of our intelligence comes from how we coordinate ourselves with other people and our environment.

An influential theory among psychologists is that we’re cognitive misers. This is the idea that we are reluctant to do mental work unless we have to, we try to avoid thinking things though fully when a short cut is available. If you’ve ever voted for the political candidate with the most honest smile, or chosen a restaurant based on how many people are already sitting in there, then you’ve been a cognitive miser. The theory explains why we’d much rather type a zipcode into a sat-nav device or Google Maps than memorise and recall the location of a venue – it’s so much easier to do so.

Research shows that people don’t tend to rely on their memories for things they can easily access. Things like the world in front of our eyes, for example, can be changed quite radically without people noticing. Experiments have shown that buildings can somehow disappear from pictures we’re looking at, or the people we’re talking to can be switched with someone else, and often we won’t notice – a phenomenon called “change blindness”. This isn’t as an example of human stupidity – far from it, in fact – this is an example of mental efficiency. The mind relies on the world as a better record than memory, and usually that’s a good assumption.

As a result, philosophers have suggested that the mind is designed to spread itself out over the environment. So much so that, they suggest, the thinking is really happening in the environment as much as it is happening in our brains. The philosopher Andy Clark called humans “natural born cyborgs“, beings with minds that naturally incorporate new tools, ideas and abilities. From Clark’s perspective, the route to a solution is not the issue – having the right tools really does mean you know the answers, just as much as already knowing the answer.

Society wins

A memory study by Daniel Wegner of Harvard University provides a neat example of this effect. Couples were asked to come into the lab to take a memorisation test. Half the couples were kept together, and half were reassigned to pair up with someone they didn’t know. Both groups then studied a list of words in silence, and were then tested individually. The pairs that were made up of a couple in a relationship could remember more items, both overall and as individuals.

What happened, according to Wegner, was that the couples in a relationship had a good understanding of their partners. Because of this they would tacitly divide up the work between them, so that, say, one partner would remember words to do with technology, assuming the other would remember the words to do with sports. In this way, each partner could concentrate on their strengths, and so individually they outperformed people in couples where no mental division of labour was possible. Just as you rely on a search engine for answers, so you can rely on people you deal with regularly to think about certain things, developing a shared system for committing items to memory and bringing them out again, what Wegner called “transactive memory”.

Having minds that work this way is one of the great strengths of the human species. Rather than being forced to rely on our own resources for everything, we can share our knowledge and so pool our understanding. Technology keeps track of things for individuals so we don’t have to, while large systems of knowledge serve the needs of society as a whole. I don’t know how a computer works, or how to grow broccoli, but that knowledge is out there and I get to benefit. And the internet provides even more potential to share this knowledge. Wikipedia is one of the best examples – an evolving store of the world’s knowledge for which everyone can benefit from. I use Wikipedia every day, aware of all the caveats of doing so, because it supports me in all the thinking I do for things like this column.

So as well as having a physical environment – like the rooms or buildings we live or work in – we also have a mental environment. Which means that when I ask you where your mind is, you shouldn’t point toward the centre of your forehead. As research on areas like transactive memory shows, our minds are made up just as much by the people and tools around us as they are by the brain cells inside our skull.

ENDNOTE: Wikipedia is an unparalleled democratisation of knowledge, a
wonderful sharing of human intelligence that’s free to anyone to view. I’m
donating the fee for this article to help support Wikipedia’s work. If you feel you can help out please follow this link: https://donate.wikimedia.org.

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Where in the World Do I Start?

One of the most frequent questions I get when people read Zen Habits, looking to change their lives, is:

“Where do I start?”

From getting in shape to flossing to getting productive to waking earlier to learning languages and much more … there are so many habits to change that people often become confused, overwhelmed, to the point where they don’t start.

I know, because I’ve been there. For me, before I learned how to change habits, the confusion of where to start resulted in two problems: 1) I would often try too many things at once, because I wanted to change a lot of things; or 2) I would just not even try, because it was too hard to figure out.

How did I solve it? I picked one thing, and just started.

This is what I recommend: pick something fun and easy. One thing. Anything, really. What you pick to start with matters little, because you’ll get to everything you want to work on eventually. Where it does matter is in how difficult the change is — if it’s too hard, you might fail and get discouraged and lose confidence. If it’s easy and fun, you’re more likely to succeed and move on to the next challenge.

That said, looking back on things, I have a few suggestions for great habits to start with. I recommend picking one of the following, depending on how much it appeals to you, and how much fun you might have doing it.

1. A Mindfulness Practice. There are a few good options here: 5 minutes of meditation, a mindful tea ritual, or 5 minutes of mindful eating at one meal per day (do nothing but be mindful as you eat, no distractions like reading or TV). Not only are these beautiful, calming practices, they actually set an amazing foundation for future changes. At the most fundamental level, they are practice for being mindful as you do anything, including undergoing other habit changes. One of the best things I’ve ever done is learning to be more mindful.

2. Simplify. Simplifying practices like decluttering or simplifying your schedule are great ways to create space for the important things in your life. I’ve found that a beautiful, uncluttered space is perfect for other things like exercise, reading, meditation, writing, and so on. Decluttering your schedule (find one thing to eliminate or simplify each day) is a great way to create space for other habit changes to follow.

3. Fun Exercise. What? Exercise can be fun? Well, sure — it is for me! I look forward to exercise, whether because running allows me to clear my head, walking allows me to mull over different ideas, or because working out with a friend is a wonderful way to socialize. If exercise doesn’t seem fun to you, you might just need to find the right partner, coach, team, or game to play. Exercise is a great habit to start with because it makes your whole day better, makes your mind more focused, and gives you the confidence to tackle other habits.

4. A Small Heathy Eating Habit. I love this habit because it makes you feel lighter, healthier, and happier. That change can affect everything else you do. A simple eating habit might be to eat fruit and raw nuts for a snack instead of greasy or sweet snacks, or drinking water or tea instead of soda, or eating veggies instead of something fried or starchy for dinner. Enjoy the cleaner, lighter taste, the lack of heaviness, greasiness and bloatedness you feel afterward. You don’t have to revamp your entire diet — just one small eating change is a great way to start.

What if you want to do all four of these? Pick the one you are looking forward to the most. If there’s a tie, then pick randomly. It doesn’t matter where you start. What matters is that you start.

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Where Does it Hurt? A Closer Look at Pain Points

The more I talk to customers, the more it amazes me how much similarity there is in the core problems businesses are trying to solve. Whether it is an IT manager or an accountant, the common denominator is that they spend the majority of their time trying to figure out how to get things done. In my world, this tends to mean moving from paper-based processes or figuring out the right way to get things done with digital information.  Which tools, what processes and how to teach everyone the “right” way to do things is a constant problem.

Companies are trying to figure this out, while at the same time, they tell their IT organizations to lower costs, streamline their processes and to protect their business interest.  No easy task – and how does an IT organization do this while also empowering their end users with best practices?

IT organizations need to think beyond just offering tools and leverage best in class practices for their organizations.  Often, this can put IT in a bind. How to lower costs and also get the best tools into their users hands?  I have found that the best organizations do this by first focusing on prioritizing the pain points of their end users. This is where the end user needs to speak up. What costs the most time, effort and pain to you in your daily work? In my previous post, I spoke to an example of a company that completely revamped its UI based on user feedback, which led to impressive results. Some examples we hear from end users are:

Gathering feedback and approvals takes foreverUsing forms to collect information is too difficultSending multiple attachments causes confusionEditing PDF documents is a hassleProperly protecting electronic documents is too time consumingIt’s hard to ensure that published documents are readable in a multi-screen worldIt’s hard to send large files with email and IT restrictionsIt takes too long and is too complicated to get documents signed electronically

Sound familiar? These are very common themes, especially as we move into a new business climate where we are not just trying to be productive on our PC’s, but also on our phones and tablets. It’s time to take a look at what NEW best in breed companies are doing.

What are your pain points? How do you handle them with the current technologies you use?

(Photo credit: Thumb Being Pressed on Thumb Tack via Shutterstock)

Mark Grilli is senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He is responsible for worldwide marketing strategy and implementation of the company’s Acrobat, EchoSign, and document products and services. Prior to joining Adobe, Grilli held marketing and client services positions at WebEx (now a Cisco Company) and was co-founder in a eLearning start up. Grilli blogs often on the official Adobe Acrobat blog. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCSB and a MBA from Pepperdine University.

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Productivity Made Simple: Where to Start with GTD

Simply GTD

GTD (or Getting Things Done) is a widely popular personal productivity and time management methodology created by David Allen and described in his book “Getting Things Done”.

And yes, Lifehack has had its share in covering this area already. For instance, by doing a simple search on Google you can quickly find out that there are more than 6,000 pages on Lifehack that mention GTD in one way or the other.

So the whole idea seems discussed enough, right? Perhaps…but it is definitely worth revisiting as we enter a new year. Consider that despite thousands of articles around the internet there is still one main problem with GTD – it’s not a methodology that’s easy to grasp.

It has a learning curve and if you simply throw yourself in the middle of it you might get the wrong overall impression about the system and abandon it after just a short while.

So if you are new to GTD I have only one favor to ask you: have a little faith that you can get much more productive with GTD and be much less stressed out and uncertain about the tasks you should do both in your work and your personal affairs.

This is the true power of GTD, at first it seems complicated, but eventually it becomes one of those can’t-live-without parts of your life.

Now, I’m not going to describe every possible aspect of GTD here. The first reason is that the book is nearly 300 pages long, and I’m not in a position to claim that I can explain it all in a single blog post. The second reason is that I only want to get you started here, and there’s only a small set of things you need to do for that.

The GTD adventure starts with one particular exercise. It’s going to take you a while but it’s worth the effort regardless if you’re going to end up implementing the system or not.

Take a couple of blank pieces of paper and write down every task (i.e. every thing you have to do) that’s on your mind right now. And by “every task” I mean every task.

Start by writing down everything work related. All the reports you need to write, all the calls you need to make, all the email you need to write or respond to, all the things your boss told you to do, all the things your clients want from you, and so on … simply everything.

If you’re not in a desk job don’t quit here. Simply write down all that is specific to your line of work.

Then switch to all house related tasks. Cleaning, building, cooking, all the other chores. Also things like calling the plumber, and so on.

Next in line is your family. Write down every task that’s a part of your family life. Things like visiting your aunt the next weekend, picking your brother up from the airport, making sure that your son does his homework, helping your daughter to choose a college, drop off you spouse for a night out with their friends, again everything you can think of.

Health and fitness related tasks. Like that doctor’s appointment you need to make for the next week, or those prescription drugs you need to pick up for the kids on you way back from work, or visiting the gym before work to stay in shape, or this new diet you want to find out more about.

Friends and colleagues. I’m sure there’s something on your mind that’s involving your friends. Maybe you’re meeting them today and need to make a reservation in your favorite pub, not to mention that you need to remember to be there on time. Apart from that, there are hundreds of other things that involve your social life. Give it a minute and try to write down every one of those things.

Most people love shopping, everybody hates paying bills. Anyway, both these things are an integral part of our lives. No matter what you do, there are still some things you want / need to buy and some bills you don’t want have to take care of. Write down everything you need to buy and every bill that has to be taken care of by the end of the month.

We’re not done yet. Next up are books, articles, and education in general. I’m sure there’s a book you really want to read, or an article you need to remember to save for future reference, not to mention all your education related tasks. Like, for instance, remembering not to be late for your Spanish lesson, or making sure that you buy a new guitar tuner before your next guitar class. I’m sure you get the point.

Now let’s get to some purely positive aspects of life, like hobbies and entertainment. Maybe there’s a movie you want to see, or how about that concert (“are the tickets still available?”), also, I’m sure there’s an upcoming party you want to attend. Think about your hobbies and all the things you want to do to get them going.

I don’t have any more ideas for additional categories of things, so let me just name this final category as other activities and tasks. Just to give you an example, I’m sure there are things you’ve chosen not to clutter your mind with because you thought you didn’t have the time to do them … write them down too.

Now, how was it? How long did it take? Do you have absolutely everything on these lists? Just a small hint, if there are less than 300 items on the lists then you haven’t been entirely honest. You need to spend a little more time and complete the list until absolutely everything is on it.

Simply take a look at the list. Can you believe that all these things have been occupying your brain’s resources? Obviously, this is one of the reasons for you being stressed out and afraid that something important might slip your mind.

Imagine how much better you could use your brain’s resources to think about (and eventually figure out) these things rather than to remember about these things.

This is what GTD can do for you. It can throw all of them out of your brain and place them in a different location you can trust.

The lists from this exercise will be the cornerstone for the system, something you will build upon in the next steps. Reflect on it for a while, and make sure that truly everything is there. If not, do a quick update,

Next time: What to do with the list and how to start implementing GTD the easy way.

Have you tried GTD yet? How is it working for you? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo credit: Productivity or Motivation Reminder via Shutterstock)

Karol K. is founder of newInternetOrder.com, a 20-something year old web 2.0 entrepreneur from Poland, and a writer at ThemeFuse.com. Loves to train Capoeira in the evenings, and likes to be stalked on twitter (@carlosinho), not too much though. Don't forget to visit ThemeFuse to get your hands on some original WordPress themes (warning: no boring stuff like everyone else offers). And also tune in to get his advice on starting an online business.

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Where next for chronic fatigue after XMRV a bust

Nature News has an excellent piece reviewing the state of play after the first reports of the XMRV virus in people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have been put in doubt both by a string of failed replications and evidence of contamination in the original research samples.

Chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS is associated with diffuse body pain, persistent tiredness and loss of concentration and is controversial owing to the fact that some patient groups are determined to identify a ‘physical cause’ while many professionals understand and successfully treat it as having a significant ‘psychological’ component.

We covered the details of the intense debate last year, but the argument was heated further recently when first reports of a virus in some CFS patients have been shown to be extremely unlikely.

The hypothesis that the retrovirus has a role in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been dealt a serious blow by the publication of two damning papers in Science and an “expression of concern” from the journal’s editor over the original report that identified signs of XMRV infection in two-thirds of people with the condition but fewer than 4% of healthy people. The authors of that paper, led by Judy Mikovits at the Whittemore-Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nevada, declined a request from Science to retract it, calling it “premature” in a statement.

“It’s a bust,” says Jonathan Stoye, a retrovirologist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, part of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), who was one of the fiercest critics of the association between XMRV and CFS. “People who are interested in this condition will have to move on.”

Yet scientists are not yet sure what the fallout will be for the future of research into CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)

The Nature News piece discusses where CFS research can go next now “XMRV’s 15 minutes of fame seem to be up” and whether this will reduce scientific interest in what is genuinely a debilitating condition.

Definitely worth a read.

Link to Nature news on ‘CFS: life after XMRV’ (via @edyong209).
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on roots of CFS controversy.

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Where mind-mindedness comes from

On childhood and memory. by Charles Fernyhough Where mind-mindedness comes from Why are some parents more mind-minded than others? Published on March 22, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

I have written previously on this blog about the concept of mind-mindedness, which refers to parents' ability or willingness to represent their children's likely thoughts and feelings. In our research, we have found that maternal mind-mindedness relates to some important developmental outcomes, such as security of attachment and theory of mind. In our first studies on this topic, we assessed mind-mindedness in terms of the extent to which parents focused on their preschoolers' thoughts, interests, feelings, and intellect when given an open-ended invitation to describe their child. More recently, we became interested in whether parents show mind-mindedness when their children are much younger, and investigated mind-mindedness in play interactions between parents and their six-month-olds. Even at this early age, we found that most parents infer that their babies' behavior (at least for some of the time) is governed by things going on inside their heads: desires, emotions, likes, dislikes, thoughts, beliefs.

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The majority of parents will find this unsurprising. What was most interesting to us, however, was that mums and dads varied in how accurate their baby ‘mind-reading' appeared to be. When it came to defining mind-mindedness in the first year, we focused on whether parents commented appropriately on what their baby might be thinking or feeling, a measure we call appropriate mind-related comments. A comment would be classed as appropriate if it matches the child's behavior: Oh, you want the teddy (as the baby gestures towards it), or Are you making a decision about something? (as the baby sits quietly with a pensive expression on his or her face).

In contrast, some comments involve the parent attributing an inappropriate internal state to the baby. For example, a mother might say, You're not interested in that one any more (while the baby is still actively engaged with a toy), or Are you scared? (in the absence of any startling event or fearful response from the baby). We call these non-attuned mind-related comments. A parent who makes a lot of these comments will be considered relatively low in mind-mindedness, while a parent who makes mostly appropriate mind-related comments will be considered more highly mind-minded. 

In a study that has just appeared in the journal Infancy, we addressed the question of why certain parents are more mind-minded than others, by looking at how these two measures of mind-mindedness (obtained by coding videotapes of mothers and babies at play at eight months) related to certain key variables relating to mother and child1. We investigated characteristics specific to the baby (temperament) and to the mother (socio-economic status, educational level, depression, social support), as well as measures relating to the earliest indicators of the mother-child relationship (attitude towards the pregnancy, and recollections of first contact with the baby). We also looked at whether the pregnancy was planned.

In focusing on these pregnancy-related variables, we figured that they would enable us to trace the very earliest origins of maternal mind-mindedness. It is one thing attributing thoughts and feelings to a preschooler; it is another to impute mental states to a newborn whose behavior might not, on the face of it, appear to have much thinking behind it. Heading back even further along the developmental timeline, a mother who is prepared to impute mental states to a fetus would seem already to have a clear representation of that child as a person in its own right. We already know that pregnant women who are able richly to describe what their babies will be like in the future are likely to be more mind-minded with those babies when they are born2. The crucial thing about mind-mindedness is that it taps into parents' representations of their children, rather than the child's behavior in itself. These parental representations have a long history, arguably beginning to be determined as soon as the decision is made to conceive. 

We therefore wondered whether mind-mindedness can be explained in part by factors that predate the birth. Our results showed that the two indices of mind-mindedness (appropriate and non-attuned mind-related comments) were both unrelated to mothers' social background and mental health. In contrast, the variables relating to pregnancy—planned conception, reflection on the pregnancy, recollection of first contact—predicted mind-mindedness. Mothers were more likely to comment appropriately on their babies' thoughts and feelings if they had intended to conceive and then reflected positively on their pregnancy. Mothers were less likely to comment in a non-attuned manner (indicative of greater mind-mindedness) if they recollected exclusively positive feelings in relation to their first contact with their baby. The good news is that, of the 206 mothers who took part in the study, 58% recollected their first contact with the baby in a purely positive light, with 17 giving effusively positive recollections: I started to cry with joy. It was the best feeling of love I have experienced. We also excluded the possibility that these relationships might be confounded by actual difficulties with the pregnancy, by factoring out medical complications to do with the pregnancy, labor and birth. In a second study reported in the same article, we focused on infant temperament, and found no relations between measures of temperament and mind-mindedness. 

These findings allow us to start to evaluate some different possible explanations of individual differences in mind-mindedness. They lead us to reject the idea that some mothers are more mind-minded because their infants are somehow 'easier' (if that were the case, we would have found an association with infant temperament). They also suggest that mother-centered factors, such as educational and mental health status, are less important in determining a mother's mind-mindedness than factors that relate to the specific relationship in question.

More research is needed to determine how accurate a woman's retrospective reports of her pregnancy and birth might be, and also how stable these representations are in light of subsequent experiences. Until we can fit these further pieces into the jigsaw, it seems reasonable to conclude that a mother's attitudes to her specific infant begin to take shape before the baby is born. They are then molded further by the particular experience that that woman has with her pregnancy, such that the highest levels of mind-mindedness in our sample were seen in women who had planned to conceive and then perceived their pregnancy as 'easy'. It is not so much whether the pregnancy is actually easy, in a medical sense, as whether the mother represents it to herself as such. In the earliest days of mind-mindedness, perceptions are everything.

1 Meins, E., Fernyhough, C., Arnott, B., Leekam, S., & Turner, M. (2011). Mother- versus infant-centered correlates of maternal mind-mindedness in the first year of life. Infancy, 16, 137-165.

2 Arnott, B., & Meins, E. (2008). Continuity in mind-mindedness from pregnancy to the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 31, 647-654.

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A place downtown where the freaks all come around

Kellogg Insight has a fantastic article on how nightclub bouncers make instant status judgements to decide whether to let people into exclusive clubs.

It’s a curious insight into perception of social status that both relies on some social stereotypes and turns others completely on their head.

The article is based on the work of sociologist Lauren Rivera who got a job as a “coat-check girl” in a high class club to observe the selection process in action before revealing her true intentions and interviewing the doormen to work out how they made status judgements of hopeful clubbers.

Through conversations and observations, she found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter. Celebrities and other recognized elites slipped through the door. And people related to or befriended by this “in crowd” often made the cut, too.

Wealth is considered to be one of the strongest indicators of status, yet bouncers frowned upon bribes even though bribes are obvious displays of money. “New Faces,” as the bouncers called unrecognized club-goers, were selected on the basis of gender, dress, race, and nationality. Sometimes the final call boiled down to details as minor as the type of watch that adorned a man’s wrist.

As we’ve discussed before, Rivera is not the first sociologist to immerse herself in the swing of urban night life for her work.

Sociologist Simon Winlow actually got a job as a bouncer to get, er, hands on experience of the role of violence in the night time economy.

Link to Kellog Insight on status judgements in night clubs.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on work of Simon Winlow.

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"Broadly Appealing": where public arts meets personal practice

“Broadly Appealing” where public arts meet personal practice

“Most people now accept that you cannot breathe new life into cities, towns and communities without culture. Sometimes the cultural element alone becomes the driving force for regeneration” (Tessa Jowell, from “Culture at the Heart of Regeneration”)

Introduction Arts projects in the UK take a number of different formats: broadly, there are projects that are self generated by artists, projects commissioned by the arts development teams of local and county councils, and regional and national projects instigated by major organisations such as the National Lottery and of course the Government. The purposes of these projects may be manifold, but at their basics they are generally intended to fulfil two premises: to generate a wider interest, understanding or appreciation of the arts, and to allow the public and community at all levels to participate in some form of creative activity. The second premise also holds the caveat that culture and the arts are, in economic terms, a tool for regeneration within communities, and this is something that must be taken into consideration when structuring or responding to an arts project brief. Given that culture may be used as a tool for urban regeneration, for creating a sense of community, or for engaging the public, one sometimes finds that these outcomes are a by-product of the original project proposal, which may simply be to decorate or commemorate a site or occasion: the public input into the whole selection process is extremely variable. It is my belief that what is understood to be culture means very different things to the bodies at either end of the process: from the artist, at the cutting edge of cultural productivity, to the commissioning body, which has reasons for funding arts projects that may ultimately have little to do with an appreciation for the arts and more to do with the effects of ‘culture’ on society or the economy. I would like to describe the differences in intent, outcome, and measurable cultural value for these two different approaches to the arts project, as in my professional and personal practice I have found myself responding to both. “The value of artistic labour is difficult to quantify or measure because of its collective, intangible nature….however, clearly the artistic and cultural labour of the creative ecology makes a substantial contribution to the general welfare of society and its communities. (Shorthose & Strange, 2004: 49, cited in Bohm and Land, 2007)

Culture and Community Art as economic force has long been recognised by the Government, although there is a conceptual difficulty in economically quantifying its value. John Holden says in his 2007 report that “…the creative industries are still, in spite of all the attention that they have received, not fully conceived, explained, narrated or understood.” In his opinion, “at a fundamental conceptual level, the creative industries’ idea veers between on the one hand being based on the creative capacities of individuals, and on the other being a categorisation of industry types.” (Holden 2007) Indeed, the term ‘creative industries’ is itself a relatively recent concept: “The core of culture [is] still creativity, but creativity [is] produced, deployed, consumed and enjoyed quite differently in post-industrial societies from the way it used to be…” (Hartley 2004) In fact, urban studies theorist Richard Florida recognised the effect of what he called the ‘Bohemian Index’ – namely that when artists move into underdeveloped areas, bringing with them a certain amount of ‘cultural cool’, this effects a form of community renewal and urban regeneration. This is in essence the effect that Jowell refers to in her introduction to the DCMS paper ‘Culture at the Heart of Regeneration’. Moreover, culture – and artists – are being used as tools to effectively give a community a sense of itself and its worth. This sort of cultural economics is seen as bringing in job creation, tourism, and visitor numbers, and these are figures that can be quantified, and thus given a value: this accounts for and legitimates expenditure in these fields. Ironically, it seems that cultural success has, for the artist, an economically inverse value: in their 2008 paper, organisational theorists Bohm and Land consider that “if an artist reaches a mass audience or enters into standardised, industrialised production, then his or her status as an artist becomes questionable”. This then is the dichotomy of the working artist: to maintain one’s credibility, but have difficulty in earning a living, or to enter into a partnership with the forces of economy, and be perceived to have ‘sold out’. Nevertheless, the legitimation of culture in terms of its social impact has the effect of creating funding opportunities for arts projects at all levels. The value of culture may sometimes be considered in terms of the distinction between high arts and popular arts, however increasingly it seems that “…to study cultural things is an activity which often refers to the exploration of the practices and lifestyles of the elite in a particular society, of high culture…[however] it can also involve the investigation of the lived experiences and representations of everyday life” (Smith 2000)

Arts in a social context Community-based arts projects take many forms, but probably have broadly the same remit: to use the arts as a tool for unifying a community or area that is deemed to have social problems. A popular project is to run arts workshops with disenfranchised young people: those excluded from school, or deemed to be a problem within their community. Ostensibly these activities are meant to allow them some form of self-expression: yet, it seems often to act as a means of bringing them in line with societies’ expectations for them: the more marginalised the youth or community, the more narrow the aesthetic parameters of the community arts product. Arts in these cases may be a means of bringing people under the same banner, unifying them to a governmental or societal idea of what is normal, what constitutes community. Ironically, these workshops and projects do not truly allow them self expression, as much of what they are allowed to do is proscribed: I have often found myself saying to young people that “you can draw/paint anything you like, as long as its not rude or illegal” - the bottom line being, of course, that I have to consider the needs of the organisation that is, ultimately, paying me to work with them.

In fact, many public or community arts projects are often simply a vehicle for getting a child’s or a member of the public’s actual, physical input on the finished artwork, by whatever means. This manner of working seems to be popular with many community organisations who believe that this allows everyone participation in creating a piece of fine art – which it does. However, what often emerges is not necessarily a work of art, but a work that serves a function to the community. If your organisation is working with a

fine artist, a writer, indeed any arts specialist, they should learn something from that process that they could not have done themselves: there should be a legacy, not only in the final artwork – which, in terms of a piece of fine art, should necessarily be something that the community could not have done themselves; this is after all, why they brought the artist in originally – but also in the process. The community or school should benefit from the experience of working with that specialist, by learning something new that they would not otherwise have been able to do. This is the gap that the autonomous artist working within a social context needs to straddle: to create work that has integrity, and leave a legacy that runs deeper than a child being able to look at a product and saying ‘I put my finger on that’.

By contrast the schools under the Creative Partnerships banner are usually looking for something other than the usual ‘community’ style art: Creative Partnerships as an organisation are focussed on process rather than product, and encourage schools to be creative in their applications for projects: although these may have a curricular theme, the interpretations can be quite open, and the hope is that both school and practitioner learn something from each other, and particularly that the practitioner leaves the school with a creative skill or idea that the teachers can continue to use as a teaching resource. Despite this emphasis on process, the school is usually quite keen to have a product as well, and there are few arts practitioners that would not want to see some kind of physical outcome at the end of their residency. Projects of this kind allow the artist to intersect their personal practice with the needs of their business or employment.

My experience as an arts practitioner within a social context has, broadly speaking, fallen into the role of being the commissioned artist working for an organisation that has a particular need. When not invited into an artist residency by bodies such as Creative Partnerships, I look for arts opportunities on sites such as the Arts Council’s “Arts Jobs”, or similarly in Artist’s Newsletter. These types of projects tend to have a very specific brief which is drawn up by the commissioning body, be it school, local council, or regional council, and these briefs are then advertised nationally.

The Arts commissioning process In an arts commission the artist is invited to submit a proposal that addresses the objectives within the brief, and from these proposals a short-list of artists is drawn up. Short-listed artists are, at interview, invited to give a more detailed demonstration of their proposal and previous work. This process is a way for both organisation and artist to get to know the needs of the other: however, to get to this stage, it is often incumbent upon the artist to invest a fair amount of time in research into the brief, the history of the school or site, the commissioning agent and other relevant factors including perhaps a site visit, before drawing up a proposal that may well include sketches, scale drawings and even maquettes. Tendering for work in this way is not of course limited to the creative industries, but for a self-employed artist it is often a matter of weighing up the time invested for a project one may not even be notified of a failure to be short-listed for. Sometimes, and this is certainly true of larger scale projects, the short-listed artists are paid for the interview, and often to develop a

proposal and present it: however, the amount of time invested in a speculative application is by many artists dependant on the overall fee: these are some of the decisions an artist must make before even drafting an application.

Artist Steve Downey was formerly, among other roles, Arts Development manager at Essex County Council. Now a full time artist, he has found that the experience of being on both sides of the commissioning process have been invaluable in both roles. The experience of being an artist helped him, in the office of Arts Development , to understand the needs of the artist, and he found that this understanding allowed him to give the artists that he commissioned a lot of freedom and to trust in their vision – not something that is common among council officials, even in the arts. Equally, as an artist, he understands the need of the organisation involved – that they need to see that their artist is competent, reliable, and in control. He says “If I’m an artist working for an organisation I… come to the table with the whole project worked out”. This, he says, goes a long way to relieve the fears of organisations that may be unused to working with artists, and is always much appreciated by them.

Proposals and applications It is important, before applying for an arts project, and especially before considering a bid for funding, to create a project proposal. Like a business proposal for small businesses, an artist project proposal performs several functions: it forces the artist to refine – and define - the details of his or her project idea, it shows that the artist is professional and understands the needs of the project and the organisation commissioning it, and it communicates the merits of the project to outsiders such as venues, investors, or collaborators. “Although writing a business plan may appear at first glance to be a tedious process, a properly prepared business plan can save an entrepreneur a tremendous amount of time, money and heartache by working out the kinks in a business concept before rather than after the business is started.” (Barringer 2009) If you substitute the words ‘project proposal’ for ‘business plan’, then this makes perfect sense, especially as a self-employed artist, where one must synergise the needs of one’s creative practice with one’s business. Costing, funding, viability, budgetary control: these are all themes that must be addressed in a proposal. “Such a plan must include: your goals for the enterprise, both short and long term; as description of the products or services you will offer and the market opportunities you have anticipated for them; and finally, and explanation of the resources and means you will employ to achieve your goals in the face of likely competition.” (Barrow, Barrow and Brown 2005) Although a plan like this may not be an immediate passport to success and sources of finance, it will “help you to… communicate your ideas to others in a way that will be easier for them to understand – and to appreciate the reasoning behind your ideas.” (Barrow, Barrow and Brown 2005)

A strong project proposal should also be supported by a strong CV, one that evidences one’s experience in the field to which you are applying. An artist may find, with their diverse interests and strengths, that they have need of several CVs – for example, in one they might weight their experiences as a public or school artist, listing school residencies and workshops first, and exhibitions second: in another, they might make more of their exhibitions and artist residencies, with the workshops and public arts projects taking second. Place. Different applications for different projects mean that any CV and personal statement, while always accurate, should hopefully play to the strengths required for the particular project or organisation that it is meant. (appendix 1)

Insurance and Clearance It is also vital for any artist working in a public sphere to have public liability cover. The current minimum amount of cover required currently stands at £5 million: a figure that has risen steadily in the years that I have been self employed. Artists Newsletter, recognising that its readership is increasingly required to operate in public spheres in order to earn a living from their practice, offers its members this amount of public liability cover as part of its subscription fee through its online community AIR (Artists’ Interaction and Representation). This has proven to be on the one hand a useful tool for increasing its subscriptions, and of huge benefit to its members. This is, in fact, only one of the many services that AN provides for the working artist. In addition one is often required to have a CRB, or Criminal Records Bureau check. This is required by law if one is working in a school or college, whether as a member of staff or as an artist in residence, or if one is in contact with vulnerable adults. The law as it stands, and in contrast to public liability insurance, seems to require a CRB check to be carried out by the institution rather than the individual; with the result that I currently hold four. These are often in fact accepted by other institutions that may not see the point of paying for yet more CRBs for artists who may only be working for them for a matter of weeks.

For example, I am one of six artists commissioned by Essex County Council for this years “Journey to the Podium” programme, which pairs artists with sports people training for the Olympics. (appendix 2) As part of this commission requires the artist to mentor a young person from a partner school, having an up-to-date CRB was a vital requirement. The Arts Development team were pleased to discover that, in my case, the CRB had been issued by another Essex authority, as otherwise they would have had to make a new application – a process which costs money and takes several weeks, during which time the artist is unable to begin work.

Keeping your name in the frame From the point of view of creating a public profile for oneself as a selfemployed artist, continuing to apply for a variety of arts projects is the useful from the point of view of introducing or keeping one’s name and practice within the radar of commissioning bodies. Artist Nicola Burrell, who is an experienced and successful artist with both a public and personal practice, says that the self-employed artist looking to earn a living in this field must keep one’s hand in by engaging regularly in the application process: “You may have to apply for ten things to get one job. But its worth all those failed applications, because even with the ones you don’t get, people will see your name, and remember it next time it comes up”. And, if you persist in applying for a range of projects, those people – often Arts Development officers or Arts administrators - will consider you a serious and committed artist with an interest in public art and community engagement.

With this in mind I, as an artist, enjoy the challenge of a commission ostensibly outside of my scope and remit, one such being commissioned by Forest Heath District Council. This was a tender for an artist to create new work for the small village of Red Lodge in Suffolk. (appendix 3) I was approached by another Cuckoo Farm Studios artist, Natasha Carsberg, who proposed a collaborative application.

Despite having a solid body of work in this field, Carsberg felt the need to broaden her ideas and practice, as did I. We had worked together before, on a residency in the Auvergne in France called Chantiers des Arts: fees for this project did little but cover costs: however both of us felt that it would be worth having on our CV, and thus the investment in terms of experience and exposure more than compensated for the projects economic shortfall. The benefits of collaboration on a project in this manner are manifold: the planning, research, site visits, and preparation can all be shared, and as these are generally a very heavy time investment for a single artist this can be a considerable lessening of the burden. Also, as Carsberg astutely reasoned, “They might be more inclined to short-list a pair of artists, getting two for the price of one. And this is a big enough project to make it worthwhile sharing the fee”. The fact that this was, at this stage, a non-specific brief – neither in terms of what kind of artwork it was looking to commission, where it was to be sited, or indeed how many artworks were required – meant that this allowed for a very open interpretation of the brief: the organisation commissioning it evidently had little idea of what they wanted, other than that it should be “broadly appealing”.

Our joint application (appendix 4) did get us short-listed and to an interview; and although we were not eventually selected for the project, the committee were interested enough in our collaborative ideas to put us on their database for future projects, either in the public realm or for community based workshops. Collaboration can open up many new avenues of experience in terms of both personal development and professional practice.

Funding options Should the public arts commission not meet the artists needs in terms of professional development, or if the artist sees an opportunity for a public or community based project that they wish to take creative control of, there are many funding options available. It has to be said that many of these grants and funds do specify some kind of community or public engagement in the project, and often require the artist to match fund or raise ‘in-kind’ sponsorship. However, creating your own project naturally allows one a certain autonomy in terms of vision, aesthetic, and outcome.

Nikki Betts is a dance artist who works both as a freelance artist and as arts coordinator for others: she finds that as an individual the work involved in selling ideas to and convincing funding bodies is more difficult and complicated than as an arts organisation: “The obvious difficulties in acquiring funding as an individual means that often great ideas do not become a reality, due to funding criteria: (No individuals can apply - and the need to create working partnerships with those who can apply) This can prove difficult and sometimes the creative outcome becomes diluted or changed (not always for the good of the project)” (Betts) When managing a project for someone else she considers the main difference is in the amount of support you are given. Ideas can be shared and discussed – something which is also a benefit to artistic collaboration, as mentioned previously. Therefore, she says, “I try to work as an individual in the same way I work as part of a group. Planning and organisation need to be at the forefront of development and adopting this discipline proves to gain greater results.” This, again, echoes the experience of Downey when approaching a commission.

There are a number of grants available to individual artists, from the Elephant Trust, which offers small grants to fine artists wishing to develop their practice, to the Winston Churchill memorial trust, which allows for travel bursaries of at least four weeks overseas in a number of different fields, including the Arts, Crafts and Music. Local councils also have a number of grants available for projects that meet their criteria, and perhaps the most popular and well known source of funding for artists and small business people of all levels is the Arts For All Award, which is supported by the Arts Council England, the Big Lottery Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Sport England Council. This will fund everything from specialised equipment needs to the costs of large-scale public arts projects, but is especially geared towards “projects that promote education, the environment and health in the local community”. (Essex Works, arts funding file)

One such recipient was Michael Goodey, who devised a project entitled ‘Signs in the Landscape’. In collaboration with firstsite and Colchester borough council, he applied for a ‘Grants for the Arts’ award to cover the cost of his project, from research and development to construction and installation. In this application he was assisted by Colchester arts organisation firstsite. According to firstsite, “In reducing a specific landscape or series of views, to a set of re-arranged symbols, Goodey is creating a journey that is both literal and conceptual.” In this case, the concept made the project interesting to the cultural ideals of firstsite, and the notion of these artworks becoming part of a cycle trail – the Viewfinder Trail, taking in key tourist locations in the area - was doubtless a factor in its interest to the Arts Council. The project continues to be popular with both the public and local authorities: images of his work being used by Essex County Council’s “Summer of Art” campaign on all kinds of promotional material, from leaflets to beer mats. Goodey’s original idea and design was straightforward enough to have the kind of mass and cultural regenerative overtones that made it a perfect candidate for public arts funding. Ironically for Goodey, the original grant did little to cover his fees, and while remaining popular, the project failed to provide the artist with an adequate income. Arts council funding is also available for specific tools or material needs, not just public arts projects: at the other end of the scale, hand-weaver Jason Collingwood successfully applied for a small grant of £1’500 to purchase a loom. As his practice required a specialised, and relatively rare, type of shaftswitching loom, and weaving is a craft that is relatively under-subscribed, the grant was awarded unconditionally: that is to say, he was not required to demonstrate any public or community engagement aspect of his practice, or put up any funds in kind.

Essex County Council produces an Arts Funding file, available on request, that lists a number of funding opportunities, from small, one-off grants to individual artists to national funding schemes and charitable trusts, as well other ways to raise funding for your project, including advice on getting arts funding from private companies, in the form of donation or sponsorship. For example, Essex County Council runs a small grants scheme: this scheme is aimed at individuals, voluntary and professional organisations who want to run arts projects for the benefit of people in the County of Essex. “The scheme offers one-off project support and awards are normally between £200 and £2,500.” (Essex Works, arts funding file)

None of these grants and bursaries are available to students: however a careful knowledge of the guidelines, criterion, and anticipated outcomes of each means that one can prepare for future projects while still undergoing a course of study.

Personal applications

For the purposes of my proposed practical research, I may well look to the ‘Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures’ which seeks proposals for activities and initiatives that support intercultural dialogue in the 37 Euro-Mediterranean countries. Their programme is co-funded by the European Union and the 37 members of the EuroMediterranean Partnership, and as part of my research is looking towards exploring the history of the medical museum in Europe, and working within them - with staff and visitors – it may be a possible source of financial support following completion of my studies.

My interest, in terms of future arts projects, is to become more proactive in setting up the kind of project I wish to run and be involved in: having had several years experience of being an arts practitioner responding to a brief or tender, I would like also to develop my personal practice by setting up projects of my own devising, as sourcing funding for it accordingly. As my current research interests are tending towards the interstices of the arts and sciences, there are specialised programmes of support for projects of this kind, assuming it meets certain criterion.

There are a great many precedents for artists inspired by the aesthetics and materials of scientific display: Damien Hirst’s early immersions such as “The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living” catapulted the artist to worldwide notoriety, and his later installations such as “Pharmacy” continue to reference these themes of medicine and the Vanitas. More recently, film-maker Amanda Schiff had an exhibition of curiosity boxes in the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL: her intimate, curious works were displayed in amongst the bones and wet collections of the museums’ permanent displays.

“Broadly appealing”, to paraphrase the Red Lodge brief, might, indeed, be a way of describing the effect that the medical and natural history museum has upon the general public: one doesn’t have to have an interest in the sciences to be interested in the display of its artefacts, human or otherwise, as I discovered during the time I have spent exploring collections such as that at the Wellcome Trust in London: all manner of people come through the doors to explore Henry Wellcome’s medical and ethnographic collections. In the Grant Museum, children and their parents jostled with students to inspect the displays, and in the Musée Dupuytren in Paris, visitors that I spoke to were from a cross-section of the public: medical students from the teaching hospital in which the museum was situated, artists and art students, and small groups of the curious with no medical or artistic affiliations at all, only human interest and curiosity.

Conclusion It has often been the case for the self-employed artist that the community project, teaching, workshops and public arts are only one side of the creative coin: on the other side is the autonomous artist, who needs the means to fund his or her studio practice. The one intersects, develops and feeds into the other, so they are not completely separate: nevertheless, they have a different end goal and context. In my personal life, these two practices have been divergent: the type of work I made in order to earn a living was visually and philosophically very different from the work I would make in my studio. However, as I develop and mature as an artist, I find that these two strands of my work increasingly intersect - resulting in both a richer personal practice, and a more creatively interesting approach to the public art project. Recently, my public artwork has had more emphasis on the forms and aesthetics of my studio practice, as evidenced in the work I made for Colchester’s ‘Creative Conveniences’ project, and the upcoming George Yard Memory Box. (appendix 5)

In their 2007 paper on cultural value, Bohm and Land consider that: “…if an artist reaches a mass audience or enters into standardised, industrialised production, then his or her status as an artist becomes questionable”. This then is the dichotomy of the working artist: to maintain one’s credibility, but have difficulty in earning a living, or to enter into a partnership with the forces of economy, and be perceived to have ‘sold out’. However, with the rise in appreciation of the arts as both a tool for regeneration and for giving a cultural ‘cachet’ to an otherwise mundane project such as a public 18 building works, it is sometime possible for the artist to intersect their own practice with the needs of the public without compromising their integrity, and the benefits of working within a social context is that there is a clear opportunity for one’s project to leave a legacy. One should never underestimate the effect that your work may have on the people who interact with it, nor fear the intersection of one’s practice with the needs of both earning a living and fulfilling one’s vision with integrity.

So where do I, as a self-employed artist, now consider myself in terms of the arts project? As it stands, I find myself at the crossroads of the two extremes of arts project management: between the applications for tendered art projects, and project proposals to further my own visual research. As a student I may not be able to apply for funding for my personal projects: however, as a self-employed public artist I can work with various bodies such as local government or organisations like Creative Partnerships to enable arts projects in schools or communities, and use these opportunities to develop – and fund – my personal practice. “…culture and the arts are, after all, fairly autonomous zones that will always exist in an ambiguous relationship to society and capital” (Bohm and Land 2007) Maintaining the balance of this ambiguous relationship is the challenge – and reward – of the self-employed artist today.

Lisa Temple-Cox 2010 MA Arts in a Social Context Arts Project Management: References and bibliography: • • • • • • • • • • • Barringer, Bruce R. Preparing effective business plans: an entrepreneurial approach. Pearson education inc. (2009). Barrow, C., Barrow, P. and Brown, R. The Business Plan Workbook Kogan Page. 5th edition (2005) Bohm, S. and Land, C. No accounting for culture? Value in the New Economy University of Essex (2008) Creative Partnerships infobook What is Creative Partnerships CCE pdf Cycling Discovery Map No.21: the viewfinder trail. DCMS Culture at the heart of Regeneration (2004) Essex Works Arts Funding File Essex County Council Florida, Richard Bohemia and Economic Geography from Journal of Economic Geography 2 (2002) Holden, John Publicly-funded culture and the Creative Industries Arts Council England (2007) Smith, Mark J. Culture: reinventing the social sciences. Open University press (2000) Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: an introduction. Routledge, 2nd edition, (1996).

Interviews/in conversation: • • • • Natasha Carsberg: landscape artist, sculptor Nicola Burrell: artist, sculptor Nikki Betts: dance artists, arts project manager for Optua Steve Downey: artist, arts administrator

Webpages: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/02/pandoras-box-curiosityand-dangerous.html www.a-n.co.uk/air www.a-n.co.uk/jobs_and_opps www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts www.artsjobs.org.uk www.creative-partnerships.com www.creativitycultureeducation.org www.creativityforlife.co.uk/Steve Downey.html www.elephanttrust.org.uk www.essex.academia.edu/ChristopherLand/Papers/106795/NoAccounting-for-Culture--Value-in-the-New-Economy www.firstsite.uk.net/page/3097/Michael+Goodey www.miller-mccune.com/carousel/for-contemporary-art-context-iscounterproductive-9220/ www.visiteastofengland.com www.wcmt.org.uk www.wellcomecollection.org

List of images: Cover: Page: 1 2 4 5 6 7 9 ‘Creative Conveniences, Mens’, (in situ ) Lisa Temple-Cox ‘Creative Conveniences, Mens’, (details) Lisa Temple-Cox ’Signs in the Landscape’, (detail) Michael Goodey Wickford Library mural project, Lisa Temple-Cox Creative partnerships/ Tyrrells School, Lisa Temple-Cox Enrichment week, Colchester Institute, Lisa Temple-Cox Steve Downey (various) ‘Crack:under pressure’, Lisa Temple-Cox / Mary Wiendling

10 Nicola Burrell (various) 11 Natasha Carsberg (various) 12 ‘Share 2010’, Nikki Betts (project organiser) 13 ’Signs in the Landscape’, Michael Goodey 14 Jason Collingwood 15 ‘Immersions and moulages’, (maquettes), Lisa Temple-Cox 16 top: ‘The physical Impossibility of death...’ Damien Hirst centre: Amanda Schriff (various) from ‘Pandora’s Box’ 17 Lisa Temple-Cox, private commissions 18 Lisa Temple-Cox, ‘Immersion 1’ (detail)

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