Ideas Festival

The Ideas Festival is a public event to present ideas, promote public debate, and foster innovation. The 2009 festival focused on five streams:

  • Invention and innovation
  • Development and design
  • Ecology and ethics
  • Action and advocacy
  • Self and society

Cathryn Lloyd ran a public event which attracted over 50 people. The theme of the session - Creative Collaborations - Ideas that Matter was to offer a creative space and process for participants to discover, develop, express, and present the ideas that really mattered to them.

While there was a loose framework for this session it was mainly self-organising allowing for the creativity and ideas of the group to emerge. Participants were encouraged to work collaboratively and find unique ways and solutions to express and present their ideas to others participating in the session.

Participants selected the theme that mattered most and went about exploring that with a group of strangers. This included creative conversations, artful ways of expressing those ideas and finally participants were asked to act on what mattered to them within one week of the festival.

Cathryn says "I was humbled by the creativity, enthusiasm, and humanity I witnessed at the workshop. It revealed what the combined thinking power of a group can actually achieve when people commit and collaborate. It emphasises the need for humans to discover fertile and dynamic ways to create healthy, productive relationships that enable the of doing great things. The experience leads me to acknowledge Buzz Aldrin's words "humankind must explore or expire".

                  

Participants' comments:

"Cathryn did a remarkable job in creating an ‘unstructured space' to empower a group of ‘strangers' to collaborate and flesh out the themes of the festival. The results of this workshop were just a little remarkable in the context." Daniel

"Thank you for a fantastic session. I think everybody was surprised at how it was to talk to each other, considering we were strangers...and a lot of us were from different backgrounds, ages etc. I learnt a lot from the experience and think your concept of arts-based learning is a fantastic one, a good way to break the boundaries of logical thinking that we endure." Leanne