Everybody knows that innovation and creativity depend on context – what’s old to you may be new to me. Entire musical careers have been built on this. For the technologists in Happenstance, ‘ripping off some old stuff’ might represent innovation in the context of an arts organisation. The creative idea in this process may be about connecting together an old technology with a new problem or reframing two disconnected ideas (bisociation) or simply reviving an old idea by connecting it to a new capability. The idea of putting ‘Site’ on the roof of Site Gallery (and making it visible to Google Earth – hello world!) was something that had been talked about before but now the organisation might be capable of doing it. Technologists seem to be resourceful in this way – recycling old technologies, bits of kit. They don’t abandon ideas that don’t work, they archive them – even the unused offcuts from a successful project might be squirreled away. Ideas that don’t work now might work later. By contrast, arts organisations seem more project focused – they don’t have the institutional memory (or at least the memory doesn’t exist outside the head of one person). Our technologists are coming up with ideas and projects – but perhaps they can also change the way arts organisations capture and retain ideas of their own. One practical example has been the use of Trello – a free online project management tool introduced by James and Leila for Happenstance at Site, and now being used by Laura and Judith for managing projects in the gallery. Trello is a virtual noticeboard where tasks are sorted and prioritised – it captures some of the principles of ‘agile’ working, notably the use of an open ‘scrum board’ for tracking progress of complex projects. This allows members of a team to park an idea and come back to it, and allows an organisation to retrieve and share ideas which don’t necessarily fit with the needs of the moment or the individual.
