Coming to your Senses

Creativity Challenge 2015 - Coming to your Senses 

This year in April the TLC Educational Trust hosted a Creativity Challenge. The theme of the conference was 'Crossing Boundaries'. It attracted a wealth of national and international speakers - the movers and shakers of creativity. Each speaker generously shared their own unique insights and perspectives. We recorded these talks so that we could share them with our students, friends, stakeholders and anyone else interested in the subject of creativity. 

Jonathan Milne is managing director, founder of The Learning Connexion (TLC) and host of this years Creativity Conference. He offers this statement about the conference:

Creativity happens on the edge. 

That’s where boundaries meet and change has to happen. Aotearoa New Zealand is on the edge. Heaving tectonic plates produce mountains, earthquakes and volcanoes that push us into new ways of thinking.

Our conference venue is on the edge. Most of the workshops are based at Taita College, an extraordinary multicultural school in a low decile area. Next door, across a fallen fence, is The Learning Connexion, the only tertiary education in New Zealand totally dedicated to creativity.
TLC’s campus used to be part of the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. It’s a fitting home for a school that works with art as a medium to connect creativity across boundaries. Science, arts, technology, business and education are pushing like tectonic plates to shape a new human landscape. How should we respond?

My own list of questions includes:

• How can we reconcile people and the new machine age?
• How can we create a higher level of equity and better opportunities for everyone?
• How can we reconnect disciplines that have become separated?
• How can creativity help us to reconnect with our individual and collective potential?

We hope this conference will be the beginning of a positive seismic shift.
We want to establish creativity, with its potential to create a portfolio of higher learning and innovative thinking, in a leading role. Ultimately all individual disciplines would connect within this framework. 

This is what we mean by the proposition that creativity crosses boundaries.

Coming to your Senses from The Learning Connexion on Vimeo.

About Jonathan Milne: 
Jonathan Milne is managing director and founder of The Learning Connexion (TLC), New Zealand’s only tertiary school fully dedicated to teaching creativity. He believes that the creative process is transferable from one field, such as art, to another, such as science. 

He has always wanted to de-mystify creativity and his book, “GO! The Art of Change” reveals many of the core practices that make creativity accessible to anyone. 

Jonathan is a renaissance-style generalist with skills that start with art and extend into many fields. He is a writer, artist, photographer, educator, businessman, philosopher, philanthropist and cartoonist who is also intensely interested in science, mathematics and social change.

About the talk:
‘Experience is not the best teacher, it’s the only teacher.’ (Bev Bos, educator)

The digital age brings excitements that fudge the truth. We humans are amazing technology in our own right. We can’t do arithmetic as quickly as computers but we do lots of other things that make machines look dumb. Human experience is so subtle that scientists are light-years from duplicating it. The big question isn’t to explain how or why humans can do amazing things. It’s far more important to discover how to nurture creativity through experiences that switch on our creative lights.

If we get it right, humanity has a future.

About the Creativity Challenge Talks:
We will upload one Creativity Challenge video each week.

Watch them on our Vimeo channel here.

What did you think Jonathan's talk? Let us know by leaving a comment!