With Mobile Networked Creativity, Adriana de Souza e Silva wants to reframe the conversation around what –– and who –– is considered creative.
What does it mean to be creative? It’s a question with about as many answers as there are people on Earth, but Adriana de Souza e Silva wants to offer an alternative.
With a new project called Mobile Networked Creativity, de Souza e Silva, a communication studies professor and director of the Center for Transformative Media at Northeastern University, aims to redefine not only what creativity is but who society defines as creative.
Creativity has long been seen as a luxury for developed countries in the global north, something you need the time and resources to commit to, she says. Mobile Networked Creativity sets the record straight.
“What we found out is that the history of creativity is a privileged [thing] … and the rest of the world was excluded from that,” de Souza e Silva says. “What we are looking at is that there are a lot of people who live in situations of hardship who never got training, who don’t have the proper resources, but they were creative regardless. The problem is that these practices were not recognized as creative.”
The ever-expanding project is a collection of stories that often get left out of the conversation around creativity. For the people in these stories, creativity is not a luxury but a necessity. Most of these stories come from the global south and less developed areas of the world: Africa, South America and parts of Asia. They all focus on the ways people are using mobile and networked technologies to tackle the most pressing problems for themselves and their communities.
De Souza e Silva and her researchers have created a mosaic, a testament to all the different ways creativity can manifest.
Safwan Harb, a disabled Jordanian refugee, created a wheelchair bike made from spare parts he found in a refugee camp. Nzolantima Swasisa, a Congolese inventor, constructed a digital library built on his innovative Lokole, which functions as a high-powered hotspot, harnessing free satellite signals to provide web and email access.
One of the stories de Souza e Silva loves to highlight is from her home country of Brazil.
The neighborhood of Queimados, a suburb of Rio De Janeiro, has become a center of violent crime after the World Cup and Olympic Games, which led the government to build tons of new infrastructure while displacing entire neighborhoods to a community that was already struggling. In Queimados, there are very few jobs and transportation options that would give people the mobility to seek employment elsewhere.
Enter Carlos Leandro de Oliveira. Calling himself “Carlos Green Bike,” de Oliveira learned how to build bikes, which are extremely expensive in Brazil, out of refurbished parts and bamboo in an effort to benefit his community. Through his startup Pedala Queimados, which often employs children who would otherwise be tempted to work for local drug dealers, he finds and repurposes abandoned bikes from wealthy areas of Rio de Janeiro and then lets people use them via WhatsApp-based rental service.
Pedala Queimados is an innovative solution to employment, transportation and social mobility related issues in the community, but it’s an approach that de Souza e Silva says is often dismissed. Ideas like these are dismissed as “subversion” or “reappropriation” of existing technologies, which are synonyms for “creativity” laced with inherent ideas about who that word applies to, she says.
“We’re looking at how these various situations of hardships that they face actually help them with finding out creative practices and new ways of building an understanding of technology,” she explains. “This has been happening forever, but we are trying to change how people look at these practices.”
Laced through all these stories is an attempt to expand and refocus the lens around creative practices. De Souza e Silva and her team emphasize that creativity is not just about the lone wolf artist who locks themselves away until a bolt of inspiration hits them.
“It’s this process that works in collaboration with people in the communities and the place where they are and their relationship with the technology,” de Souza e Silva says. “It’s not just about having a design goal of creating something, but it’s a process that sometimes is very unpredictable.”
She hopes that thinking about creativity in that way “totally changes the way that technology is designed” and leads to a shift away from the approach that most companies use: develop technology, sell it and then see how people use or don’t use it. Instead, de Souze e Silva wants this project to show the value of looking for inspiration on the ground floor instead of the C-suite.
“The idea is that instead of having a top-down approach, let’s actually look into what these communities are already doing from the ground up and learn from them,” de Souza e Silva says.