Estamos muy contentos de anunciar que participaremos en el congreso «Creative Citizens», que tendrá lugar el próximo 17-18 de septiembre en Royal College of Art, Londres. El congreso es la parte final de un proyecto de objetivos y características similares al nuestro. El abstract que ha sido aceptado refleja el resumen de las conclusiones sobre el proyecto en las que estamos trabajando actualmente.
Abstract:
The present paper aims to present the preliminary results of the three-year research project[1] Creative practices and participation in new media, which addresses the different ways of understanding creativity, participation and cultural production in digital media. This is captured by notion of “co-creation”, understood as a collective way of creation in which industries and users are contributing meaningfully (Banks and Potts, 2010; Bauwens, 2009; San Cornelio and Gómez Cruz, 2014) but also articulated by the relationships between productive “practices” (Schatzki, 1996) and “participatory logics” (Jenkins, 2004) within the creative and cultural industries. In this context, the objectives are to describe material and discursive practices taking place in co-creative processes, to compare different forms of participation in these processes, and to find out the different models of this relationship related to the tensions and ways to conciliate opposite participatory logics (e.g common good vs. profit and market motivations).
The research is organized through six case studies –mainly based in the Spanish context- following a qualitative methodological approach (including ethnography, participant observation, and discourse analysis). The selected cases cover a wide range of co-creation models and participatory logics: from processes directly inspired in the open source, free-culture movement, to processes linked to innovation goals of private companies. These are: a) innovation programs that incorporate artists in industries; b) the role of creative consumers (modders) in the videogame industries; c) digital photography communities and the production of expertise; d) the incorporation of the user in the design of interactive artefacts (co-design); and e) the engagement of audiences in audiovisual collaborative projects (crowdsourcing and crowdfunding).
After a two-year period of developing the case studies independently, a series of seminars were conducted in order to discuss and compare all the cases, taking in consideration some analytical axis that included: motivations and rewards, rules (implicit or explicit), tensions and conflicts, levels of engagement (and types), acknowledgment, innovative aspects and legal aspects, amongst others. At this moment, we are analyzing this material, and some different levels of results can be identified: regarding the discourses some of the main conclusions are that despite being different articulations of participation, all projects have similarities in the discourses emerging from the participants regarding the creative processes, the notion of expertise, commitment with the quality and an understanding of participation in terms of value and affect. In a more general level, some of the cases are connected to reflections on the future of cultural models, suggesting a change, that includes new social economies and alternative market models that will co-exist with the current ones.