Graphic: Recommendations for Co-Creation

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Throughout the interviews, discussions, and gatherings we held for this project, we heard that co-creation calls for profound attention to the process. The media industry has commodified the construction and telling of stories, so the prevailing standards of funding, researching, evaluating, and producing leave little room for process-oriented work. The current pipelines of production demand highly specialized, often extractive processes that are defined by deliverables and outcomes.

In this report, we have attempted to name and illustrate processes that are all too often invisible or implicit. The next step is to gather concrete and detailed procedures and make them available to communities, festivals, organizations, funding bodies, and colleagues in other fields. Some of this work may be appropriate in partnership with the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab, and some tasks may best be conducted elsewhere.

Key Recommendations: Support the Process

Overwhelmingly, our research found that the key to co-creation involves supporting and investing in process, not only in deliverables and products. This recommendation extends across individual projects, community initiatives, institutional support, and argues for systemic changes in the way that media is produced and connected to social movements.

Recommendations for Co-Creation: Share report, incubate projects, structural change, build/share curricula, strengthen networks, and develop research.

1. Research

Many stakeholders should conduct more research in order to map and understand the operations of co-creation in the context of our dominant culture, one predisposed to individual ownership, accumulation, and appropriation. We need to understand the implications of co-creation in a society of systemic inequity and in an era of fast-changing biological and technological developments. We need to continue to learn from historical and current human practices by studying and understanding: business/organizational models; co-creation in diverse communities; co-creation beyond the U.S. and Canada; ownership and intellectual-property models; art collectives; co-operative economic models; transdisciplinarity models and matchmaking; art and AI; deepfake and synthetic media, and new non-hierarchical forms of convening.

2. A Library of Toolkits and Curricula

Many stakeholders need to create resources for teaching, sharing, and learning co-creative models. This involves co-creative strategic planning that will create networks and hubs to document, organize, and create an accessible library of existing toolkits (contracts, worksheets, community agreement forms), best practices, and document and share failures through modular curricula. These networks and hubs should include media-makers, community groups, non-profits, private companies, public institutions, media institutions, and universities. These resources should be intended for professional development as well.

3. Structural Changes at Institutions

More research and prototyping within institutions, both public and private, must be undertaken. This will develop pathways for co-creative practices internally and methods to reach communities that already co-create. These processes must be ethical, just, transparent, and equitable.

4. Spaces for Incubation and Production

More sustainable programs, fellowships, workshops, streams, and incubators should be developed to facilitate co-creative projects that honor the processes, multiple partnerships, and timeframes involved. The governance of these spaces and the projects need to be interrogated. These sites need to provide adequate resources, mentors, cross-disciplinary supports, and witnesses. Further, intentional healing and trauma-informed practices should be implemented.

5. Networks for Distribution

Spaces and networks for distributing co-creative projects need to be supported, including community centers, libraries, alternative spaces, schools, festivals, universities, and among allied funders engaged in projects.

Conclusion

Together, we share a vast history of co-creation. From early rock art to the development of our sacred texts, to the politicized twentieth-century newsreel collectives, to the latest experiments in immersive technologies fueled by AI, co-creation is remarkably commonplace. But it is also remarkably invisible. Before it is co-opted by digital empires, and marketers, we have a chance to define it, claim it, and ground it to principles of equity, justice and authentic collective models of ownership.

Performance in the village at 47 km, by Zhang Menqi. Photo courtesy of The Folk Memory Project.

Media co-creation allows for new, better questions, and for paths in which there are not always singular answers. Co-creation can enrich daily practice. It demands self-reflection and forges harmonious, equitable relationships between partners, within and across communities, beyond disciplines, and working with non-human systems, many of which we do not yet fully understand.

Throughout the making of this study, primarily through listening, we have been humbled and inspired by the phenomenal stories of co-creation, and by the openness of all stakeholders to learn from each other and to engage in courageous questioning. The conversations have been nuanced, messy, difficult, exciting, and above all, overflowing. Co-creation carries with it profound respect for each person’s unique expertise, and also the knowledge that we must share both the burden and the liberation of determining our future collectively. There is an urgency to the challenges we face at this moment in history, and no one person, organization, or discipline can determine all the answers alone.

Making can divide, alienate, and exploit — or it has the potential to be inclusive, equitable, and respectful. The latter conditions are far more conducive to the collective efforts it will take to address the immense challenges of structural inequality, exponential population growth, the Anthropocene, and the ever-diminishing resources that follow in their wake. In reaching beyond the mere sum of our collective intelligence, we stand a chance at finding our collective wisdom. Co-creation offers hope.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

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The Co-Creation Studio researches and incubates alternatives to a singular authorial vision in nonfiction media.