ideas to be discussed / rejected / amended / replaced

Learning in Creative Quartets

(see Creative University Futures, languaging co-creation, genius and other keywords)

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These notes were compiled for a meeting with Dilys Williams and Paul Halliday at the RFH on 20th May 2026
(see notes made at the meeting)

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A Possible Pitch

1. Funding for a series of pilot workshops for 0-29 <?> year olds
2. (not yet agreed) - to be 1) co-sponsored by and 2) held at the October Gallery (Central London)
3. (not yet agreed) - to be conducted in collaboration with the London Interdisciplinary School
4. Providing learning experiences that take place within neurodiverse, transdisciplinary teams.
5. They would be invited to seek new opportunities that would offer likely benefits for themselves, their communities and others.

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Possible Pilot Funding

1. Hugo Burge Foundation (est. 2022) is a charity supporting creativity in all its forms across the UK.
2. See Hugo Burge Foundation Grants (max £15K)
3. Application window - June 1st - July 31st 2026
   • They award grants, prizes, residencies and studio spaces to artists and craftspeople
   • They provide funding to arts organisations and community groups
   • They work closely with educational institutions and charities to improve access to creative learning.
   • They also fund major public art projects, with the goal of permanently enriching Britain’s cultural landscape.
4. Selection Criteria (vague) i.e. 'Open & flexible' - an assumption that applicants are field experts. (further details to be updated).
   • Quality of work
   • Impact – individual, community or stakeholders
   • Does the funding provide an opportunity that wouldn’t otherwise happen?
   • Panellists will interpret these phrases as they choose (welcoming a diversity of opinion and assessment).
   • Panellists will be asked to assess these qualities based on 1) answers to the questions on the application 2) applicant’s submitted materials. At times, panellists might conduct their own research.

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The CONTEXT of Co-creativity

some relevant keywords

1. Creative innovation brings unforeseen opportunities on many levels and for many stakeholders.
2. Whether governments understand the social importance of creativity within education is doubtful.
3. Educational institutions seem not to know how to cultivate and harness creativity effectively.
4. Creativity often seen as an individual talent, rather than a learnable attribute of cooperative groups.

Head-focused learning.

1. Mainstream universities currently value ways of knowing that cultivate critical, analytical and evidence-based modes of reasoning that can be evaluated via written texts.
2. These practices derive from ancient monastic institutions whose respect for books shaped the way we understand learning and knowing.

Hand-focused learning:

1. Art Schools and apprentice schemes still tend to be seen as less prestigious than the above systems.
2. They derive more from the mediaeval crafts guilds and offer a more hands-on and less cerebral understanding of 'knowing'.
3. The hegemony of literacy and science has biased the way we understand and foster creativity.
4. Whereas classical science sought replicable 'laws' and dependable algorithms, artists more often seek uniqueness and exception.

The Myth of Genius

1. Recent research suggests that creativity is common to all humans, rather than specific to particular local cultures.
2. E.g. Recent findings show cave paintings to be older and more common than previously thought (Prayogi et al. 2026).
3. And anthropologists have long seen cave painting as a precursor to religion and science.
4. By contrast, genius is a characteristically 'western' concept that evolved over a few thousand years.
5. The myth of genius implies that creative innovation is the hallmark of rare and exceptional talent.
6. This idea can become toxic when society confers power and celebrity onto egotistical individuals.
7. We know that creative thinking is, in essence, combinatorial (e.g. Koestler, 1963) (see bisociation).
8. If acts of creation are always co-located, 'co-creative acts' might equally well derive from different regions of one brain, or from different individuals within a group.
9. And however flexible they are, individuals are likely to be less innovative than highly diverse teams.
10. Although recent brain research has made us respect neurodiversity more, it has yet to impact on education systems.

Managing Whole Systems

1. We are less competent at managing multiplicity than focusing on individual items.
2. After all, humans have been digging 'stuff' out of the ground for over 3 million years.
3. The last ten thousand years of industrialisation gave us alphabetic writing and accountancy.
4. These methods of reasoning encouraged us to quantify value, rather than experience quality.
5. The design of money created the illusion that we can 'sum up' value. 
6. But synergies never 'add up' because they often deliver more 'out' than what we put 'in'.

Enterprise as 'Designing by Re-combining'

1. However, abundance can only be created by combining different things appropriately. 
   • (i.e. single assets, materials or entities rarely have practical value in isolation.)

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Creative Duets

1. A collaborative partnership of 2 players (creating 1 relationship)
2. Mathematically (simplistically) this relationship might be synergistic.
3. The word 'enterprise' (literally, 'taking from between') implies the presence of a third player.
4. A collaboration designed to find new values, ideas and opportunities.
   • e.g. it may comprise 2 peer workers, a learner and a mentor, a problem holder and a solution-finder.

Creative Trios

1. A collaborative partnership of 3 players (creating 3 relationships that might be synergistic).

Creative Quartets

(see Creative Quartets)

1. A collaborative partnership of 4 players (creating 6 relationships)
2. 4 is auspicious because it is the lowest number in which the sum of its relations is bigger than itself.

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Synergies of Synergies

1. Professor Daisy Fancourt - Art & Health Care
2. Professor Iain McGilchrist - the 2 hemispheres
3. Bim Malcomson
4. Caroline Lucas - essential political synergies (green and red)
5. Dr Ash Brockwell
6. Dave Cotterill - faith, hope and charity
7. Professor Dilys Williams - the look and feel of natural fibres
8. Dr Francesco Mazzarella - fashioning kindness
9. Luke Coutinho - (Indian) food preparation synergies
10. Paul Taylor / Dr Stuart Cowan / - Fuller’s unfinished work
11. Professor Marcus Du Sautoy - the Incompleteness theorem

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Creative quartets

(see 'context' and exo-synergy'). Most acts of creation and co-creation are defined, shaped and judged within their context. This includes an assumed purpose and other elements within the larger situation. Although, the precise purpose and client may initially be unknown or ambiguous, it can be useful to try to map them out in a way that reveals possible unforeseen relationships, their affordances and opportunities. Figure 2 maps a tetrahedral set of relations from the perspective of a co-creator.

Fig. 2 - A Creative Quartet

As explained (see 'exo-synergy') the four-fold (i.e. tetrahedral) format is auspicious for reasons that are both cognitive and mathematical. Figure 3 is a diagram that loosely interprets John Ruskin's (1819–1900) writings about the multiple benefits of the craft culture. Unlike figure 2 it presents it as an overview, rather than from the standpoint of one of the agents. It happens to illustrate the fact that four agents have six potential relations that may each be valued somewhere between synergistic or dysergistic. In this case, all can be seen to be exo-synergistic.

Fig. 3 - the craft economy mapped as a four-fold framework

19). Entredonneur

(See 'exo-synergy', 'co-optimism'). Richard Cantillon created the term 'entrepreneurship' around 1730. Etymologically speaking it suggests 'taking from between'. Disappointingly, Cantillon described it merely as a risk-taking activity. The economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) later characterised it more in terms of planning. i.e. "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediary between capital and labour". It is remarkable that the concept of taking has come to seem normal, within the current economic order. Today we sometimes associate with business that is exploitative or predatory. In reality, it is hard to find any enterprise that is exclusively selfish, or exclusively altruistic, hence a reason to introduce the idea of ‘entredonneurship (‘giving from between’) as a companion term for ‘entrepreneurship’.

20). Emulsifier

(See 'catalyst', 'co-pessimism'). It's almost impossible to keep oil and water mixed together without an emulsifier to bind them. While a diversity of opinions can be potentially productive (see 'bisociation) in a team, they can sometimes lead to vehement disagreement or mutual avoidance. A human 'emulsifier' is likely to be someone emotionally literate enough to facilitate creative collaboration between the parties concerned.

21). Endodysergy

(See 'exodysergy', 'exosynergy', ‘endosynergy’). In orthodox macro-economic theory it is customary to disregard the unwanted side effects of trading by dismissing (i.e. 'discounting') them as ‘externalities’. The same kind of myopia appears to pertain to the original Greek word 'synergos' (συνεργός) which, literally, meant ‘working together. This contrasts with Aristotle's description: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts”, which implies that synergy is a potential source of abundance. In order to clarify this contradiction I have replaced the term ‘synergy’ with two new ones: (i.e. ‘endosynergy’ and 'exosynergy') in order to differentiate between the two notions.

Fig. 4 - Relevating hidden aspects of synergy

Normal dictionaries and the established usage show the term 'dysergy' as the opposite of 'synergy' (i.e. bad effects deriving from the combination of things). Hypothetically, therefore, 'endodysergy' refers to situations in which the bad effects are contained within the place of combination.

22). Exodysergy

(see 'endodysergy', 'exosynergy'). Whereas 'endodysergy' refers to a dysergy in which the bad effects are confined to the local space of combination, 'exodysergies' also exert a bad influence on external agents or factors.

23). Endosynergy

(See ‘exosynergy’). This applies to synergies that are 'discreet' - i.e. they create benefits that are local to the place of combination but little or none to other agents in the vicinity.

24). Exo-synergy

(See ‘co-optimism',‘endosynergy’). We usually focus on the complementarity of parts that create synergy. But some potential synergies are also structurally dependent on the number of agents (e.g. participants) working together within a cluster. In 1751, Euler noticed a pattern of abundance in polygons. His Law states that:

V + F = E + 2
where:

• V represents the number of vertices
• F represents the number of faces
• E represents the number of edges

Fig. 5 - Different types of polygon

We can apply this mapping method (polygons) to team participants and the relationships between them (i.e. nodes represent participants and the interconnecting lines represent their relationships).

Fig. 6 - a quartet has 6 x more potential synergies than a duet

The number of relationships relative to participants, demonstrates how exo-synergies produce outputs exceeding 100% of input.
For example:

• In a team of 8, each team member is responsible for 25% of all relations
• In a team of 4, each team member is responsible for 50% of all relations
• In a team of 3, each team member is responsible for 66.6% of all relations
• In a team of 2, each team member is responsible for 100% of all relations

(see 'co-optimism').

Genius

(see 'bisociation'). The apocryphal story of Archimedes and his 'eureka moment’ depicts invention as a moment of individual epiphany. The myth of singularity (i.e. a 'silver bullet' solution emanating from a lone inventor) probably inspired the popular idea of genius that reached a high point in the Enlightenment and thrives in today's era of celebrity and ego. By attributing new ideas to (usually male) individuals it tends to devalue the role of other co-creators. In a 1784 essay Kant laments mankind’s failure to use reason, intellect and wisdom ‘without the guidance of another’. Nietzsche (1844-1900) even saw it as a demiurgic ‘will to power’ (‘Der Übermensch’, 1883). It therefore led to a form of exceptionalism in which certain unique, self-styled individuals were excused from adapting to the ‘normal’ world of the everyday (e.g. Schopenhauer (1788-1860). In short, the role of ego in promoting the idea of 'genius' is an impediment to co-creation.

27>30). Head/Hand/Heart/Humour

(see 'body-mind dualism', 'exo-synergy', 'search' and 'research'). There are several reasons why art schools (in the UK, at least), were always a dubious addition to mainstream universities. First, they evolved from the mediaeval Crafts Guilds rather than from the monastic traditions of discursive inquiry. Subjects such as fine art, design and craft therefore continue to foreground tacit aspects of knowing, rather than those of reading and writing. Perhaps the growing appreciation of neurodiversities will lead to an education system that is deliberately heterogeneous and co-creative. Currently, academia straddles a fault-line separating two approaches to co-creation. Whereas mainstream education's concern with 'critical thinking' reflects the cloistered scholastism of the ancient monasteries, art schools emerged from the more 'hands-on' methods of the mediaeval Crafts Guilds. It would be good to unify these, and other, approaches within a more comprehensive and transdisciplinary education system. By Fig. 7 implies that we need a more coordinated understanding of the sites of learning and knowing.

Fig. 7 - 4 sites of human learning and knowledge---

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