Research from the University of Sussex shows that creative practices, including art, design, games and performance support positive eco-change. The CreaTures Framework developed from the research sets out how creative practices can stimulate action towards eco-socially sustainable futures.

Believing in the transformative potential of creative practices, Prof Ann Light, Professor of Design & Creative Technology at the University of Sussex, developed a research project to investigate how art, design, and related cultural fields, contribute to transitions in values and priorities and ultimately drive change.

Through the research, Prof Light and her team discovered that people engaging in creative practice began to understand the world differently as a consequence of their engagement. This process of stimulating transformative thinking and action is fundamental to the kind of shifts in culture that are needed.

While understanding the impacts of climate change from a scientific perspective is important, researchers argue that creative practice in art and design have a critical role to play as it enables people to experience a different future.

The CreaTures Framework emerged as one of the main outcomes of the research and it sets out how practitioners can understand and use creative practice to bring about these eco-social futures.

Prof Light explains:

“Only telling people they must reduce consumption may fall on hostile ears, reduce creative options and send some people into fatalism.

“Our approach of imagining new possibilities for life inspires new relations with the world and creatures around us and works with a totally different part of human motivation – more akin to flourishing. It is more hopeful in the face of crisis, as it offers paths for finding new values together.

“We want to put culture on the map for its transformative potential. The arts and humanities are often considered to be completely irrelevant when it comes to sustainability, but we have shown the power of experience.”

The research included working with artists to develop experimental scenarios. One example of this is ‘The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025’, an immersive experience whereby participants explored what it would be like if other species such as trees, beetles and squirrels, were to rise up and demand equal rights with humans. It was designed to explore new means of building empathy and promote the biodiversity of the area.

The research team found that two types of learning emerged; firstly, people’s experience of engagement and the chance to meet others involved in the same playful but purposeful activities supported a desire for positive action, a commitment to making it and a will to challenge the slow pace of change at national and international levels.

Secondly, the team learnt that the potential of the arts to support change was invisible, even to those funding arts and community design activities, who tend only to ask how organisations are saving carbon rather than how they are helping others move to more sustainable lifestyles and values.

The CreaTures framework provides a system of evaluation, which allows those creating something experiential to analyse audiences’ responses and ask, did it affect them emotionally, did it teach them anything and did it subvert their expectations.

There are four pathways to the framework as it is relevant to different groups including, people implementing creative practice, people seeking or judging the eligibility for funding of creative practices, people doing the research and people making policy.