
For the past five years, Brian Condon has run the groundbreaking Centre for Creative Collaboration; now that the project has ended, he reflects on how much of its success was due to the space itself
Hi Brian >
< Hi Neil
December 2014 marked the closure of a space in which you invested considerable time, energy and emotion, which also inspired my journey from mere corporate employee to socially motivated blogger – the Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC).
As an incubation space, it preceded Silicon Roundabout and the plethora of co-working environments, and spawned amazing business ventures such as Pavegen. But what always fascinated me was its energy. As a workspace, there was nothing pretty or “designed” about it, but it positively frizzled.
It challenged me to consider that the energy in a space had nothing at all to do with design. Yet as we have discussed, its secret was its curation. Can you share more about this?
We met 25 universities across London at multiple levels, surveyed 1,000 businesses across south-east England, visited all the innovation/enterprise hubs we could find in London, and looked at exemplar projects in Toronto, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
The idea of active independent management – it was only described as “curation” later – was integral to the project.
There will be many reading this who are engaged in the process of designing space they believe will foster innovation, but is it the case that the more intrusive and enriched the design, the more it interferes with the creative mind?
At C4CC, the space was awash with natural light, and furnished with whatever was available at the time, but otherwise it was merely a canvas.
We were lucky in that the building had already been used as a design studio (by Thomas Heatherwick), so it was an interesting and challenging environment. We had no money for furnishing, so we had a big mixture of ‘stuff’.
At the beginning, we had a big empty space – and lots of demand for people to work in the environment we were creating – and so it had to be animated by the people and projects that were in it!
It became a process of carefully judged “interventions” in what was happening in the space and what the people and projects were doing. We were constantly “in beta”. Curation must add value; it must be done by people who are open, experienced, generous and pragmatic.
It’s not FM (though there are elements of that) and it must not be a top-down directive process. Curation must be about the work, about helping creative people achieve their best work, and, sometimes helping them to fail – but to fail “non-corrosively”.