Cultivating Creativity | Catalyzing a global movement enabling everyone to unlock and unleash their individual and collective creativity
The Challenge
The accelerating crises, disruptions, and disconnections in today’s society—nationally and globally—highlight the urgency for all of us to become more inventive, empathetic, and creative in everything we do.
The ability to think and act creatively is the most powerful antidote to depression, disillusionment, distancing, and destruction; research shows that participation in creative arts learning, problem-solving, and empathy result in wellbeing. How might fostering lifelong creativity help society envision, explore, and implement a more joyful, artful, meaningful, and equitable future?
The Media Lab’s View
Cultivating creativity on a broad scale requires expertise that cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Media Lab is uniquely positioned to mobilize a global creativity movement, building on our long tradition of weaving creative expression into all aspects of our work.
We have nurtured a creative culture within the Media Lab that sparks innovation in our courses and research, bringing together arts, education, technological innovation, empowerment, and social action. We collaborate with organizations around the world to engage people everywhere in creative exploration, experimentation, and expression.
We will engage an unprecedented combination of diverse Media Lab groups to develop a new generation of tools, methods, and experiences to inspire and support creative thinking, creative expression, and creative computation— ultimately enabling people from all backgrounds to develop and share their ideas, explore new possibilities, and contribute to meaningful change in their communities, with special focus on people from communities that have been excluded and marginalized in the past. We will work closely with cultural, educational, philanthropic, entrepreneurial, corporate, and governmental organizations around the world to support and mobilize new communities of creativity.
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