Think Change

Can art and design change the world?

• ODI

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When it comes to development, creative and cultural practitioners are too often overlooked and underestimated as agents of change.  

According to UNESCO, the creative and cultural sector is one of the most powerful engines of global development. It accounts for nearly 50 million jobs worldwide, representing 6.2% of all existing employment and 3.1% of global GDP.  

On this episode, our guests discuss the immense potential of art, design and creativity to inspire social development and tackle global injustices. They unveil the ways in which creative projects are more than aesthetic pursuits – they are at the heart of change and testament to our shared humanity, fostering human connections and challenging the status quo. 

Join us as we explore the intersection of creativity and development, and ask why – and how – creative and policy communities must work more closely together to change the world.

This episode was produced in partnership with LAGO. 

Guests 

  • Sara Pantuliano (host), Chief Executive, ODI
  • Federica Fragapane, Information Designer and ODI Research Associate  
  • Adama Sanneh,  CO-Founder and CEO, Moleskine Foundation  
  • Marta Foresti, Visiting Senior Fellow, ODI

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0:00:11 – Sara Pantuliano

Welcome to Think Change. I'm Sara Pantuliano. When it comes to development, culture is too often overlooked and underestimated. But art, design, creativity they all play a really important critical role in helping address injustice. And yet we all too often undervalue creative and cultural practitioners as agents of change. But there is so much untapped potential in these sectors. UNESCO says that the creative and cultural sectors is one of the most powerful engines of global development. In fact, it accounts for more than 48 million jobs worldwide and that represents 6.2% of all existing employment and 3.1% of global GDP. And actually, almost half of these jobs are held by women. This is also a sector that provides employment for the largest number of young people under the age of 13.  

In September 2022, 150 states gathered in Mexico for the largest world conference devoted to culture in the last 40 years. It was called Mondia Cult 2022. And here 150 states unanimously adopted the historic declaration for culture. They affirmed culture as a global public good and it called for it to be integrated as a specific goal in its own right in the development agenda beyond 2030. I'm joined for this conversation by Marta Foresti, visiting senior fellow at ODI and founder of the Social Enterprise LAGO, local Action on global opportunity. Marta, you're the founder of Lago, but you've also worked on migration policy for many years now. How did you come interested in the intersection of arts, design and migration?  

0:01:57 - Marta Foresti 

Thank you, Sara. Let me start by saying something that has nothing to do with development or migration and just to say that arts and culture is about us all it’s what makes us human. My first encounter with arts and creativity is through dance. I'm a dancer, I've been studying dance since I was a kid and it's very part of my life and what I love and what I experience, and it's one of the things that really makes us all human and unites us across borders. And then, talking about borders, as you said, I've been working on migration policy and migration related issues and development for many years and I started to get very worried particularly since 2015, when migration hit the headlines and the political debate that as much as we were trying to tell the story about the movement of people through our traditional means of social scientists and researchers, through words and through numbers that we could not cut through, that we were not inspiring anyone, but we're not actually explaining and really making people feel that there's something that fundamentally connects us all across borders and there is not just humanity but also contribution, skills, talent, craftsmanship, beauty in the movement of people.  

And that's when I first encountered actually a guest on this podcast, Federica Fragapane, who really showed me the potential of information design to explore data and inspired others. And also, as you said, I began to take an active interest in the fact that, as a sector, the creative sectors, the creative economy is somewhat missing in the development landscape and missing from conversations about investment.  

0:03:38 - Sara Pantuliano 

Eventually, Federica will bring her in in a few minutes together with our other guests. But I wanted to explore a bit further what you say. In what way does Lago contribute through its creativity, through supporting the creative industries, to creating a fairer world? Can you give us some examples?  

0:03:58 - Marta Foresti 

Yes, of course, in a couple of very practical ways.  

For example, by actually producing and investing in work products, be data visualizations, be in artistic documentaries, be in conversations.  

They actually bring together the artists and the creativity with the problems and the solutions that we're trying to see.  

For example, we worked also together on producing an artistic documentary that had the mayor of Freetown as the narrating voice of a short film that is now being shown in festivals around the world.  

That explains both the potential of the creative sectors in the city of Freetown, the real challenges that people have by not being able to move and to experience and share their talent and their creativity in taking that product. So that very conversation of a policymaker that talks about the creative potential of this city to places like film festivals, like museums as we speak is on show in Rotterdam as part of a Tate Modern exhibition on African photography so to really create opportunities to take this message in places where otherwise a conversation about the opportunities and challenges of a city like Freetown will not be known and will not be heard and where, very importantly, the voice of a mayor in this case, will not be heard outside of the traditional policy space. So it's very much about creating connections, very concrete connections and counters of people through doing things together, through creating opportunities for designers to work together on collections across borders. So try to really close that gap between the policy narratives and conversation and the artistic production. 

0:05:46 - Sara Pantuliano 

And I've seen first-hand how powerful that is. We've been able to bring conversations and aspects of the work that we do at ODI to a much wider public through this engagement in the creative industry, and we'll place a few links in the resources associated to the podcast so that everyone can see what impactful work we've been able to produce over the past few years. But let me bring in our other guests Federica, Federica Fragapane, Marta just mentioned you. Federica is an information designer and a research assistant at ODI. Welcome to the podcast, and we're also joined by Adama Sanneh, who is the co-founder and CEO of the Moleskin Foundation. Adama, I want to ask you a question. The ethos of your foundation is creativity as a tool for social change. Not everyone who is listening to Think Change will be aware of the Moleskin Foundation. Can you tell us a little bit what it does?  

0:06:42 - Adama Sanneh 

Well, I think we start from a similar intuition that Marta just shared. We used to, we work in the space of, I personally work in the space of development since the past 20 years almost. You know I was first working in emergency relief, then for the UN, you know, I did my things. And within the foundation it's a group of people that they all come from very different backgrounds, either business, you know, or the cultural side. But I think that we realised, we came to the same conclusion that Marta, you know, you shared before.  

There was something missing, you know, in the space of quote, unquote, development, development cooperation policy, etc. And the creative piece is what is missing. So the Moleskine Foundation that you know have the ambition or division to inspire a new generation of creative thinkers and doers. Now the question is who is a creative thinker and doer? And we try to summarise it as creative thinkers and doers is anybody who master creative skills, meaning critical thinking, creative doing, a lifelong learning, a rational compassion, a changemaking approach, etc. etc. Finally, you know the world is recognizing the importance of creative skills and developing creative skills. We don't call them any more soft skills, we call them essential skills. The word creativity is coming up for the first time in a lot of very serious high level policy papers. You look at the word economic forum, future of work, you know nine of the top 10 skills are creative base. You look at the SDGs, there's finally an emphasis on creative still development.  

But there's also the point is that nobody really knows how to make it, how to develop those. Then nobody really knows how to invest in those skills, and one of the reasons why those skills are so hard to develop is because they're not linear. They cannot be developed linearly. You can't just put a course on critical thinking, and it happened. You cannot put a course on creativity and that will happen. It's not the same thing like learning how to develop a software.  

And so the idea of working in this space force you as an organization to rethink the way an organization should work and in fact the Moleskine Foundation kind of shift the idea of from a space of control linearity to a space of how could I say to basically put our attention in space development, in spaces development, instead of having a linear approach. What do I mean? We mean that in order to develop those skills, the only thing that we know and literally show us is that we need to have spaces where criticality and imagination can happen, and so, hence the Moleskine Foundation tend to support cultural and creative organisation that are operating in underserved communities, that they are able to develop through their, through their approach, their those skills While they're doing this, while they're doing this, these organisations are incredible changemaker spaces for the community work.  

0:10:04 - Sara Pantuliano 

There are a lot of incredible changemakers that come through their creative industries engagement. They use creativity as a tool for social change and yet, at the same time, even though you're saying that creativity is starting to be more appreciated, fundamentally still undervalued as a tool for social change. Why is that?  

0:10:26 - Adama Sanneh 

Well, there are obviously many reasons, but I think one of the main reasons is that the market, the system, is not, is not ready to support those type of experiences. You know, I'll make an example. This incredible organization is called Seven Heels and it's it's a skate park in in Amman, you know, in Jordan, created by a Palestinian architect and you know, is a typical project that, from the world that I was used to come, you know, the UN, etc. etc. Is a typical cute project, you know, typical project that you would say, oh, that's nice for a brand. Maybe, you know, because you see these very dramatic pictures, you know, young people on a skate, a young woman with a hijab, you know. So it's all like kind of very cool and everything, and so pretty much what they say is that it's a cool, it's a cute project.  

But then Victoria, who's responsible of the program, you know, added an information and a point and it was saying well, very few people know that in Jordan, at least in that space in Jordan, more than 40% of the population has a refugee background. You know Iraqi, you know Syrians, Palestinians, the Sudanese, etc. Etc. We know the drill. And now the question is how do you create a sense of community and a sense of solidarity in a country that has almost 40%, you know, refugee. So now, suddenly, a skate park, that it goes outside the rate of the complexity of building a school, because the price of the school, which school? What is the methodology, what is the religion of the school? What are we? What are the, you know? But a skate park where everybody can connect, where a young woman or young girls connect with a young man from a completely different background through the skate park, and suddenly that experience becomes vital for that space. The problem is that the market don't have the tools to really understand. How does it work? How do I measure it?  

0:12:32 - Sara Pantuliano 

But it doesn't fit into our nice technocratic, you know, measurement frameworks, assessment frameworks of the development industry.  

0:12:43 - Adama Sanneh 

And that's exactly the point. So the answer is that we have an intuition that this is important. We have an understanding that this is important. We have even the proof that everything that we do on our personal level is mostly based on principle of creativity and culture, et cetera, et cetera. But then we know that the moment that we get to a systemic level we created system that are not able to basically embrace and those type of issues and then where the market gap kicks in, so it's technically a market failure, an old school market failure, and what we try to do, together with many partners, is to cover that gap.  

0:13:28 - Marta Foresti 

Can I come in quickly on this point of cuteness? And then I think there is something here also about there is this problem with the system and the market failure.  

There is also a bit of a barrier in our minds and in our approaches, which is that something like culture is cute, is a nice to have, is luxury, is not something that belongs to the sense of the essentials, sort of the bare bone of development work, which is about making sure that people have enough to live and have dignity and a life and the sense that culture is something that happens only once everything else is in place and is a nice to have, which is a profound misunderstanding because, actually, the experience of a skate park, the experience of music, the experience of beauty, is something that we all share, and that is certainly not something that is privy to people with either an education or with money, and it's something that actually really creates, connects us all, and I think that, in the sector, there is a bit of a misunderstanding around this.  

0:14:32 - Sara Pantuliano 

Well, again, it can be. The usual paternalism that the sector suffers of sort of implies that this is only for the wealthy, the steady.  

0:14:43 - Adama Sanneh 

But super quickly, because at this point there's always somebody not in this case, probably, but there's always somebody that tries to side Maslow and say like, ah, but do you remember? You first take care of the basic needs and then you go up and then the activities at the top. He never meant to create a pyramid. The idea is that they don't work up first, then the other one, but it's a circle everything needed to create wealth.  

0:15:07 - Sara Pantuliano 

Let me bring in Federica's been waiting patiently, federica. You're an information designer. You give visual form to complex information and rich data sets and I've seen first hand the incredible work you've done for ODI over the past few years, bringing to life some very kind of hard, dry data and transforming them into these beautifully, visually impactful art forms that have resonated so well with so many people and on so many issues from migrations to you know, CDs to you know skill sets of refugees and migrants you name it. We'll put them all in the show notes.  

Your works have recently been acquired by Momma's Permanent Collection, which says it all about you know the impact and the quality and the beauty of your work. You know, really congratulations. You visualise global injustices in climate change and geopolitics and conflict in gender inequality and here at ODI you’ve also demonstrated, you know, the connection between the art and the struggle for social justice, largely through our work with Align, one of our platforms on artivism, which we'll also add, you know, to the show notes. Talk to our listeners about some of the work you're most proud of.  

0:16:27 - Federica Frangapane 

Thank you, first of all, Sara, for your words, and so, yes, as you mentioned, as an information designer, I typically work with rich and multi-layered data sets to help in exploring complex topics and topics in their complexity, and that. But something that I discovered recently is that data visualization can be a tool also also on social media, as a way to help focusing the light on events, on urgent topics and urgent events, in a way that I've never done before, and I want to give you some quick examples and also the reasons behind why I started using the data visualisation and social media in this way. So until a few years ago, I didn't visualize data specifically for social media. I use social media to share my work. That is something very different, of course.  

And then, in 2022, I posted an infographic about the number of people killed in Iran during the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, and it was a project I created after reading a message posted online by an Iranian colleague. She was asking us, the people outside Iran, to keep a light on the topic and to use our tools to do it, and data visualization is one of my tools. It’s one of the tools I use. Aesthetics is also one of the tools I use, and so after I posted my project online, I was very, very impressed by the number of people many from the Iranian diaspora who asked me to keep doing it. So, my project, which was something that I didn't plan, became a periodically updated project. I posted the last update, unfortunately, a couple of months ago. It was a participatory project for me, because I wasn't planning anything actually when I posted the first infographic. The people who were involved more or less directly helped me in shaping it, and I kept on working it because they asked me to, and so this helped me understand how sometimes just one simple number, or a couple of simple numbers, visualized can help to focus a spotlight on stories or events, and I do it with numbers that sometimes somehow obsess me. And to give you some other examples, some weeks ago I designed a visualization about the population density in Rafah, the city in the south of the Gaza Strip, and since Israel ordered civilians to evacuate south, its population has increased from around 250,000 to an estimate of 1.5 million, and I tried to give shape to this information.  

I was obsessed with this huge increase in the population density. I did it after it was announced that Israeli troops were preparing to expand their ground operation there in Rafa, and I did something similar weeks before. I was reading a report from Oxfam saying that Israel's military was killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day. At that point, 200 days has passed since the beginning of the attacks, so I then drew a shape made by 250 branches, one for each person killed, and then I repeated it more than 100 times to give shape to such numbers. And also, this project was very largely shared online in a way that I wasn't expecting, but in a way that I hope can provide another window. There are many, many windows, many, many ways to help keep the focus on certain topics, and I just hope that my language can be one of them.  

0:20:12 - Sara Pantuliano 

You know you currently use aesthetics as a way to get people to pay attention and you know you don't shy away from showing the real impact of conflict and injustice through striking imagery. You mentioned recent work on Rafah population density, but I also remember looking at you know another piece of work you did on the number of days that girls have been out of education in Afghanistan I also find really. 

0:20:39 - Federica Frangapane 

I have to say that many people understood somehow the reasons behind my approach and the projects you mentioned the one about Afghanistan girls I'd like to talk a little bit about that one too. So, also in this case, I visualized just one number, and this number is the number of days since the Taliban banned teenage girls from schools, and I started doing it one year ago more or less, and at the time I was seeing that many activists and journalists were counting these number of days. When I posted it the first time, it was 500 days, and 500 days without access to education is a number that deserves to be counted, in my opinion, and so I decided to count it visually, using words, and I created a spiral made of the numbers texturally written from 1 to 500, to visualize and to count this number of days, because counting, writing, reading is what gives access to education, to culture and to knowledge.  

0:21:50 - Sara Pantuliano 

Yeah, it was incredible. I shared it online and it was reshared so many times. There were so many comments about how striking the visualization was to bring home the plight of Afghan women obviously something we all know about but seeing it so visually, sort of brings a whole different perspective. Clearly, you made a very convincing case about the importance of using the arts, in whatever forms creativity, as a tool for policy change. But creative and policy communities don't work together, don't work together enough. What can we do to make sure that they collaborate more, collaborate better, to really help achieve meaningful change?  

0:22:37 - Marta Foresti 

You're absolutely right. There is a real need to do something in this space to bring these communities together, but also to then move to actually, you know, making a difference in practice, and that can be done at a different level. A couple of very concrete ideas as you know, I work a lot with cities and I think cities are a very interesting level where we can create those connections where, for a start, the policy space and the political space is very close to the lived space and the distance between the policymakers and the politicians and the people and the citizens is somewhat shorter, and then it all happens in a defined space. That also happens to be very fertile ground for creatives and creativity. So one very practical ideas is to connect the cities and to make sure that all the attention that there is in the policy space right now around urban development very rapidly, you know, developing and expanding mega cities in different parts of the world, including Africa is that we really tap into this moment of interest to really showcase the importance and and not just to showcase but to demonstrate also the impact on local economic development of the creative industries and some of the figures that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode around the. You know the economic relevance of the creative industries is multiplied at the city level because in a, in the local economy of the city, you know, the creative sectors really play a role. The second thing is to really tap into existing opportunities that exist, that all that are coming up, some of them again, are the city levels.  

Think about the number of Biennales that are developing around the world and what is possible. And specifically on the Biennales, just to really ground some of this conversation, we had the Venice Biennale of architecture last year focus on africa, and for the first time had a woman who was the curator, was an architect, a woman from Ghana and from Scotland. In a couple of weeks, the next Biennale this year on art will open and it has a title which is Stranieri ovunque, for foreigners everywhere, with a very strong theme of sort of the role of diasporic communities in arts creation and also with a narrative about giving space and voice to artists from the so-called global south. Now these are concrete opportunities. These are major events that attract, you know, attention, the public investment. There are institutions involved.  

We're soon going to have a conversation again with Palazzo Grassi in Venice about the role of cultural institutions, like museums to you know, to convene some of these conversations, hopefully with the International Organization for Migration in Rome, again around the themes of the Biennale, bringing together conversation around the role of culture in migration narratives and in regular pathways for migrations. Organizations like ODI, like museums, like foundations, like Moleskine, Moleskine is very active in that space to get other foundations on board and then to work with, you know, creative’s like, federica, to really make sure that the platforms that we can create in the policy community can actually see the work that Federica does that speaks directly on social media. To you know, particularly young people all over the world. To make sure that you know some of the ministers 

0:26:01 - Sara Pantuliano 

Gets out of our little development style. Federica, what do you think?  

0:26:03 - Federica Frangapane 

I mean, I totally agree with Marta. The Project Key Workers the one that is the result of the collaboration with me, Alex Caccentini, designer colleague, friend, and Marta Foresti and the ODI team was the result of some questions and one of these questions was how can we show the stories the project is about migrants' contribution to the COVID response and how these contributions were recognised during the COVID-19 emergency, and the project was an answer to the question how can we bring these stories to life? And without these questions asked by the ODI's part, the ODI side and Marta's side the project would never have brought to life. So the combination of questions and then the response of designers and technicians, it's essential, I think.  

0:26:58 - Adama Sanneh 

Well, I mean, I agree absolutely with this. I also want to bring, like also a different spin to the point. The point is there also want to demystify the idea that there are, you know, the creatives on one side and a non-creative on the other side. You know, I think that we need to start to rediscover what creativity means, because creativity is not just what stays as silos again, another silos of the specific creative industry or the arts, that is a performative element of it, but creativity is a mindset, it's a way in which we interpret the world, is a way in which we try to solve problems. So when you start having this, you know now, suddenly, even people in hardcore development or policy sectors can be very creative. And I think, by opening up the possibility that there can be leadership style that are on the creative element or working style that are a creative element, you know, and then we realize that there are many more creatives, you know, all over the sectors, but now they're a little bit repressed. People don't talk about it, they try to hide it out when they have that side. That's one thing. And then I think that there is also an element, there is a third community, let's put it in this way, in which, in which what you described before, that are what we call the creativity pioneers, they are creative change makers. There are people who are already exactly at the nexus between creativity and social change.  

The way I look at it is to me this is a similar situation, compared that we can compare to 20, 25 years ago with social entrepreneurship. You know, social entrepreneurship at some point Not that, no, not that Skoll or Ashoka or anybody invented social entrepreneurship but people were already solving problems in this way, you know, but the market could not see them and could not recognize them. You know, because the unus of the world on one side, you know, couldn't be funded, funded by, you know, the typical VC investors, because they're like, oh, you know, maximizing what is happening here. But even the philanthropy world, in the beginning, couldn't also finance them because, like, are you a sellout? Because you, you know, you don't match to our model, you know. And so there has to be a recognition of the power of those solutions that were happening from a completely different standpoint, and then the market reorganized itself to try to develop tools and processes, etc, etc. That could cater for this solution.  

So, if we look at that, I think we are in a very similar situation nowadays, but at the center, there is a question of creativity and social change, and I think that, beyond having you know different ways to try to different strategy, different try to different ways to try to create a systemic change, I think that we just need to start having the courage to ask ourselves the relevant question.  

Nowadays and we have this especially in the development sector and sometimes in the policy sector we have this enormous capacity to completely overlooked and put aside the big question that we're not able to answer and we try to belittle them and say that, oh, this is just something that is not possible. We have an organization dealing with theater Northern Ukraine, ten years of war, belarus first, then Russia, and they teach now poetry to young people in bombshells. And again the typical thing. That normally is a nice story and that's it. But the question is through blended finance, we can definitely rebuild the building that was bombed during the war, but the question is how can we rebuild the sense of self in a community that has been in war for the past 10 years?  

0:30:56 - Sara Pantuliano 

Well, thank you very much to my brilliant guests for joining me today on this episode of ThinkChange. I hope we have picked our listeners' interests in the work that we have pioneered at ODI, particularly led by Marta, and that that will really push people to go and find ways to unleash their creative mindset, as Adama said, to find ways to tackle global challenges, push for social change beyond standard, more technical approaches that we are used to. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do like, subscribe and rate it. It helps us a lot and we hope you'll join us again next time. 

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