Accidentally Innovative
My friend Kale got a tattoo that says “the greatest inspiration is often born through desperation”. It has stayed with me ever since, like permanent ink etched into the nooks and crannies of my mind, permanently changing the the way I think and how I move through the world.
Recently there is a lot of talk in many different systems about “innovation”. It has really become a buzzword and many people use it without realizing what it means. “Innovation comes from Latin innovare for renew, whose root is novus or new. It can be used for either the act of introducing something new, as in a company that rewards creativity and innovation, or something that is newly introduced, like an innovation in microchip design.” Now, when I connect this concept of innovation with my friend’s tattoo… it makes me think of many times in my life where I have accidentally been innovative, not due to a deliberate effort at innovation, but because I was doing the best I could with what I had available in as creative a way as I could think of.
When I was a kid I wanted Pokemon cards. We couldn't afford them. I felt very out of place at school, and since we moved a lot and I had difficulty making friends, I spent much of my childhood play time alone. That meant reading books or playing games with my toys or even board games by myself. One day, when I was feeling especially sad that I couldn't afford this Pokemon game and even if I could I didn't have anyone to play with. So I looked around at the toys I had gotten from Value Village (many from fast food kids meals) the scraps of paper that were laying around and I got to work creating my own fun. I selected 8 of my toys, and laid them out in front of me. I ripped the pieces of paper (no scissors) into the same sized pieces and drew a template that I repeated 8 more times. I drew a portrait of the toys, I named them, I wrote a little sentence for their bio and then I wondered ‘how would they actually interact with each other?’ In Pokemon there was a set of rules, a sort of battle, there were points and other things I didn’t actually know what they were.
So in my version, I gave each person so many pieces of crumpled paper, let's say 10 each, with each piece of paper representing what in Pokemon is called a Hit Point, but in my game was called "life energy". When my toys/characters would engage in battle I had to find a way to make their interactions consistent but also unpredictable and out of my control. So I created menus of six actions or moves that each toy could take and then I added a dice into the mix!! It randomized the interactions between the toys and it became a game that I could play for hours with different combinations. I could make tournaments and have different people as losers or winners and create story lines, like in wrestling or soap operas. One of the exciting things that I loved doing was making one of the toys the “messy” toy, and the other one “the cleaner” and their battle would actually correlate to cleaning up or messing up my room. Naturally, because it was random there were the odd occasions where playing my little game actually resulted in my room getting messier than when i started playing. but that’s the risk you take when you have a game like that defined by the roll of a dice.
What did this experience teach me? As an adult, I look back on that experience and realize that I had accidentally utilized a gamification process to do my chores at home. Today I am working on a number of innovation related projects and often use language like this to get systems excited about things that we have been doing in the inner city for quite some time. In some cases for First Nations Metis and Inuit, innovation is especially frustrating because when we see a modern application of a traditional teaching or concept, many have never seen this before and will be tempted to call this innovation. I would argue that “Indigenous innovation” is actually more ancient than modern, and innovation is a value that is built into many of the teachings I have learned from knowledge keepers.
This was especially evident last summer with some of the amazing things happening in Belize, but that’s a story for another day!
To be Continued….
