Fostering the conditions for creative concept development

Concept development workshops were held at various universities around Cape Town, South Africa since 2017. The aim of the workshops was to develop new concepts using an art-making process. The student protests in South Africa in 2015 and 2016 opened up pertinent social issues, but left many universities in a stagnated place where lecturers and students are too afraid to converse and unable to think creatively about ways forward. Issues of specifically social transformation and decolonisation came to the fore during the student protests, but because of the sensitivity of the topics, people were unwilling to participate or engage. The concept development workshops served as an experimental space where lecturers and students engaged in serious conversations, but in a playful manner. The workshops opened up spaces for bodily and cognitive engagements and became a way to be/think/act differently, which opened up new possibilities to move forward. This article will take the reader through the same concept development process as though the reader is part of the workshop. The reader can then participate and also learn about what other participants did in previous workshops.