Fellows Salon: Creative Collaboration with Clare Brown
The Fellows program is an opportunity to bring together Georgetown faculty from across the University—as well as visiting scholars—for community building, curricular development, and pedagogical experimentation. At these gatherings (also known as “salons” or “jam sessions”), the expanded Ethics Lab team comes together to share ideas and research, discuss best practices, and identify areas where their work overlaps through engaging and playful facilitation.
Clare Brown is Creative Director at Gallagher & Associates, a global exhibition and experience design firm. With over twenty years of experience in design for cultural institutions, her work focuses on applying contemporary design practices to exhibitions and pushing innovation in human-centered design of museum experiences. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Experience Design at the University of The Arts, London, where she has a strong focus on integrated and collaborative design practice—especially through collaborative facilitation.
For her salon, Brown wanted to build on ideas from adventure education theory, supporting her efforts to identify a “sweet spot” where learning and productivity can flourish.
First, Brown introduced the idea of adventure education theory to Ethics Lab Fellows and team members through a warm-up activity. Given prompts ranging from facing a snake to cooking a meal with family members, participants indicated whether they were in the “comfort,” “stretch,” or “panic” zone. Following the theory that the stretch zone is the optimal state, Brown hoped to explore the utility of fear and discomfort, and the threshold where they prevent or catalyze creative collaboration.
Participants then reflected upon their past experiences of working in a group, and how the categorizing title ("team", "committee", "crew", "cohort" etc.) reflected or influenced those experiences. How did the group’s title affect each individual’s work? What might the groups have been called instead? Would that have changed anything? How could we improve the collaborative experience and quality of work through reframing the group dynamic? Producing alternatives of varying degrees of precision and playfulness, participants considered the impacts of categorizing title on the group’s context.
In the final part of the salon, Ethics Lab Fellows and team members considered what zones they occupy throughout the course of a collaborative project. As each participant populated their map, Brown noted that one could create a schedule of work that maximizes each person’s productivity point. If the stretch zone is treated as the “learning” or “creativity” zone, groups could create workflows to optimize that dynamic and, ultimately, the end product.
“I think it’s important for groups of people to think about how they work together and what their relationships are because [...] then the panic zone becomes much, much smaller and they are more likely to reach the stretch zone together,” said Brown.