Learning, Creativity and Innovation by Bob Cotton
The Future of AI, Project-Based Learning, Peer-Learning Networks and smart software agents (aigents) as tools in Lifelong Learning.
When you consider the range and depth of the 'creative industries', it's not surprising that it contributes almost 6% of the UK economy. If you include Film-making (with all its essential components, including film education and training, film production (planning, production and post-production); Theatre - from Drama schools and support sector (costume-design, make-up, production, casting, theatre-management, art-direction, finance, more to come here, including Music, Digital (special effects, 3d modelling and animation, (and crowd-simulation) Game-design and production, Streaming technologies, Podcasting, multimedia mixes; Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Generative Art, Fractals, Interactive Design, etc etc); Art and Design, Graphics, Photography Illustration, Advertising and Marketing, Fashion, Cosmetics, Textile-design and production, Hair and Maquillage; Architecture, Furniture design and production, Interior Design, Crafts Training and Workshops; Arts Labs, Film, Arts and Literary Festivals
"The UK Creative Industries: Have a GVA contribution of £125bn – representing almost 6% of the economy. From 2020 to 2022, the sector's GVA grew by over 19% and 175,000 new jobs were created. Export £46bn of goods and services annually, representing 14% of all UK services exports." (Google Search)
By revenue, the UK had the second-largest video game market in Europe in 2022 after Germany, and the sixth-largest globally. By sales, it is Europe's largest market, having overtaken Germany in 2022. The UK video game market was worth £7.16 billion ($9.81 billion) in 2021, a 2% increase over the previous year." (Google Search)
Total spending on film production in the UK in 2022 was £1.97 billion. Approximately 16,000 companies were involved in video production, or film video and television video editing and post-production in 2020. In 2020, the UK film industry supported 86,000 jobs, of which 75% worked in movie production and distribution.1 Aug 2024
How Big is the Fashion Industry in the UK?
The UK fashion industry is one of the largest in the world, and contributes significantly to the UK economy:
- Size: The UK is the third largest apparel and footwear market in the world, after China and the United States.
- Revenue: The UK fashion industry contributes around £62 billion to the UK economy, which is equivalent to £1 in every £34 of the UK's total gross value added (GVA) contribution.
- Jobs: The UK fashion industry supports around 1.3 million jobs across the country.
- Tax revenue: The UK fashion industry raises more than £23 billion in tax revenues.
- Hub: London is considered a key global hub for the fashion business.
- Professions: The UK fashion industry includes a wide range of professions, such as fashion designers, manufacturers, retailers, magazine publishers, journalists, marketeers, course lecturers, and business managers.
- (UKFT.com)
How Big is the Industrial Design sector in the UK?
The UK design economy is a significant contributor to the UK economy, and here are some of the key statistics:
- Gross Value Added (GVA)In 2019, the design economy contributed £97.4 billion to the UK economy, which is almost the same as the combined value of the hospitality and real estate sectors.
- Number of jobs In 2020, 1.97 million people were employed in design-related roles, which is one in twenty workers in the UK.
In 2019 alone, the design economy contributed £97.4 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the UK economy, almost matching the value of the hospitality and real-estate sectors combined. By Design Council's estimates, design in the UK is worth just over £276 billion, or 4.47 million jobs.
"What we need is an Industrial Revolution for the Arts" Melvyn Bragg (House of Lords 2024)
https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/melvyn-bragg-arts-industry-needs-radical-overhaul (House of Lords 010224)
I've been wanting to address this crucial issue for some time, and now with the recent victory of Labour in the UK, it's even more pressing - now is the time for rebooting our entire (secondary and tertiary and lifelong/Further Education) education system, and changing the role of education in fostering lifelong self-education (lifelong learning), examining the role of Design in general education, and exploring the role of peer-learning networks, We need to address the use of AI Large Language Models and the model of Student-centred, project-based learning (PBL) - a model that has been proven highly successful in the UK art-schools and in building the success of the UK's Creative Industries over the last 150 years. Britain's success in this wide-ranging field has a history stretching back to Victorian innovations like Henry Cole's Great Exhibition, and the art-education system that gave us modern art colleges like the Royal College of Art and those now incorporated in University of the Arts, London (Central St Martins, London College of Fashion, London College of Communication, Camberwell, Wimbledon, Chelsea School of Art etc), and regional art colleges too, as well the William Morris-inspired Arts and Crafts revolution, the Austrian Werkbund, the Soviet Vkhutemas, the German Bauhaus, the US Black Mountain College, Chicago Arts Institute, New York New School, Parsons College of Art, and in the UK, the Sixties innovations sparked by the Coldstream Report, the introduction of the Diploma in Art & Design (DipAD), and the post-war innovations of artist-teachers like William Johnstone at the Central School of Arts and Design,, and more recently Victor Pasmore, Richard Hamilton and Roy Ascott in their foundation or 'ground' courses at Nottingham and Ealing. The role of Art Schools fostering innovation in the UK reached global heights during the mid-to-late Sixties, with the Beatles, the Stones, British Fashion (Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes, Vivienne Westwood, Jean Muir etc), Fashion Retailing (Biba, Foale and Tuffin etc), British Satire (The Establishment, Private Eye, TW3), British Television (Dr Who, Ready Steady Go! and The Prisoner, etc) and world-around Television (BBC Our World) broadcasts in 1967; in the Theatre (Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Pinter, Osborne, Shaffer, Brook, Royal Shakespeare, etc) and myriads of breakthrough actors), and the bottom-up creativity of Jim Haynes and David Bowie's Arts Labs, the explosion of Street Fashion trends of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road and the Soho Mods, the Hippies, the skinheads, new romantics, and punks. Our modern innovations in personal computing, cybernetics and machine-intelligence also stemmed from the US government-funded Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which gave us ARPANET and the Internet (the economist Mariana Mazzucato has written well on this state-funded endeavour: Mazzucato The Entrepreneurial State 2013), and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tim Berners Lee wonderful World-wide Web (WWW). Post-War, Cybernetics and systems research focussed by Norbert Weiner and many British pioneers; Machine Intelligence, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence, was kick-started by Alan Turing (in 1950), and early contributors included robotics pioneer William Grey Walter, cyber-arts pioneer Gordon Speedie Pask, cyber-management pioneer Anthony Stafford Beer and led to the hotbed of 1950s to 1960s digital innovations and computer-related arts (like those catalogued by Jascia Reichart in her Cybernetic Serendipity show at the ICA in 1968....
And the early (1950s-1960s) essays into AI mapped an extremely wide territory - overviewed and explained by Ray Kurzweil in his The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) - covering cryptography, language translation, gameplay, expert-systems, pattern and image-recognition, robotics, neural networks, chat-bots, and much else as well.
Ray Kurzweil: The Age of intelligent Machines (1990). This book provides a really good overview of the whole field of AI c1990
During this period (late 1940s, 1950s, early 1960s) British art-schools were supplying ground-breaking ideas, teachers and students that directly or indirectly fed into the explosion of the creative industries in the Sixties: (pop music, fashion, street-culture, pop art, graphic design, product-design, television and film, advertising, theatre and satire). Many examples of this: John Lennon at Liverpool Art School in early Sixties, Bryan Ferry at Nottingham, Brian Eno at Ealing, Peter Greenaway and Ian Dury at Walthamstow, Hockney and Peter Blake and Pauline Boty (and many others) at the RCA. Art schools were the common feed of talent into the creative industries during this formative decade - they were where fashion experimentation and street-fashion trendings were focussed, new dances developed, popular music featured in college circuits, art-schools became the focus, and often the source, of innovation at this time, and most if not all adopted student-centred, project-based learning as the educational/learning model that best channeled independent thinking, new ideas - and the spirit of team-working that best prepared students for roles in the creative industries... And don't forget the importance of the dole (social security welfare) on sustaining and providing the opportunities for self-development in the creative arts in songwriting, in dress-design, in music, art and bottom-up entrepreneurialism - access to the dole encouraged hundreds of thousands of writers, musicians, artists, designers, and cultural entrepreneurs at this time...
Of course Project-based Learning is not just applicable to the creative arts: "Blumenfeld,Fishman, Krajcik, Marx and Soloway (2000), for example, described the process of project based science as follows:‘The presumption is that students need opportunities to construct knowledge by solving real problems through asking and refining questions, designing and conducting investigations, gathering, analysing, and interpreting information and data, drawing conclusions, and reporting findings’ (p.150)".
(https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1408243/19191.pdf)
Bob Cotton: Futurecasting Digital Media (Pearson/FT.com 2002)
Another research strand that I've found very useful in bridging the gap between learning and innovation is what I call futurecasting - an area that includes technology forecasting, trend-forecasting, sociological forecasting, ethnographical forecasting, business forecasting, and techniques like Delphi circulars and scenario-building, and what McLuhan called Forecasting the Present - essentially analysing what artists (and other leading creatives) are doing now - artists are always ahead of their time - McLuhan recognised artists as core inventors of the future - in their work and in their lifestyle and their tastes. Nowadays you could include popular, bottom-up street trendings as well - Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and other forward-looking 'protest' movements too. Trend-analysis is an important indicator...
The aims of Futurecasting are twofold: to map the opportunity-space as it exists now AND as it is likely to exist in the immediate future (ie when the item you're developing enters the market place).
To ensure that designers and product-developers stay abreast of developing trends and possible broader changes in marketplace...
For instance, at the Arts University at Bournemouth I remember c2006 watching a presentation by one of the innovation researchers at the then giant Nokia mobile-phone company. I noticed there was no mention of the multi-touch experiments of Jeff Han - who had just published a TED talk video on his really exciting multi-touch interface. The next year (2007) Apple launched the iPhone (with multi-touch display), and Nokia (and Blackberry, - and others) were history.
I've created PBL-based exercises in Futurecasting at London College of Communications and the North Italian University of Nova Gorizia in the 1990s - with students of Alan Sekers' MA in Interactive Media, and those of Peter Purg's multimedia MA, and I've used similar techniques during the University of the Arts, London Technology-Transfer exercise with the UK Press Association (c2003-4) - on all these endeavours mapping the 'opportunity-spaces' created by emerging, converging and diverging trends. Nicholas Negroponte had used similar techniques to identify and communicate the territory that the proposed MIT Media Lab wold be operating within from the mid-1980s on.
From the very beginnings of digital computing and packet-switched networks, Artists, and the creative vision of artists, played as significant a role as the computer scientist, the information-processing engineer and telecoms engineer in the growth of new media. This was catalogued by several exhibitions towards the end of the Sixties, including the fore-mentioned Cybernetic Serendipity, Jack Burnham's Software exhibition in 1970 and others (see: https://mediainspiratorium.com/1960-1970/). Significant examples of individual artist's contributions include George Brecht and Yoko Ono's Event Scores (1959-63 - effectively algorithms for generating creativity), Jay Wright Forrester's Industrial Dynamics (1958); Stan Vanderbeek's Movie Drome (1963 - multimedia, immersive synaesthetic multi-channel environments and his manifestos on the future of media); La Monte Young's Anthology of Chance Operations (1963 - the use of chance and random-numbers, echoed their use in computer programming), Ken Isaacs' Knowledge Box (1962 - Isaacs illustration of a future multimedia, multi-channel information-machine); Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (1960 - a witty satire on auto-destructive art in an autonomous 'happening' - a scripted automatic machine-performance); the work of John Cage; Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow's loosely-scripted Happenings (from late 1940s). The Stanford professor Fred Turner has mapped many of these developments in his excellent The Democratic Surround (2013). There's a good detailed history of art-craft-design education in UK at https://jte-journal.org/articles/10.21061/jte.v2i1.a.2
And here is Sir Ken Robinson's spirited TED Talk from 2007 - extremely pertinent now:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms?subtitle=en
So, while all these related innovations in Art and Technology were developing rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, so too were the developments in art and design education, including importantly the ideas derived from John Dewey's philosophy of Education and Learning - the ideas of learning by doing, of lifelong learning, and learning in a social context - essentially of the importance of peer-learning networks, as amplified by Ivan Illich in his DeSchooling Society of 1971 - these ideas are of supreme and continuing importance in the 21st century - and especially in the UK in its current search for innovation and growth. These are the models for learning, innovation and growth now in 2024.
And what exactly is the role of Large-Language Models (and ChatGPT) in this quest for an appropriate 21st century approach to Learning and Innovation? Here the AI/chat GPT companies are taking - literally stealing - (well, laying claim to, appropriating) all the knowledge, information and media-forms we have stored electronically and digitally over the last half a century or so - and I mean everything that we have acquired by dint of observation, science papers, scholarship, art and media history - all the songs, all the art, all the photos, graphics, films, all the newspapers, all the magazines and peer-reviewed journals, all the artefacts in museum and gallery archives EVERYTHING we have made or recorded since the neolithic creative explosion. That's some Robbery! And they are SELLING it all back us in the form of Large Language Models coupled with ChatGPT - that's some fucking CHEEK. The least they should be encouraged to do in recompense is build the best Learning Buddies/Mentor Maidens/lifelong learning champions, business babes - tailored specifically for ALL of us to grow and learn with, for all of our lives. it would be like having personal teachers, expert mentors, practical designers, engineers and crafts-people, cuddly nursery teachers, best peer-learning buddies, professional and entrepreneurial wizards, old-age companions, medical experts, care-givers, helpers, and lifelong advisors - and to give us all of this FREE (or at least cheap enough for state subsidy) in return for all of mankind's knowledge.
So, what I am saying here is that we should lay out the approach to a research programme whose aims would include creating personalised software agents ('aigents') for every person at secondary and tertiary stages and above - and building the peer-learning networks to support them. Peer-learning Networks (PLNs) are online networks linking learners with other learners at similar stages of development, and linking these learners with centres of expertise and individual teachers and mentors in specialist and generalist subjects. These software agents (Aigents) are both digital 'friends' or 'mentors' and digital 'teachers' too: and are tailored to every individual of (say) 12 or over on the planet - these aigents know all about us, our health, our skills, our talents, our likes and dislikes, our aims and aspirations, our friends and our associates. Aigents are totally secure and private to us (logged in block-chain archives for example), and as aigents, search out centres of excellence for all the expertise required by their human subject. Aigents can run tests on our learning and cognition, devise concept-maps and learning-plans (curricula) for us and 'sit by our side' as we progress, helping us rehearse, repeat, reflect, revise and analyse our learning, point out links to further study and links to peer-learners sharing similar stages of learning... Aigents can help set subjects and queries for problem-based learning projects
Nicholas Negroponte devised this pair of Venn diagrams in the mid 1970s when he was pitching the idea of a 'media lab' to the MIT board of governors, - and to potential corporate sponsors. The left-hand Venn described the three mostly separate communications industries then dominating the planet. The right-hand Venn indicated how these major communications sectors would - Negroponte predicted - converge into one major sector of development (ie they would all be subsumed in the digital domain) - and this would be where the Media Lab would operate, inventing new hybrids, new technologies, new fusions of digital processing, publishing and media. And he was right. The central converged sector (the overlap of the three older sectors) is our 21st century media ecology: it is dominated by computer-internetworks and the WWW; computer servers and data-centres; computer graphics, computer animation and special effects; streaming 'narrowcast' digital media (like podcasts, and Youtube videos for example); broadcast terrestrial and satellite media; epubs, ebooks and websites and other electronic-digital documentation. Add to this the sectors developed in the Artificial Intelligence industry (from the mid 1950s) - another subset of digital computing including: cryptography; gameplay, pattern recognition, image recognition, language translation, machine-learning, genetic algorithms, artificial life, knowledge-based systems; neural networks; learning-support systems, expert-systems, software agents, decision-support systems, recommendation engines, (for a complete overview c1990 see Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines. Then there's the current ongoing experimentation with large Language Models and Chat GPT - and Quantum Computing - more on these later...
simplified model of Dewey's Learning by Doing - akin to student-centred, problem-based learning
Dewey's pragmatism - and his idea of social-learning - have had important real-world impacts since he formulated these ideas in the 1890s-1910s. And student centred, project-based learning was the basis for the success of art-schools in the UK in the creative explosion of the Sixties. And once adopted and practised, PBL becomes the kick-start to Lifelong Learning...to the idea that Education is what we do!
"Education is not a preparation for Life - it's Life itself." John Dewey
"
Ken Robinson's comprehensive Gulbenkian report 1982.
The Tate's equally comprehensive The London Arts Schools Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now (2015) - especially good on William Johnstone's 1950s implementation of a British Basic Design course, based on the Bauhaus - and Jessie Collins and Albert Halliwell's experiences in the 1920s and 1930s (in the Introduction).
The point of all this, is that this converged sector is one of the primary sources of innovation and growth in the world economy. What we lack in the UK is state direction and improved investment and capitalisation of start-ups - and more development capital...we need a structure that encourages creativity and innovation from the bottom-up - literally from primary and early lifelong-learning initiatives onwards through our whole lives...Remember Dewey said: "Education is not preparation for Life - it's Life itself" .
This is the Industrial Revolution for the Arts glimpsed by Melvyn Bragg - isn't it worth a look?
Quantum Computing and other important potential directions
The potentialities - and actualities - such as Neural Networks, Peer-Learning Networks, the UK National AI Strategy, Blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), Tony Blair Foundation Initiatives:
"Today, the tools exist to provide every child with a personalised education, with learning tailored to individual needs and differentiated by subject. Bringing the best and most innovative educational materials into the classroom would free up teachers’ time so they can focus on giving each student the right mix of challenge and support to help them fulfil their potential. Education technology can be embedded in classroom and home learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) used to revolutionise the experience of pupils and teachers.
Tony Blair Institute at https://www.institute.global/insights/public-services/future-of-learning-delivering-tech-enabled-quality-education-for-britain
Now. The redesign of Education in the UK - from 19th century models to 21st century thinking obviously isn't going to happen overnight - but experimental development and trials of the PBL learning approach could be instituted now. My arguments here are based upon the use of PBL in the sector of arts and design, but lots of work has already been carried out in using PBL in other educational sectors too
Types of Creativity
Dennis Milner Explorations of Consciousness 1978
insert quote here from Dennis Milner
"Creative Consciousness
- The activity of our inner lives mostly follows a pattern that has developed according to the ideas and attitudes prevalent in our society. We tend to behave according to the standards we have been brought up to, and to strive towards the goals that our society regards as desirable. The way we think, feel and act would, after all, be very different had we been born at a different time, and in a different environment, say 1000 years ago in india. Most of us earn our livelihoods by playing our roles in society according to these established ways of life. We may take the things that society considers desirable, by the techniques that society has developed. We educate children in the subjects, from the viewpoints and to the standards of our society. We administer a law and order that ensures that people conform generally to the way of life which our society has developed. When we have reached the stage at which we perform roles in which we think, feel and act in accord with established viewpoints and goals then we become rationally-conscious participants in society. At this stage of development our pattern of behaviour is largely a conditioned one.
- But we can also think, feel and act creatively out of our own inner resources. That is, instead of responding, almost unconsciously, in accordance with an acquired pattern of behaviour, we can meet situations in life in their own right. If we do this we become conscious of what is involved in a situation, we perceive its problems and its potentials and bring these potentials to realisation. A person who does this is more individual in his responses to life and he develops inner resources of his own. The depth psychologist Jung found that often people needed to find themselves in this way to bring about self-realisation and to give them an inner stability. Otherwise they become 'lost souls', without sense of purpose and direction to their lives, experiencing frustration and becoming neurotic. Jung called the process through which a person passed when he developed his individual resources and came to self-realisation, the 'individuation process'. Another psychologist, (Abram) Maslow, designated people who had attained to this state as 'self-actualising'. He found that self-actualising people are independent of the fashions and prejudices of their environment; they lead individual lives, yet work harmoniously with others; they have achieved an inner philosophical balance and are democratic, creative and understanding.
- When we think, feel and act creatively we are imparting something of ourselves to situations. There are two mail levels of creativity which merge into one another. The first level is confined to an activity within our personal subconscious. We then work with established knowledge and adapt it to different circumstances. In this rational-creativity something new appears within the framework of the known, but the boundaries of of the framework are not extended. We are doing this to a greater or lesser extent whever we bring about a change, whether it be domestic, professional or social, when by rearranging relationships we create a modification or a new development in an existing situation. This process is the basis of most of the creative activity that takes place within society.
- However, if rational-creativity were the limit of human achievement the boundaries of civilisation would never make any major stride forward. For this to happen a further and more advanced type of creativity is necessary which involves tapping into the universal sub-conscious. This is the sort creative innovation that great inventors, artists, scientists, etc. experience when their creative activity significantly extends the boundaries of human achievement. However, creativity of this type rarely manifests as pure knowledge from the universal subconscious. Usually it is coloured or modified by the personal sub-conscious.
- The stress that Milner makes here on the 'universal subconscious' is interesting, but there is a non-Jungian explication here too. Margaret Boden (in The Creative Mind 1990) suggests that
Craft-based innovation
Of course there is another approach to innovation - and it's craft-based - and it's one of our oldest technological innovations - you guessed - it's flint-knapping. This essential skill involved knapping flintstones - you only have to bash pebble against pebble to see how a sharp edge results. But our Pleiocene ancestors - those existing c3 million years ago, left evidence of flint-knapping indicating a gradual evolution of these skills from simple cutting tools to aesthetically refined hand axes and spear and arrow heads with tangs and barbs:
This diagram relates to arrow-heads created by flint-knapping ancestors in NW America and you can see that these craft-skills - due both to increased dexterity (through practice) and through the social sharing and learning as we learned from each other, and probably the expertise shared by stone-age masters - either locals in our own family tribes or itinerant experts.
Another example of craft-based skills reaching modern-day levels of refinement is the art of boat-building, fascinating in itself. I've seen close friends build clinker rowing boats by eye and hand, eschewing paper plans for paper templates and fitting flat planks of ash into three-dimensional curved space, then rivetting (or clenching) them in place with copper nails and roves, to form tight waterproof clinker hulls.
The hand-crafted beauty of clinker or lapstrake construction: wood planks are trimmed to a 3-dimensional template, then steamed in a pipe, and joined with copper rivets to make a light, strong and very beautiful rowboat or sailing dinghy.
Boat builders would also carve scale-models of the hull-shape they wanted on the basis that if the model looked right, the scaled-up actual boat would be right. Once the model was complete it was sawn in half, then in sections, these shapes were traced and scaled-up to create the 'lines-drawings' for the final boat construction
These 'lines drawings' are scaled-up in the boatyard and used to make the keel and hull frames on the full-size vessel under construction. Remember - all this derives from a craftsman carving a pleasing hull-shape - using a penknife, chisels and spokeshaves - it's a hand-craft... You can see many of the un-sawn half-models decorating the walls of yacht-clubs around the world.
Handcraft to Mind-craft
Craft-skills are still the basis of much innovation - in product-design, in ergonomic testing - but especially relevant now - in computer-programming - for example, where the suck-it and see innovation approach is quick and easy - and an essential product of the rapid-prototyping process. This is like shaping a piece of wood and 'offering it up' - to see if it fits. Code is hand-crafted or mind-crafted in the same way - testing bit by bit components of a more general product-development plan.
Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasizes the coding skills of the software developers. It is a response by software developers to the perceived ills of the mainstream software industry, including the prioritization of financial concerns over developer accountability.
OK, I know that this is a counter-cultural 'open-source' kind of approach - but it's a proven 'bottom-up' alternative to more scientifically rigorous methods:
"Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasises the coding skills of the software developers. It is a response by software developers to the perceived ills of the mainstream software industry, including the prioritisation of financial concerns over developer accountability.Historically, programmers have been encouraged to see themselves as practitioners of the well-defined statistical analysis and mathematical rigour of a scientific approach with computational theory. This has changed to an engineering approach with connotations of precision, predictability, measurement, risk mitigation, and professionalism. Practice of engineering led to calls for licensing, certification and codified bodies of knowledge as mechanisms for spreading engineering knowledge and maturing the field." (Wikipedia)
And another source of innovation is of course, the perspectives and big-picture overviews attained by those taking an alternative or counter-cultural point-of-view - a classic example of this is the artist/musician-led revolution in the popular music scene in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s - and it's spin-offs in graphics, fashion and lifestyle.... Here, offbeat fans of the Blues - both Delta and Country blues and electrified Chicago Blues - people like Elmo (Brian) Jones and Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger (and many others) recreated the sound of the Blues, added a Rock beat, and made this 'R&B' into a highly successful 'British Blues' genre that was then exported around the world - including back to the USA! The other notable artist-led revolution at this time was the gradual levering of creative control away from conservative managers and record companies - and the assumption of creative control and direction by the artist-musicians themselves - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann - and many others are examples here.
And this accords with another principle that I learned from the sci-fi novels of Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land etc) and others - in the Sixties. It's a necessity for humans to be generalists in order to survive in the multi-faceted worlds which we inhabit:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love.
This is why I've always admired Soldiers, Farmers, and especially Sailors - they have to be generalists in order to survive - a blue-water sailor for example will need seamanship, navigation, boat-building and boat-repair skills, first-aid, mechanical engineering, astro-navigation, radio protocols, meteorological, domestic science, oceanographical knowledge, personal relationship management - and much much more - in order to live successfully at sea.
Innovation in this case is the result of problem-solving - often emergency problem-solving.
In the creative industries there are two major strands of learning - the pursuit and perfection of innate skills (in whatever discipline the student has inclinations) - and secondly, the acquisition of a big picture - an overview - of the many factors - social trends, developing technologies, infrastructure, politics, etc - that could or will impinge or impact on any design development the student is undertaking...
Bob Cotton: Innovation and integration in art and design education/learning