Creativity: The bridge between people

As part of the three-member core team of zunder zwo, Renate Woditschka and her colleagues have realised mediation and design projects for numerous exhibition houses, museums, learning and educational venues over the past 12 years. These include Lower Austrian and Upper Austrian exhibitions, the Schallaburg. These include Lower Austrian and Upper Austrian provincial exhibitions, Schallaburg Castle, the Vienna Literature Museum, the Austrian National Library, the Angewandte Innovation Lab, the University of Vienna and the Johannes Kepler University. From the idea to the elaboration of the content, sometimes to the creative implementation, exhibition and mediation spaces, interactive experience paths, participatory installations, workshops and accompanying programmes were created. In the conception and design of these exhibitions, Renate Woditschka focuses on innovative approaches and new formats that make people an integral part of the stories. Renate Woditschka explains why: "Only through interaction does an exhibition unfold its full potential. A multi-layered narrative becomes a shared experience, a place of experience and encounter."

Is innovation digital per se?
In exhibition design and communication, digital media complement the analogue realisations and objects. For Renate Woditschka, this is an interplay of possibilities: "Digital applications can support, depict some things in greater detail or more immersively and create additional levels. But the digital always interacts with and relates to the analogue space, the real objects and the interpersonal interaction." Due to the pandemic, many museums and exhibition houses have also increasingly turned to online formats, e.g. video and podcasts or live streaming of events. These offerings complement and expand the analogue exhibition experience, but cannot replace it. There is still a lot of potential here to reach visitors outside the museum with innovative applications.
Innovation does not have to be digital per se, but digitisation opens up new platforms and possibilities for translating and transporting information and expanding it to include new perspectives.

The human being at the centre of innovations
Renate Woditschka is very familiar with creative approaches and sees creativity as a bridge between people. This is precisely her experience as a participant in the "Human Centered Innovation & Designing Thinking" course at the Innovation Agent Academy (IAA). Creatives and participants from large companies meet there, whose backgrounds and realities of life could not be more different.
Bringing these two worlds together is one of the Innovation Agent Academy's recipes for success. For Renate Woditschka, this opens up access to new tools and methods as well as exciting new contacts outside the cultural and educational sector. "What we have in common is the high demand for creative approaches," says Renate Woditschka, who became an innovation agent through a KAT scholarship. Even though the cultural and educational sector, where Renate Woditschka works, and the business world definitely have different requirements, it is precisely this diversity that makes creative approaches and out-of-the-box thinking possible in the first place. With the Innovation Agent Academy, Pro Active and the Creative Region Linz & Upper Austria have created a training format that combines methodological knowledge and mindset building. Another common denominator for the participants is the motivation to find people-centred solutions for upcoming challenges. In the Innovation Agent Academy, they learn how to lead such processes not only on their own, but also in teams. "The focus is always on improving things for people - this mindset is the driving force for innovation for us Innovation Agents," says Renate Woditschka.

The Innovation Agent Academy opens the "black box" of innovation. Participants from different companies and industries learn from experienced experts how ideas become real products and services. In the course "Human Centered Innovation / Design Thinking", knowledge is shared, know-how is built up and experience is gained. The goal: to increase the potential of people, ideas and organisations through creativity and to raise it to a new level.

The Innovation Agent Academy is a cooperation between Pro Active and the Creative Region Linz & Upper Austria and is supported by Kreativwirtschaft Austria & WKÖ.

More information at: https://www.innovationagent.academy and https://creativeregion.org

 

Photos: zunder zwo & Creative Region