Two things caught my roving eye this afternoon:

The UK government’s culture online initiative

Culture Online is an innovative initiative to increase access to, and participation in, arts and culture. It brings together cultural organisations with cutting-edge technical providers to create projects that will delight adults and children of all ages and backgrounds.

Culture Online aims to:

• enhance access to the arts for children and young people and give them the opportunity to develop their talents to the full;
• open up our cultural institutions to the wider community, to promote lifelong learning and social cohesion;
• extend the reach of new technologies and build IT skills;
• support wider and richer engagement and learning by all adults.

We intend to bring people further into the arts and culture through history, the visual arts, the performing arts, music, crafts and science. Each experience will be highly participatory and encourage the innovative use of technologies such as the Internet, digital interactive TV, mobile and wireless devices.

OK, all well and good, some really cool projects (and some not-so), and it looked all bottom-up and participatory – in as much as a “government intitiative” ever can be. But I was deeply disturbed by an assumption I thought I detected – that is, that creativity is a social good that the “underprivileged” lack and that can be given to you, or taught to you, or developed in you, by arts experts. I wasn’t sure if I was just being cranky – after all, this has been the assumption of much arts education for a long time.

Then I encountered a blast of fresh air at Anne Galloway’s blog – always plenty of fresh air to be had there. Anne discusses Transcendent Interactions: Collaborative Contexts and Relationship-Based Computing, Ludicorp’s presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (an event financially inaccessible to mere mortals) – thankyou Stewart for posting the slides. It’s about play as a fundamentally people-centred and collaborative field of interaction – and by the way, I am with Anne in thinking that “play” as a concept is a deeply important way of framing cultural action, interaction, production, and consumption – particularly in digitized and urbanized contexts.

This has important implications for policy-makers and critics, educators and designers – and from what I can see, it is the designers who are ahead of the game in understanding it. I won’t repeat the presentation or Anne’s excellent [not that it is of poor quality–see comments] summaryexegesis of it here, but I will pull out a particularly resonant quote:

Applications, like architecture, can shut down possibility … The real action of inter-relation happens in the spaces between these monolithic structures. Play, improvisation and communication don’t need containers, they need platforms.

Excellent.