A letter to you
Welcome
Whether this is your first time popping in, or you’re coming back, I’m glad you’re here. I’m Gina and I have one of those bouncy, busy brains and writing’s always been a tool for me in trying to make sense of the world.
Room to Be
About a year ago, in between coughing fits and daytime naps with COVID-19, I caught myself staring at a pastel blue, bud vase on a bookshelf. It had sat there since I bought it on TradeMe a few years back and had collected its fair share of dust in that time. Now, this isn’t just any old, old vase. The maker’s mark on its bottom says Te Mata Potteries, Havelock North and it was (most probably) sold in The Gallery of Helen Hitchings in the late 1940s. Ever since I was an art history student in Wellington, I’ve thought Helen Hitchings was really quite something. But, more on Helen later.
Naps are most definitely not the norm these days, and I didn’t want to let this window go to waste. So, in between literal fever dreams, I used the time to try and connect the dots between a few disparate domains, experiences, skills, conversations, and ideas that had been swirling around my head for a while. Shortly after I recovered, I took my scratchy notes and sketches and created a quiet space on Substack called Room to Be.
Possibility
The more I posted, the more I got curious about possibility. At its heart, possibility is what could be before we decide what is. And, possibility will be become more and more powerful for all of us.
alterMODERN
These ideas needed a bigger home, so I took an unfinished idea from 2009 and polished it up. alterMODERN became all about the practice of possibility. A place quiet place on the internet away from the pressure and the pings to take a pause and ask some good questions.
Dream Together Set
alterMODERN’s first cab-off-the-rank is the Dream Together Set. Anything’s possible as children and adults play together as creative partners. The practices were developed over about a year with my daughter. We had a lot of fun creating, playing, testing, evolving, pretending, and then playing some more.
Something I noticed being a parent is that activities for families and children are heavy on process and games can pit players against each other. Child-initiated pretend play can be a whole lot of fun, but can wear thin after playing over-and-over. And, if it’s up to you, sometimes it’s hard to know where to even start.
Even art class can feel like paint-by-numbers and gloss over ideas and the art of a blank sheet of paper. No matter what you’re doing out in the world, or how old you are, there’s more-and-more pressure to always get it right. Add to this, a time when answers are only a few taps away, it’s no wonder taking shortcuts can be seductive.
But this isn’t an anti-AI tale. You should know that after rough sketching and concepting, I used AI during the rapid prototyping phase of the Dream Together Set to get to a proof of concept and test early thinking with reviewers. You should also know that it was important to me that all the practices were created with my daughter and written by me. So, the prototype was ripped up and all the words that made it here are my own. The final copy for the set (and all copy on this site) was written between the Clements Hotel’s restaurant (thanks for all the matcha’s), our family farm robotic milking shed, the school gate.
AI’s not going anywhere and thankfully, the same can be said for human capabilities in and around creativity. Well, that’s not quite true. The cruel truth is that recent research says that the capability we need the most in this new age is the capability that’s the most at risk from AI.
The set will help you practice:
Playing together as creative partners: Inspired by tools and techniques of creative professionals, you’ll contribute and create as equals.
Being human in the age of AI: Practices are built around capabilities we’ll all need to keep alive in this new world.
Start with what you have, right where you are.
