While the CreativeMilwaukee@Work Summit, scheduled to run Friday, Nov. 8, has exceeded capacity with nearly 325 attendees, individuals who didn’t have a chance to register can still take part in the day through social media feeds.
Both organizers and attendees at the second annual summit, which is being presented by Creative Alliance Milwaukee, will document the day on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter through @mkecreative and #mkecreates.
“We’re really going to be inviting attendees to be social media correspondents essentially so that those who aren’t in attendance…can be a fly on the wall and get a flavor for what’s going on,” said Maggie Jacobus, president and executive director of Creative Alliance Milwaukee.
This year’s summit, to be held at Discovery World from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., will draw participants into the creative processes of professionals from a diversity of backgrounds so that participants can walk away with a new understanding of how to implement creativity into their own work spheres.
The summit will also expose attendees firsthand to the concept of Experience Design.
“That means every aspect of the day has been taken into consideration and designed for a particular experience, with each experience building on the one before,” Jacobus said. “The goal is for attendees to experience an optimized community that applies creativity, creative processes and creative problem solving across disciplines, professions and issues.”
Summit presenters include creative giants like Lincoln Fowler, co-owner of Milwaukee-based Colectivo Coffee Roasters; Ken Leinbach, executive director of Milwaukee’s Urban Ecology Center; Mike Rohde, local designer and creator of the note taking tool known as “sketchnoting”; and Mark Clements, artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
The action of the day will be capped with a presentation by Bob Schwartz, general manager of global design and user experience at Waukesha-based GE Healthcare, along with representatives from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). The group will focus on GE Healthcare and MIAD’s year-long collaboration on the Compassion Project, which pushed MIAD students to explore the “end-to-end journey of breast cancer” and seek ways to improve the patient experience of this journey.
Those who aren’t at the conference will also have plenty of opportunity to jump in on the creative dialogue it spurs later this month.
“Nov. 8 is not the end,” Jacobus said. “It’s only the beginning.”
Creative Alliance Milwaukee plans to follow the summit with a series of Milwaukee Creates Labs starting on Thursday, Nov. 14, to address critical citywide issues needing more attention and priority.
“Our intention is not to end with just great conversation and brainstorming and good ideas, but it’s to start building an agenda for the creative community going forward,” Jacobus said.
Issues discussed at the labs will be generated largely by attendees at Friday’s summit as well as through the summit’s social media feeds as the alliance collects feedback on the day. The organization hopes to gain insight into what employers and employees need, what’s working well in Milwaukee, and what barriers are in place and how creative processes can be applied to some of those barriers, particularly barriers related to the growth of the creative economy and development and retention of talent.
“The key word in our organization’s name is ‘alliance,’” Jacobus said. “An alliance implies a close association and relationship in which a group of people or organizations agree to work together for a common cause. In our case, the common cause is growing the creative economy and attracting and retaining talent.”
The inaugural Milwaukee Creates Lab on Nov. 14 will run from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. at Translator, located at 415 E. Menomonee St. in Milwaukee. Labs are free and open to the public. To register or find more information, click here.
BizTimes Media is serving as a media sponsor of the summit.
