Creative Temporal Costings

This AHRC 3-month ‘sprint’ collaboration with Leeds Creative Timebank examined artists' experiences of using time as a means of non-monetary exchange to organise people around a creative purpose. For every hour ‘deposited’ in a timebank (e.g. giving practical help to another) one can ‘withdraw’ an hour of different equivalent support. The experimental social design research was enabled though AHRC's Protopublics, or Developing Participation in Social Design: Prototyping Projects, Programmes and Policies workshop run by Lucy Kimbell, Guy Julier and team. It examined collaborative exchange as experienced by, and through a co-commissioned study undertaken with the bank. Key objectives were to investigate the value of creative collaborative exchange in an emerging ‘parallel’ (non-monetary) economy and test and develop experimental research methods for social design.

The researchers and the timebank ran two workshops in Leeds involving commissioning five artists to realise artworks through which they were asked to investigate their experiences of exchanging time, using time for the artists’ payment. The researchers and artists developed and applied collaborative creative approaches to generate latent non-monetary value through cultural expression and engagement, and by promoting tangible forms of cultural action.