Collective Wisdom

How to co-create—and why: the emergence of media co-creation as a concept and as a practice grounded in equity and justice.

Co-creation is everywhere: It’s how the internet was built; it generated massive prehistoric rock carvings; it powered the development of vaccines for COVID-19 in record time. Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for—and profit from—collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships.
 
Why co-create—and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organization, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. The idea of “collective intelligence” is not new, and has been applied to such disparate phenomena as decision making by consensus and hived insects. Collective wisdom goes further. With conceptual explanation and practical examples, this book shows that co-creation only becomes wise when it is grounded in equity and justice.

With Coauthors
Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Detroit Narrative Agency, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, Richard Lachman, Louis Massiah, Cara Mertes, Sara Rafsky, Michèle Stephenson, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Sarah WolozinIntroduction 1
1 "We are Here": Starting Points in Co-Creation 19
2 Nothing About Us Without Us: Co-Creating Within Communities 75
3 Estuaries: Co-Creating Across Disciplines and Organizations 149
4 Plants, Animals, Gods, and AI: Co-Creating with Nonhuman Systems 193
5 Field Guide: Risks and Lessons of Co-Creation 231
6 Conclusion: Where to From Here? 295
Acknowledgments 303
Appendix: Related Media Projects 307
Notes 327
Bibliography 339
Biographies of Authors and Coauthors 361
Index 363"The myth of the single author is beautifully exposed with the bright light of co-creation, which gives us our power as collective storytellers and makers fueled by care, responsibility and humility."
—Sarah Polley, Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay

“My first thought as an educator, I need all my students to read this!”
—Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology and Viral Justice
 
"Collective Wisdom provides us with a utopian possibility. Through rich references and real-life stories, the coauthors show how our futures are connected and how, if we ignore this, we will face disasters even harder to grasp and control."
—Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
 
“Collective Wisdom is a seminal work that surfaces critical ideas for how to be better designers of our future.”
—Kamal Sinclair, co-author of Making a New Reality and member of the Interactive Board, Peabody Awards

“This book is a much needed tool to build a more conscious and interdependent society.”
—Hank Willis Thomas

Recommended Book, International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, 2022.

Katerina Cizek, an Emmy and Peabody–winning documentarian, is the Artistic Director and Cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also Founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio.