Transcript

Playing with risk: The dangers of thinking safe | Mike Hewson | TEDxSydney

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_oDofXXxvE
Video ID: 8_oDofXXxvE
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foreign [Music] winter when I was about seven my friends and I decided that we would build a dam out the back of our school now there was this Grassy Creek that went through a farm Paddock and it it um it narrowed between two Banks which is where we dug up dirt and piled it in the center now it took quite a few lunch times but eventually we started to flood the paddock and then eventually the neighbor's property next door and then we took it even further and we built a raft and I have no idea how we managed to build a raft but we would pile dirt on it and then we'd drag it across to stack it up make the dam higher and um the lake would yeah we were calling it a lake at this point when the when when the Lake froze over Thomas would jump in and he would he would um like Wade through breaking the ice with his belly with us sitting on the raft which is obviously fantastic right you know unsupervised seven-year-olds and cold wet clothing in the middle of the winter building a shoddy mud Dam maybe a little irresponsible so does anyone have a fond memory of a wild childhood Adventure that they have on yeah I mean they're like very Vivid memories for us this is a drawing I did around the same age it was clearly a sort of odd creative kid but strangely practical I liked how things were put together and I was interested in that and now I make um artwork in public places uh large permanent usually climbable things in unsupervised places filled with like children parents teenagers where anything could go wrong and when I'm Dreaming up these projects it's really hard not to get bogged down on all the things you can't do because it's not safe it's too risky maybe what if this happens all these like Risk reducing practical concerns that seem to crush creativity so my name's Mike I'm here today to share some of the experiences that have led me to become the artist that I am today I'll take you through some of the projects that I've made and um a lot of the learnings that I've had often from observing The Adventurous child when it comes to things around embracing the inherent risks in life so and I hope to leave you with a sense of why it's really important that we encourage like exploratory and risk-taking behavior in an everyday public setting so my dream was always to be an artist but I didn't start out that way out of school I studied civil engineering and my first job was in Marine construction building a pipeline just off the coast of New Zealand so the ocean is a wild dangerous unpredictable place where you quickly learn to expect the unexpected there's like no shop around the corner so you have to be resourceful and when things go wrong and often they go horribly wrong you have to be able to think on your feet to come up with some solutions and there's no off-the-shelf solution so you have to you know you're stuck with your own creativity um which is why engineering is great it's like it's logical it's clear it's problem solving it's like methodical it's risk-averse but my other love art seems always to be kind of the exact opposite hard to combine the two which is why every couple of years I've quit my engineering job because something was missing there was this like constant pull away from uncertainty trying to escape risk but it turns out you you can't you can't escape danger and in February 2011 Christchurch the city where I lived was shaken to the ground in a giant earthquake and the in the city where I had an art studio at the time was locked up from the public for almost two years overnight the city became sort of an unrecognizable Wasteland like all of the landmarks that we knew were removed and even precious Heritage buildings weren't spared either so I would sneak back into the inner city and paste up images on buildings is my way of temporarily trying to put some love back into the inner city these projects didn't last for long because as we were building them the buildings were being knocked down so you know I had to Don Hive us because you couldn't get access and just jump over the fences and I often use my sort of engineering credentials to talk my way in yeah things were changing very quickly but in hindsight this like time of like massive and Rapid change kind of you know gave me this also a sense of like strange possibility and kind of started to temporarily open things up so that period where the stable City that I knew it became like the Wild Ocean it was suddenly dangerous unpredictable and you had to like think on your feet in the sense that everything was really temporary it never really left me and so when I was invited to propose a project in the city of Wollongong I wanted to try and bring this like sense of like you know things are temporary and what I want it to be light I want to be vulnerable I want something that can like grow alongside the city and the people there something of like local significance um and you know when I when I visited the cities the newly designed City Square this is this fantastic low budget Christmas tree is not mine I wish it was um but it was me it was missing something we had no connection to the landscape so this was my uh realized proposal which was effectively like a you know a living flagpole and the most prominent part was this um 100 year old palm trees strapped to the top of a Lamppost it's a part of a series of sculptures that were strewn down the mall and then there was you know these palm tree seats which are laid on their side appearing unplanted I also did these like Sandstone Boulders with these slightly silly forklift slots cut in them as if a rock for hire company hadn't dropped them off um and then Troy this uh amazing uh Stone Guru um kind of these huge Sandstone formations that we went through the onerous process of like eventually getting them down to the mall which was no small feat and then as you do we thought it'd be great to core a little hole through one of the formations and poke a little palm tree through and we decided to leave it there and if you go down to Wollongong it's doing very well four years on we did a rubber matting that matched the granite Paving in the mall and then whacked on a swing and you have like an elegantly thrown Together Playground and this artwork had the kind of unusual requirement that it needed to do something and it wasn't what the public were expecting it's a lot of people said it's not safe it's too risky maybe maybe it's fine in nature but like not in the Central City but the kids they got it they instantly understood it and they swarmed it and they helped translate to the adults what the thing was you know they they didn't need to see the hidden engineering that was keeping the palm trees alive they just they got it so I took a big risk on this project I copped a lot of flack but in the end I was trying to open up like you know what what what's possible what can we do let's do things let's do something new and in the end it was embraced which is why it's important to to be you know prepared to take risks and you know if we're observant we can take cues from the risks that we're drawn to because it's like we want to teach ourselves something in my in my work with playgrounds I am keenly interested in observing how kids want to interact with things for example kids like climbing things they're always annoyingly trying to climb things if you're trying to walk down the street there are scrambling up a tree or like walking along a wall to them like everything is potentially a playground and you can't really stop them so hold that thought I was invited to submit a proposal down the road in Saint Peter's where many homes were being taken by the government and demolished to make way for a big Highway tunnel project and Sydney people know what I'm talking about a very uh disjointing and very difficult time for that community so I ended up studying archive images of old homes and proposed to rebuild their front fences in a park from the bricks of the houses that have been demolished and so here's a layout of all the different fences that we built but I decided to work with a local school to come up with a layout for this and as you would expect it ended up being like haphazardly plonked all over the place a real mashup which is one of my favorite looks and here's some photos of us like meticulously working through to try and like Faithfully construct these uh fences and you know we wanted them to be kind of like almost sinking into the ground like a like a graveyard but it's quite complicated engineering to sort of arrest them in this position for the next you know 50 years or however long so here's the the graveyard but you know but for kids this is like a wild unkempt ruin and it's great and it's for them it confirms that they're supposed to explore real risks because in the end it's how they learn to keep themselves safe and you know kids aren't stupid they don't necessarily assume things are safe all the time and it's quite interesting if there's like a loose object or something that looks like it's not connected in I noticed that they'll often just like give it a little nudge before they'll try and like Yank on it and see if they can walk on something and you know they're running all these little risk assessments all the time to see how how they should navigate the world and these kinds of spaces like facilitate that for them and I think we're all kind of intrigued by ruins because there's something that like we want to know about precarity we want to know about impermanence for some reason we want it near us and you know we somehow there's something appealing about we don't just want straight lines and clean surfaces so as an engineer I'm getting pretty great at jumping through hoops I'm getting great at like navigating through all the regulations to try and like open things up to try and create more but more possibility and I think it's really important that we do that because when you know when people come up to me and they see these projects they're like so like who said yes it's like I've I've broken some secret rule and I think it touches on this assumption that we have in the 21st century that everything should be on one track which should be it should be more safe that's the direction we're going it's the only gospel we've got to be we've got to be ordered we've got to be predictable it's got to be efficient it's got to be you know it's got to be probably more boring and so they're genuinely surprised when we kind of get to these projects but you know we know that's not the reality of the world we live in so like why do we try and like live as if it's always going to be good and I think you know how do we in modern cities ensure that kids can have Adventures so they can be prepared in life and I think how do we prepare ourselves when we get thrown up on the high seas you know we all know the last couple of years what it's been like it's it happens and it's going to continue to happen and you know we need to be ready and so I got this other opportunity in a recent project to propose something much more freeform like kids love stacking things and you know I like stacking things too you sort of find whatever's lying around and put it up into a tower and so this was like me I'm the seven-year-old dam builder piling up towers of rubbish heavy duty plastic bucket it was a really a leftovers project and you know I even used old trees that they were cutting down in the park at the time and Incorporated them and uh yeah I was just trying to like have a bit of fun with it and and then in the end it's quite complicated engineering to to pull these off because I'm trying to design like the the Wild Ocean but sort of want to try and build it like a like a 600 six billion dollar like submarine or something you know like it's got a it's got to do both I think the way the kids interact with this is that they like they get it and they just they move around it because there's nothing prescribed in the way they know you know how to interact with these things and what I find really encouraging about these Parks is that they're effectively an endorsement from the government that kids need you know that risk is valuable and that we see that kids are capable of navigating the big bad World on their own and with their friends when they're older this is a project I'm doing with city of Melbourne photo from this week but I push and I push limits because we need some people to push in the opposite direction of safe thinking so we don't develop blind spots and this goes in every area but I take risk management very seriously and I'm not just saying that in case my insurer is watching this Ted video um I take it seriously because there's nothing endearing or useful about negligence or recklessness risk risk management 100 helps me deliver these projects it's very helpful we absolutely need to be improving the way we like look after the vulnerable and the diverse needs of a community however what I'm what I want to say is you're also going to think about what we're losing if we potentially you know blindly focus on reducing risk we can't put handrails around everything and even if we could I don't think it would really benefit us so I'm going to go back to the start you know embracing risk is really just part of embracing life and thinking about those like cute little like seven-year-olds trying to build their little like lunchtime dam in the middle of winter like should we let them do it it's really up to you guys but you know come on all right well thanks thanks for having me [Applause] [Music]