What does it mean to be part of a sector? Who are our peers when we all have such varied jobs and niche specialisms? Where can we gather? Where can we find support, solidarity, a shoulder to rant on? What can we unpack, re-mix, re-imagine together?
These are some of the questions at the heart of the Emergent Value project, born from a stubborn optimism and hope that we might build an effective network dedicated to listening to audiences, that resists placing more strain on artists to prove some kind of objective value of their work.
The Emergent Value Sector Group was originally set up to embed the expertise of arts workers throughout the project. We began by inviting staff from each of our original partners; Coney, Trinity, and MAYK and soon expanded to members of Residence and the ACE evaluation team. Following this, we widened the net with open calls to interested artists and arts administrators. We began with the simple aim to get a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise together to support the project towards better (more impactful) outcomes.
The group gathered in 2-hour sessions, approximately every 3 months – although this of course shifted as we responded to changing schedules and availability. For these sessions, Astrid put together a guide with broad talking points, ranging from working evaluation practices to perspectives on why it matters to be thinking through how to evolve ideas and approaches. For example;
Sessions 1 & 2 dug into the principles of emergent value, what they could mean in practice for each of the group members, and what challenges and opportunities they bring. A reminder, these principles are;
Session 3 explored the potential of differing evaluation practices to affect change on an organisational and a sector level. We asked;
Session 4 built on these discussions of the barriers to effective evaluation, asking how we shift audience expectations on the purposes of reflection / evaluation? How do we assure audiences that their contributions are meaningful, not just to us but to them?
For Session 5, we wanted to do something a little different and ensure that the members of the Sector Group had supported space and time to generate their own ideas for more creative, playful and contextually embedded evaluation methods. For this, we held a Sector Game Jam in collaboration with facilitators Toby Peach and Mel Frances of Mod.
This built on the successful Game Jam we’d held earlier in 2025 for makers and experience designers (which later seeded our Commissions programme – see here). The day was broken up into discussions and more practical sessions, taking Mod’s game making format as the basic methodology. We began asking; can we make a game/ playful evaluation experience that...
With these questions (and more) as our main material– Mod helped us gather a collection of existing game formats (i.e. grandma’s footsteps, hot potato, playing with scales and voting), identify the systems at play within the game, and then experiment with "modifying” or “modding” the system for different learning and experiential outcomes according to our questions.
If, for example, in a round of grandma’s footsteps, we introduce a rule that if anyone is caught moving everyone goes back to the beginning, how does that change our playing experience? Does having responsibility for others’ progress make the game more or less fun? Do higher stakes make it more or less engaging? And how can these reflections help us to build a game of evaluation that participants want to engage in, rather than feel obliged to?
Working together in groups we worked on mapping our initial questions onto playful experiences, modding the rules, and then shared back our findings.
In a final discussion, we attempted to bring forward key learnings from these experiments, make notes on how they might be piloted, and ask what would need to be in place for them to work? As well as any other tips and tricks, we’d want to share with artists keen to develop their own versions.
It was a really rich day, and we continue to be grateful for the insights, enthusiasm and creativity of our Sector Group and their invaluable contributions to this project.
I’m grateful to the Emergent Value Sector Group for the time and space it provided me with to look into and reflect on how we evaluate in our industry. The sessions have been very productive especially as they gave opportunity to share different perspectives and contexts. I have a better grasp now on how to move forward working with evaluations in a more integrated, creative, playful way, that is considered a part of the overall audience experience.
The wider value of this is hopefully to raise the audience experience of participating in evaluation, for instance because it may be fun or feel like it’s part of the overall event or because there is a sense of reciprocity or audiences feel they can gain some insight and/ or get something out of it. Hopefully this will lead to higher quality evaluations also, rather than just complying with ‘box-ticking exercises. There is the ethical side of it too, what kind of data to ask for and to consider carefully why it’s needed. I feel more critical now in terms of what kind of ‘data’ to ask audiences to reveal, and to make sure to only ask for info that I can actually process, and not just in order to hand over data to my funders without it being considered in an impactful way. In that sense I have a responsibility to my audience.
I am keen to stay a part of the discussion to reflect on and shape evaluation in a considered, ethical and impactful way. - Sylvia Rimat, Sector Group Member
If you’d like to learn more, all the key learnings from the Sector Group sessions will be included in the Emergent Value Playbook, coming soon! Watch this space.
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