Co-creation

This paper has been published in a somewhat different form in Meg Harris Williams' "Aesthetic Conflict  and its Clinical Relevance." - Karnac, 2018.

It outlines the various "knife-edge" defenses the infant mind must struggle with in the face of the emotional impact of the mother's beauty, particularly when there is no absolute guarantee of this being reciprocated.
An attempt is made to disambiguate this vulnerability from those which call into play defenses against (Kleinian) unconscious envy.
Both serve to protect the internal good/beautiful mother from destruction, in the infant mind.
One aspect of Narcissism, not usually emphasized, is the lack of conscious awareness of one's rejection of love and beauty when offered by another.
Instead, the narcissist remains almost totally merely conscious of his or her own feelings of being rejected, especially aesthetically.

L’open innovation se heurte indéniablement aujourd’hui à des problèmes d’éthique et de manque d’efficacité. Et si la blockchain représentait une voie à emprunter pour redonner liberté et pouvoir aux communautés d’individus désireuses de créer et d’innover ?

In recent years, the way corporates innovate has changed significantly. Going from 'behind closed doors' innovation to open innovation where collaboration with outsiders is encouraged, companies are in the pursuit of more effective ways to accelerate their innovation outcomes. As a result, many companies are investing to create more entrepreneurial environments, which not only empower employees to proactively propose and test new ideas, but also reach beyond company walls to involve many others in the co-creation of new solutions. In this paper, we outline the most notable benefits of hackathons from the perspective of large organizations, and present the benefits and a methodology for organizing hackathons, ie. competition-based events where participants work in small teams over a short period of time to ideate, design, rapidly prototype and test their ideas with a user-centric approach to solve a determined challenge. This paper also provides a brief insight into the CEMEX Hackathon, which was organized following the aforementioned methodology.

RESUMEN Este documento considera un análisis sobre el concepto de innovación pública como nuevo paradigma en el actuar del servidor público y sus maneras de enfrentar los problemas complejos de forma creativa bajo un modelo de trabajo articulado y colectivo con la sociedad civil, manteniendo un enfoque de un ejercicio político organizacionalmente flexible. Parte de una reflexión obtenida en la experiencia de trabajo en el sector publico en donde nos enfrentamos a la lógica administrativa rígida y tradicional desde un modelo de pensamiento de diseño. Palabras Clave: TIC, gobierno, innovación, colectivo. INTRODUCCIÓN El estado Colombiano, en las últimas décadas ha iniciado procesos encaminados a fortalecer la estrategia de innovación pública, ante esto, ha buscado que su ecosistema administrativo y funcional esté cada vez más articulado con los nuevos paradigmas del desarrollo mundial fundamentados a través de la "agenda 2030 y los objetivos de desarrollo sostenible", adoptada por líderes del mundo de Las Naciones Unidas en septiembre de 2015, planteando como fin un ambicioso un plan de acción enfocado hacia las personas, el planeta, la prosperidad y el trabajo conjunto, (Cepal, 2018). Dentro de esa articulación es así como el ODS 16, "Paz, justicia e instituciones sólidas", apunta precisamente a fortalecer la institucionalidad, la eficacia y la responsabilidad del estado en todos sus niveles para buscar la paz, la justicia y la inclusión, articulando un modelo de trabajo colectivo entre gobierno y sociedad civil (UN, 2017). Este documento busca, que los servidores públicos conozcan como estos desafíos se pueden abordar bajo el nuevo paradigma de la innovación pública, el uso de las nuevas tecnologías en la gestión pública y su valor para los gobiernos, por otro lado, se busca identificar el contexto de la

Understanding what motivates participation in online innovation communities is now a high priority given the recent interest in  crowdsourcing as an approach to increasing diversity and creativity in innovation. This article reports on the results of a survey of participants in an online innovation community to characterise and find correlations between motivation and participation styles. An analysis of the survey results show: the majority of participants were contributors or collaborators, not readers or leaders; reasons for joining collective innovation communities can be different to the reason for continuing to participate; primary motivations for participation are fun and challenge; intrinsic motivations rated higher than extrinsic; and the participants that are passionate about the online community are either new members, < 1 month, or long standing members, > 6 months.

Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet die heute mehrheitlich urban umgesetzte Idee der Mobility Hubs und zeigt Wege der Übertragbarkeit auf kleine Städte bzw. ländlich geprägte Gebiete in Deutschland. Er beschreibt die zugehörigen Herausforderungen in der Mobilitätsentwicklung und skizziert methodische Ansätze zur kooperativen Planung von Mobility Hubs.

A new era of participation marketing has dawned and co-creativity is at the heart of this highly-collaborative business model. While crowdsourcing may have decentralized some aspects of marketing, creativity and innovation through open calls to the public ... co-creativity has democratized the relationship between brands, employees and customers by building a trusted community of collaborative peers.

The present study empirically explores a theoretical model of co-creation, technological innovation, guest satisfaction and guest revisit intention. For meeting the objectives of the study data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire from 341 customers visiting luxury hotels in Jammu and Kashmir using a non-probability convenience sampling technique. Structural equation modeling has been used to test the relationship between hypotheses. The findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between co-creation, technological innovation, guest satisfaction and revisit intention. It was found that co-creation and technological innovation have a positive influence on the potential decisions and morale of guests to revisit the same hotel again and again in the future period. The direct relationship between guest satisfaction and revisit intention was also examined. The study is confined to the customers visiting luxury hotels in Jammu and Kashmir. Future studies can widen the circle of study to other states and may add more antecedents and outcomes to co-creation and technological innovation for better results.

Sense making through conversation plays a key
role in channelling and furthering participatory business model innovation. The designer as facilitator, with conversation as a core tool, is an emerging area of interest within the design research literature. This paper will discuss preliminary findings of a case study of Second Road, a strategy and innovation consultancy that employed a design thinking approach and conversational methods to redesign a client’s business development model. Through this study conversation based co-creation emerged as the primary method for participatory innovation.

Summary of Issues in Responsible Conduct
in Research-Creation and Proposed Tools for Reflection
This Toolkit was produced as part of the research project Responsible Conduct in Research-Creation:
Providing Creative Tools to Meet the Challenges of an Emerging Field. It was funded by the Fonds de
recherche du Québec (FRQ) as part of the Concerted Action La conduite responsable en recherche : mieux
comprendre pour mieux agir (2016-2018) [Responsible Conduct of Research: A Better Understanding for
More Effective Action]. A brainstorming workshop held in November 2017 was funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and several institutional partners.
Project website: www.crr-rc-rcr.ca
REFERENCES

A partir de réflexions sur la participation citoyenne dans les quartiers, les notions du sensible et de l’esthétique environnementale, mais aussi le rôle de l’art dans les démarches citoyennes, cet article présente la démarche de co-création de trajectoires territoriales Intertexting ainsi que les premiers retours d’expériences de ce nouvel outil dans différents quartiers. L’élaboration de récits collectifs sensibles ouvre des perspectives de déploiement dans les pratiques urbaines, du projet de quartier au projet urbain, avec les acteurs institutionnels et les acteurs locaux.

Creative Inquiry frames learning and education as a larger manifestation
of the creative impulse rather than as the fundamentally instrumental acquisition, retention, and reproduction of information, or Reproductive Learning.
Montuori, A. (2011). Creative inquiry. In N. M. Seel (Ed.), The encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. Heidelberg: Springer.

In addition to addressing the history of and rationale for the teaching and learning center (TLC) as a means of achieving lasting professional development of the faculty, Schumann, Peters, and Olsen introduce the concept of co-creating value that not only facilitates the success of the TLC but also has the potential to permeate the educational fiber of the entire college or university.

This conceptual paper re-evaluates the concept of niches in tourism markets. As many regions are now attempting to address niche markets in tourism as a development strategy, understanding of the dynamics of niche markets is crucial. Current approaches are often limited to seeing niche markets as simple subsectors of larger consumer markets. We argue for a broader view of market niches as forms of social rituals involving both consumers and producers with a mutual focus of attention. Based on the work of Randall Collins we examine how interaction rituals are produced and maintained, and how these are also reflected in niche markets, such as backpacking. We illustrate the how backpacking produces a mutual focus of attention and boundaries to outsiders, helping to sustain the niche over the longer term. This analysis has implications for producers hoping to tap into niche markets, as they too need to become part of the niche community.

Homelessness, as other severe societal problems, is increasingly thought to be resolved through means of tighter collaboration between different actors. As a case in point, the co-creation of homelessness services has been one of the core features of the Finnish Housing First paradigm. This article provides a grassroots' illustration of how the participants experience co-creation in practice. It focuses on a particular Finnish application of co-creation, inviting former beneficiaries as 'experts-by-experience' into social welfare organisations. The article develops Dodge's (2010) work on the tensions the participatory ethos poses for civil society organisations by identifying similar contradictions in the participants' experiences. It argues that the co-creation discourse places a double demand on participating service users, requiring them to strike a difficult balance between policy-relevant expertise and authenticity. The experts-by-experience need to remain close enough to real-life experiences to appear reliable in the eyes of the service users, and to be able to contribute experience-based input. At the same time, they need to distance themselves from those experiences in order to be recognised as experts delivering policy-relevant knowledge. Subsequently, under a co-creation paradigm, the tensions previously managed by civil society organisations are increasingly transformed into contrasting demands for individual participants.

The paper introduces a participatory method for re-generation of the common spaces in residential neighbourhoods, especially in case of post-war mass housing. The method combines regenerative design and co-commitment that are recognized as decisive factors in mass housing revitalisation. The spatial focus of the research is on New Belgrade Blocks (Serbia) that are part of the larger phenomenon of the post-socialist urban heritage. The neighbourhoods that are part of this larger framework are having common attributes and facing similar issues nowadays. Comprehending and managing change in these neighbourhoods requires community-driven actions that would include all relevant stakeholders in the process through co-commitment. The actions, that would be based on regenerative and biophilic design, would ensure both maintenance of green spaces of the neighbourhoods, as well as integration of new nature-based solutions. The approach is enhancing the role of community and highlighting the important values of common spaces in ensuring vitality of mass housing and co-creating healthy and liveable environments. The paper is contributing to contemporary discussions on resilient cities and communities and promoting participatory and integrated urban renewal.

The chapter focuses on how digital workers — professionals who use digital skills in their work — are supported by arts experiences at transformational festivals like Burning Man. Using interviews with 13 digital workers who have attended the transformational festival, Burning Man, we examine the impact of arts experiences on the way they operate. Burning Man participation opens up new ways of doing things for digital workers, by providing them with new tools to improve their well-being and professional networks. At Burning Man, digital workers blur the lines between artist and innovator, as they suspend their conventional work activities whilst engaging with arts activities. Through their Burning Man experiences, digital workers access well-being and networking benefits which they later absorb into their professional lives, thus changing the way they approach their work and do business.

－ Companies explore how to manage CSV and strike a balance between social value and economic value. Living Lab is an approach to improve relationship between corporations and local communities so that we investigated Scandinavian Best Practices of Living Lab. In this paper, patterns and improving actions are extracted through investigated data. In addition, differences between Scandinavian culture and Japanese one are discussed.

This paper applies a service ecosystems perspective on the public service logic to evaluate the benefits and challenges this view brings to the management of public services. First, the article clarifies the concepts of private and public value, as well as co-production and co-creation. Second, the article presents an overview of the service-dominant logic, public service-dominant logic, and public service logic. Third, the paper analyses the potential of merging public service logic with a service ecosystems framework in a technology-based context, cross-fertilising public management and marketing research. This can lead to the development of a theory of public service ecosystems.

Purpose: Over the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest within the higher education sector in students becoming producers, partners and co-creators of their own learning (Bovill et al, 2011; Little, 2011; McCulloch, 2009; Neary and Winn, 2009; Werder & Otis, 2010). Individual academic staff and some institutions are creating exciting ways of engaging students more meaningfully in curriculum design. This paper will explore the literature and examples of practice and analyses whether students and staff co-creating curricula can be considered as good practice.
Approach: I present background literature and an overview of some of the rationales given by staff to explain why they are interested in providing opportunities for students to co-create curricula. I also briefly outline some of the benefits resulting from the processes and outcomes of co-created curricula. I then summarise a range of examples to illustrate ways in which students and staff are working together to co-create
curricula. Finally, using Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education, I analyse whether students and staff co-creating curricula demonstrates any of these seven principles of good practice.
Findings: This study found that there was good alignment between five out of seven of Chickering and Gamson’s principles of good practice with work involving students co-creating curricula. There were relatively weaker links to the remaining two principles.
Practical implications: Based on the findings and the co-created curricula literature, recommendations are made that include: explore different possible forms of cocreation; start co-creation early in students’ experience; acknowledge but work within constraints; and talk to your students about learning and teaching.

This paper analyses how knowledge-based practices adopted by innovation  intermediaries enable them to generate value for themselves when collaborating with their clients. While the literature focuses on value creation for their client organisations, little is known about how innovation intermediaries create internal value even though this is essential for ensuring their long-term survival and sustaining their key facilitating role in the innovation system. This understudied issue is explored using empirical evidence from a sub-set of innovation intermediaries, Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs). The results indicate that by capitalising on existing knowledge vested in employees and collaborators as well as understanding and shaping the knowledge base of the innovation ecosystem, innovation intermediaries generate internal value from their involvement in collaborative innovation, which range from different financial to non-financial types of value. Implications for intermediaries, their collaborators and for policymakers are then discussed.

The branding literature has long recognized the power of storytelling to provide meaning to the brand and practitioners have used storytelling to enhance consumers' connections with brands. The premise of brand storytelling has been that the story and its content, production, and distribution are the brand owner's realm and the consumer primarily a listener. The emergence of social media has changed the consumers' role in storytelling from that of a passive listener to a more active participant. Our paper uses the metaphor of improvisation (improv) theater to show that in social media brand owners do not tell brand stories alone but co-create brand performances in collaboration with the consumers. The first and foremost contribution of such a conceptualization is that it offers a semantic framework that resolves issues in storytelling, demonstrates the necessity of cocreation in storytelling, and identifies the core of an inspiring story. The improv theater metaphor also helps identify the following three propositions relevant for branding in social media: (i) the process of improvisation is more important than the output, (ii) managing brands is about keeping the brand performance alive, and (iii) understanding the audience and its roles is the prerequisite for a successful brand performance.

Customer journey has become an increasingly important concept to understand complex customer behaviours and get insights into their experiences. While the term has been used in diverse disciplines since the 1990s and its literature has grown more than sevenfold over the last eight years, understanding of the topic remains incoherent. This paper adopted a stream-based systematic review approach to identify the underlying themes of the customer journey presented in the business literature up to May 2020. 147 relevant papers were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCO for the analysis. The quantitative content analysis identified five underlying themes of the customer journey, namely, service satisfaction, failure and recovery, co-creation, customer response, channels and technological disruption. The results section reviewed and discussed each theme and its sub-themes in turn. The review identified important gaps in the literature related to the key stages of a customer journey.

Co-creation, driven by the influence of the economic and technological context, has propelled new ways of working with design, as well as the development of new roles for designers .These collaborative approaches are presented as one of the main challenges that design' schools have to face in the post-modern society .

"As a model of participation and creativity, the design charrette has huge potential for reshaping the engagement of design professionals and the dynamic processes available to businesses and organisations seeking ongoing innovation. Design charrettes in their current form largely remain the preserve of design firms, used both for internal project analysis and synthesis of large volumes of complex information. Charrettes are most often used as a consultant tool for engaging the community in participatory workshops on potentially controversial developments.

Taking the format of charrette as developed in the field of planning and urban design, this paper will reflect on the enquiry by design process and explore the potential of stimulating innovation through drawing as a way of collaborating with stakeholders outside of the key design professions.

Development, facilitation and analysis of a student workshop explores abstracted principles of a design charrette and indicates possibilities for more open, inclusive and holistic engagement between design professionals as consultants and others as collaborators."

This book chapter describes two case studies on how management and the works council of a Dutch government organization and a Dutch health organization came to integrative agreements on organizational HR policies and social plans, via cocreation and collaborative negotiation.

The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre represents one of the most popular, dynamic and influential spaces of digital play. Since the genres first commercial release in 2009 with the title League of Legends (2009 – present, Riot Games), MOBAs have played an integral role in pioneering ‘fair’ models of free-to-play, live streaming as a ubiquitous spectator activity and e-sports as an increasingly recognised mainstream industry. This thesis posits each of these trends as connected to the influence of MOBAs as a genre with a rich history in grassroots spaces of non-commercial play and participation. Adopting an online ethnographic approach, the thesis describes how the transition of the genre away from its non-commercial and collectivised origins has introduced an influential model of hybrid power relations characteristic of the affective economics that underpin many wider digital platforms.

Central to this thesis is the introduction of playful co-creativity as a conception for describing the productive role that play and closely related participatory activities exert in the vibrant activities of MOBAs. Through framing play as a co-creative practice that informs design, spurs participation, creates professions and sustains vast sums of affective value, the thesis asks how the political economy of playful co-creativity in MOBAs can be critically approached. The research mobilises approaches from game, fan and Internet studies to approach the complex set of relations encompassed by MOBAs.

The online ethnography of this research comprises observations, personal experiences, in-depth case studies and player responses from online open discussions on Reddit. In particular, the research focuses on three influential examples of MOBAs in the original Warcraft III (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003) custom game DotA, League of Legends and Dota 2 (Valve Corporation, 2013 – present). Through grasping the differing modes of governance in each of these games, the aim of this thesis is to exemplify how MOBAs are a genre imbricated with affective forms of playful interaction that both sustain and at times threaten the hybrid power dynamics of this heterogeneous genre.

ABSTRACT Purpose ‐ This paper aims to address the emerging post-millennium trends in co-creational marketing, in the context of how these trends apply to the recorded and live sectors of the music industry. Consideration of marketing as a broadened concept to include societal processes has implications not only for the marketing concept itself, but also for the roles of the parties implicitly involved in the marketing process. Therefore, the standard and polarising marketing clichés of &amp;quot;firm and customer&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;buyer and seller&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;producer and consumer&amp;quot; may be replaced with a more contemporary marketing approach in which value can be created and shared by either party. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Initially the paper provides a review of contemporary literature on co-creational aspects of marketing and a subsequent identification of typologies of co-creation practices. Conceptual frameworks pertaining to the relationships of these typologies are then proposed. An extensive review and analysis of journal articles, industry reports and news sources on music industry marketing was conducted. From this review and analysis, 30 examples of co-creational marketing were identified. The music industry was chosen as it constitutes a relevant and contemporary marketing context due to the existence of interactive technology and changing consumer preferences regarding their interaction with music intermediaries and against a context of digital piracy. Findings ‐ Five typologies of co-creational marketing were found to be relevant to the music industry. Key examples of co-creational marketing within the music industry are discussed and analysed in relation to the identified typologies and conceptual frameworks. Research limitations/implications ‐ The relevancy of co-creational marketing practices to the music industry is investigated, followed by consideration of managerial implications and future research directions. Originality/value ‐ The theoretical prospect of value co-creation through active consumer contributions to the marketing process is not revolutionary or new, but the implications of such a potential shift in power or influence have developed into a contemporary challenge for marketers.

This article revolves around fansubbing, a subtitling-based mediation phenomenon whose emergence and consolidation in recent years has gone hand in hand with the globalisation of Japanese animated cinema. The paper begins with an overview of (i) the origins and rationale for the popularity of anime in Japan and beyond; (ii) the first attempts to localise anime into other languages; and (iii) the contribution of fansubbing to the expansion of anime fandom worldwide. The article then proceeds to delve into the organisation of the fansubbing process and outline its most distinctive practices. The final section appraises the potential for propagation of fansubbing practices within a fast-changing cultural landscape, drawing on the theoretical models that media sociology has developed to account for similar developments in the audiovisual marketplace.

Researchers in the fields of arts and culture in recent years have extensively investigated the participation of consumers in value creation. Surprisingly, however, the music industry, which has undergone profound changes, has not been the subject of much research. The author uses the data from 18 qualitative interviews to try to better understand consumers’ participation in value creation and to put the phenomenon into perspective in terms of the literature.

While social media is, by definition, about connecting multiple people, many discussions about social media platforms and practices presume that accounts and profiles are managed by individual users with the agency to make fully-informed choices about their activities. When discussing children, especially younger children, their agency is at times characterised as partial, or emerging, but with the presumption that with sufficient time they will eventually reach the same (presumed) status and ability as adult users (Livingstone & Third, 2017). At the other end of life, at the moment of death, the social media traces and online presences that persist after a user has passed away also present challenges in terms of agency.  While there is an increasing push to include some sort of instructions about digital property in wills, these instructions are currently few and far between. Some platforms have deployed algorithmic solutions which have begun to address the reality of deceased users, but these are, at best, partial and largely insufficient responses. With these two figures in mind, I argue that the very young—from conception to birth and early infancy—and the recently deceased both act as liminal figures where the question of their (lack of) agency on social media highlights some of the ongoing challenges in presuming that social media traces can always be the responsibility of users with full, or even partial, agency. Rather, using a range of examples, I argue in this chapter that more encompassing ways of thinking about the relationship between social media, networked selves and identities, are needed. Drawing on work from the creative industries, I suggest that the term co-creation can be reframed to emphasise the way that social media almost always entails creating other people’s identities as much as our own. Parents and carers are the first arbiters and co-creators of a young person’s life, making a large number of important choices about what sort of private or public online presence a newly born baby will have, how that presence will develop over time, on which platforms, and under which circumstances. Parents, in effect, can choose to name their children into being online, and in doing so must navigate the parental joys of sharing whilst balancing this against the rights of the child to, amongst other things, privacy in the present and future. At the other end of life, but in functionally similar ways, the loved ones left behind by the recently deceased will often need to make decisions about which social media profiles and traces persist after that user has died, how these traces will be (re)framed, and what online spaces will persist (if any), possibly in the form of online memorials. Moreover, both ends of life are now situated in an online context where real identities and real names, which persist over time, are both expected and demanded by the policies and practices of online platforms. The use of real names on social media amplifies the impact and longevity of social media traces, whether early or late in life. In outlining the challenges inherent in framing the very young, and the recently deceased, online, I argue in this chapter that a broader sense of agency and impact is needed across all life-stages on social media.  A wider lens in terms of the way users contribute to the stories of each other on social media may well assist us all in making decisions about online material that inevitably impact the lives and legacies of other people.

The role of playful innovations in the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre has become a hugely important, contested and under studied activity. Through a case study of the ‘fountain hook’ and an exploration of exploitative and emergent notions of play, this paper explores how the dynamics of co-creativity function in online play spaces such as the MOBA genre. In what ways these co-creative dynamics impact different stakeholders of the play space and open up critical questions similar to that of wider participatory platforms is a particular focus here. Informed by online ethnographic research that forms part of a wider PhD project this paper also touches upon specific themes related to the unexplored genre of MOBAs such as why they are so appealing and what it is that makes them so challenging to study.

It is not possible to speak of a single systems approach. There are rather of a number of systems approaches, each loosely drawing on different aspects of a family composed mainly of, general system theory, cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory. Systems approaches have been used in most of the social sciences, particularly sociology and management, but their use has extended into the arts and humanities.Creativity researchers have used systems approaches drawing on very different sources and in very different ways. The main focus has been to highlight creativity as a phenomenon that occurs in the context of multiple systems, and therefore involves a network of interactions.

Part 1, Chapter 2: Composing Sociality: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition Design

Composing sociality is a group practice in which artwork functions in tandem with natural social systems.  Composing sociality is a feedback loop: group irreconcilabilities reveal features of the artist’s work that feed back once again into people’s everyday lives. Sound artwork can be positioned anywhere socially, spatially, or temporally and may include any imaginable ways that sound and music help the organizational structures of a collectivity, financially, for morale, or otherwise. This may include the artist’s imagined design structures, networking possibilities, or other social interfaces in which they are involved that include the use of sound and music.

First, I reframe the term “composition” in the light of sound studies and then I reevaluate the premises of experimental music and sound work as founded in the mid-twentieth century by John Cage and others in order to identify and isolate unhelpful biases that have enervated the broadening of sound aesthetics in the academy and still inhibit forms of sonic collectivity such as composing sociality. Thereafter, I consider aesthetic issues of authorship and control within a process of co-creation and how I have looked to transition design concepts as a guide in the seemingly contradictory scenario of art that deals with society as one of its materials. Then I describe one way the artist’s imagination can specifically and analytically engage to encompass an expanded field of social relations in sound art—“social tonality.” Finally, I consider how sound and music may possibly function as a public contract in a gift economy, and, therefore, even as an alternative kind of currency, where mutual support and investigative listening can become a means toward group self- realization. Along the way I consider, by way of example, approaches to composing sociality by Brian Harnetty, Brandon LaBelle, Laura Mello, Carlos Sandoval, and Ultra-red among others. I conclude by contextualizing the concept of social composition further by describing a few of my own experimental sound works with urban gardens.