CATALYZING the Conversation: Designing Peace
By Dr Mary McBride
Issue 12 Summer | Fall 2013<
A world of seven billion requires a generative impulse-a desire to nourish and nurture, engage and enable. Generativity requires creativity, but creativity is often very individual and focused on expression in form. Generativity is collaborative and focused on generating new possibilities in a variety of forms. It finds its expression in the way we encounter each other and in our intentions toward each other. It is explicitly and unabashedly caring.
Generative leaders use their creativity strategically to discover and define, design and deliver futures filled with options and opportunities. This is not always easy. It can be especially difficult at a time when economies are stagnant, and for many young people the future seems to be on hold.
But generativity is the antidote to stagnation. It strives toward the possible and encourages exploration.
This issue of Catalyst begins our exploration of the generative impulse at play in the creative professions. This impulse is generating new creative economies and securing human rights. The actions we take now can generate new options for the many-if we care, collaborate and create.
Designing peace will be essential to generating futures. A world at war expends its energy on protecting the boundary of what is. Peace creates a horizon of possibility-a movement toward what might be.
In this issue, we 
went in search of the peacemakers and shapers and even the peace entrepreneurs. You will meet the cultural curators and creative strategists who are on the leading edge of change.
They remind us that the economies of war- resource wars, geopolitical or trade wars- offer a stale and increasingly fragile security. Creative economies can do more than secure us behind boundaries of gender, class, national identity or “culture”.
Creativity + generativity can enable us to design objects and curate experiences that re-define who we are and who we might become.
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BACKGROUND IMAGE: New International Human Rights Logo, Designed by Predrag Stakic of Serbia, Unveiled in 2011.