Uncommon Sense and Learning Initiatives

I took part in a Creative Research Network day this Wednesday at Kent University: Canterbury. The theme, Creative Campus, could not have had a more inspirational setting. One of their myriad initiatives is the building of an outdoor labyrinth, placed on the slopes of the campus with a view of Canterbury Cathedral. This was the idea of Dr. Jan Sellers and funded by her National Teaching Fellowship Award.
Walking a labyrinth has for centuries been an aid to contemplation, and contemplation often opens the gates of the imagination. This, and indeed the whole day, led me to a number of thoughts.
To propose such an initiative seems to me a quantum leap of the imagination, and possibly the setting aside for a while, of what we might call common sense. In my early work as a theatre designer and actor I found that common sense was the biggest threat to producing innovative and exciting work.
I doubt that Samuel Beckett would have got very far with Waiting for Godot, if he had been required to submit a three page “treatment” or synopsis. The same could be applied to James Joyce’s Ulysses. I then thought about the horrors of Design by Committee, often encountered in my Library Design work. And finally, sitting watching people walking the Canterbury Labyrinth, my eye wandered to the spires of the distant Cathedral, and I thought of Antoni Gaudi and his "crazy" but superb Cathedral of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona
Submitting Gaudi’s design as a proposal to a committee based on conventional thinking, and common sense, might well have killed it before it had a chance to draw breath. Sometimes it requires a brave dislocation of thinking, or a discontinuity in the evolution of ideas, to innovate. Maybe this makes uncommon sense.