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In today's blog post, I talk about how a coalition of activist museums came to life and I invite you to join a week-long discussion about innovative tactics centred on the use of history.

New tactics are seldom found keeping your head down, dragging your feet on the beaten path. You want to create some quick-ass tactic or new institution from scratch? Here are two macro-sized creativity techniques.

But be warned. Creativity sometime lands you in an awkward place. That's the price to pay.

1. Leverage instinct into tactic. One way to steer your creativity into new territory is to take a fundamental human need or instinct and look for ways to turn it into a deliberate, self-aware method of serving your goals.

Take memory. Us humans have a natural propensity to want to remember the past by preserving some old fragments. It's why you're still holding on to that clump of baby hair and that illustrious, but awfully worn-out T-Shirt. Now how could you transform the basic human need for memory into a tool for building a culture of peace and human rights?

2. Combine same-olds to make new. Another avenue towards creation is to take two completely separate strands of human endeavour. Then try to make something new from that. It's a form of breeding. Like how babies come to most species.

So how about combining... traditional museum science, and... human rights activism. These sound heterogeneous enough, right?

That's the creative challenge folks like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Liberation War Museum, and the Gulag Museum at Perm 36 took on. Here's what Liz Ŝevčenko had to say in her tactical notebook The Power of Place: How historic sites can engage citizens in human rights issues. In their efforts to transform the memory instinct into method, and to entice museums to mate with activism, this conundrum tested their resolve:

"Most other museums, and funders of museums, compared their collections of Wedgwood or Vermeer to that of the Tenement Museum, which includes a few hundred buttons, a laundry ticket and a mummified rat found in our ceiling, and couldn’t see how we had much in common.", says Ŝevčenko.

"When we approached human rights and social welfare agencies, they said, “You’re a museum,” by which they meant something that was self-indulgent, precious and a big waste of time. So we felt caught between two worlds and began to fear that we would not survive unless we abandoned our mission", Ŝevčenko remembers.

I told you creativity isn't easy. Sounds like both worlds became quite stiff and puzzled about the new experiment.

Stranded as they were between two universes, what could our human-rights historians do? Well, twinkle twinkle, they could call on other stray stars around them.

So Liz Ŝevčenko and her team gathered other museums that shared an activist twist. And it sparked: they were able to connect like-minded dots in a brand new constellation called the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, an organization that Ŝevčenko calls “a kind of a support group for misfit museums.”

So keep creativity tip number 3 up your sleeve, just in case:

3. If you can't join with the big stars, shine with the other misfits.

— Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org

All week, from October 24 to 30, 2007, I invite you to join a discussion on The Power of Place: How Sites of Conscience Inspire Civic Engagement featuring practitioners from the International Coalition of Historical Sites of Conscience including Sarwar Ali, Trustee from Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh; and Ereshnee Naidu, Director of Programs for Africa and Asia at the International Coalition office in New York and former Project Manager for Memorialization at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa.

Later this week, I'll be sharing The Seven Wonders of Powerful Places, inspired by the tactical usefulness of Sites of Conscience Museums, on some of the ways THEN can serve NOW.