AMIS – Artistic Co-creation Methods for Innovation and Sustainability

How can artistic co-creation methods be used to stimulate work on innovation and sustainability? This is one of the central questions in the research project AMIS. Combining artistic and scientific research, the project is conducted by a multidisciplinary research team in collaboration with Scania, PostNord, and Implement Consulting Group, alongside practicing artists.

Project purpose and research questions

The purpose of the project is to explore how artistic methods can be applied and create new opportunities in contexts outside the art world. The project is timely and valuable in light of the many challenges society faces today, where artistic experiences and skills can play a vital role in sustainable development and social change.

AMIS builds on the results of the artistic research project Music in Disorder, conducted between 2016 and 2019 at KMH, focusing on improvisational methods rooted in "generative vagueness" and "productive disorder".

The AMIS research project addresses two main questions:

• How can artistic interventions based on research in improvisation and co-creation contribute to innovation and systemic change for sustainability?
• How can these interventions contribute to both artistic and innovation research by emphasizing an interdisciplinary and process-relational approach?

Theory and method

The research will be conducted by the project’s interdisciplinary research group in collaboration with artists, researchers, and co-researchers from the business sector. The studies will take place in co-creation labs that combine artistic works and aesthetic experiments to develop shared approaches that promote artistic creation and sustainable innovation.

Artistic research

Focuses on developing concepts and methods for how art can contribute to social change, address contemporary challenges, and create new works of art

Innovation and organizational research

Uses participatory action research to examine how art-based methods can transform innovation, sustainability, and interdisciplinarity within the business sector.

Some of the questions the project will explore include how artistic co-creation methods can provide:

• New ways to leverage knowledge and skills within a team for design, innovation, or development.
• New approaches to accessing sources of inspiration and imagination beyond immediate expertise, particularly in relation to sustainability issues.
• New methods to support the distribution of creativity across multiple individuals and groups.

Expected Outcomes

The project has three main objectives:

1. Generate new knowledge and understanding of how artistic co-creation methods can be successfully used in industrial innovation and development.
2. Enhance industry partners’ ability to innovate by developing individual and collective skills for “artfulness,” applying these in the workplace, and potentially contributing to systemic change.
3. Create new knowledge about how an artistic research methodology can foster interdisciplinary feedback loops between conceptual and aesthetic-practical domains, between art and innovation, and between academia and industry.

Artists and artistic researchers will create new works of art, which will form part of the outcomes of the project’s artistic research branch.