| 1. |
Akimenko, D., Sarantou, M. & Miettinen, S. , Collaborative art and storytelling as an empowering tool for social design. , Routledge Publishers, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003227557 , 60-75, 2023.01, This chapter draws on two workshops carried out with a group of Anangu Aboriginal artists and the Fibrespace Incorporated textile artist group in South Australia. The two workshops are part of a two-year project titled ‘Women Living on the Edges of the World’, which is also informally known as ‘Margin to Margin’. The chapter discusses the role of art, storytelling and narrative practice as a means for local empowerment by focusing on the front end of social design processes, when artistic and social design methods are used to familiarise the participants, designers, artists or artist-researchers with one another. Empathy refers to the capacity to understand the elements that shape the realities and situations people face. Empowerment refers to the degree of self-determination and autonomy in groups or individuals and the ability to represent their interests responsibly and in the way they determine.. |
| 2. |
Sofia Lindström Sol, Andrea Kárpáti, Melanie Sarantou, Carolina Gutiérrez Novoa, Silvia Remotti, AMASS Policy White Paper, Zenodo OpenAire, 10.5281/zenodo.6596502, 1-39, 2022.05, Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) is an EU Horizon 2020 research project funded under the theme of Societal Challenges and the Arts, which focuses on the cultural rights perspective of marginalisation and its effects on other forms of exclusion in Europe. Using arts-based interventions, this project aims to address marginalisation challenges through community involvement and community building. This white paper compiles the outcomes of research studies and previous arts
interventions (Section One) and the European testbed of arts-based interventions (Section Two). These insights form the basis of the identified needs and corresponding recommendations, which can be read in
Section Three. Below is a summary of the sections. As part of the AMASS project, qualitative and systematic literature reviews were performed to understand the current research discourse on the assessment of arts-based interventions with a social focus in Europe. According to our analysis, culture and the arts are framed as participatory, sometimes therapeutic, means of empowering individuals and communities to assert agency over their own lives, develop and express their identities and strengthen local learning and development initiatives. Our results also point to effects that can be problematised as negative, such as the social reproduction of dominant groups’ values and practices at the expense of marginalised groups. Thus, the arts are not a given good but can depend on context. Previous arts-based interventions often lacked the personnel and financial resources to continue after the end of the funding period. In many cases, the assessment of project results was anecdotal or lacking. As a result, the power of the arts for social well-being and cultural integration could not be convincingly revealed. The AMASS European testbed included 35 arts-based case studies to evaluate the impact of these approaches in addressing marginalisation. The outcomes of these testbeds were compiled around tasks designed to achieve the following: 1. Develop and sustain innovative artsbased projects 2. Collect, analyse and evaluate data to measure the impact of the projects 3. Encourage active participation as an added value 4. Promote networking and new modes of dissemination to increase impact 5. Sustainable use of public spaces to engage communities 6. Renew the promotion of culture using technology 7. Support cognitive development through art education. |
| 3. |
Daria Akimenko, Melanie Sarantou, Satu Miettinen, Collaborative art and storytelling as an empowering tool for social design, Empathy and Business Transformation, 10.4324/9781003227557-6, 60-75, 2022.10, This chapter draws on two workshops carried out with a group of Anangu Aboriginal artists and the Fibrespace Incorporated textile artist group in South Australia. The two workshops are part of a two-year project titled ‘Women Living on the Edges of the World’, which is also informally known as ‘Margin to Margin’. The chapter discusses the role of art, storytelling and narrative practice as a means for local empowerment by focusing on the front end of social design processes, when artistic and social design methods are used to familiarise the participants, designers, artists or artist-researchers with one another. Empathy refers to the capacity to understand the elements that shape the realities and situations people face. Empowerment refers to the degree of self-determination and autonomy in groups or individuals and the ability to represent their interests responsibly and in the way they determine.. |
| 4. |
Heidi Pietarinen, Amna Qureshi, Melanie Sarantou, Flag, Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse, 10.4324/9781003285175-22, 217-227, 2022.12, The Flag workshop explores visual and multisensory thinking as an internal process for the University of Lapland’s fashion, textile art and material study students and artist-researchers (authors). The students verbalised and visualised their ideas, thoughts and feelings, which led to the initial ideas and material experiments being transformed into sketches. This culminated in the Flag: A Shared Horizon installation. The colourful and kinetic installation Net, emerging from Flag, mirrors the shared horizons of youth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting extended global lockdowns. The installation came about in Agora Hall in the F-Wing of the University of Lapland. Both Flag and Nets are metaphors that look beyond the obvious challenges youth have faced during the pandemic, redefining their diverse understandings of hope, fear, needs and what constitutes novel ideas what they want in the future. Thinking towards the unknown can reveal insights into the underlying narratives, while arts-based methods can open up new approaches to the different challenges faced by society. Net will represent the portrait of the participating youth from December 2021 to February 2022. The objective of the workshop was to provide these youth with knowledge about pluralism and how to apply it in their (re)design thinking. It was a process for applying a lens of pluralism to a real youth-based workshop, solving problems by prioritising their (the participants’) needs above all else and sharing what they learned in the workshop.. |
| 5. |
Satu Miettinen, Enni Mikkonen, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, Melanie Sarantou, Introduction, Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse, 10.4324/9781003285175-1, 1-14, 2022.12, This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a practical four-step approach to the challenges presented concerning how organisations can turn from merely feeling empathy with or for people to actions of empathy and compassion that can be implemented with and by communities. It discusses how refugee youth’s well-being and integration into societies can be strengthened through creativity and arts-based approaches, here as a way to strengthen their sense of belonging and connection to new environments. The book discusses how love and hate letters were used to gauge customer satisfaction and build empathy through digital business. It explores the relationship between historic and local stories, place making and empathy.. |
| 6. |
Amna Qureshi, Melanie Sarantou, Satu Miettinen, Meaning-making and interpretation through personal mandalas in the context of visual literacy, Journal of Visual Literacy, 10.1080/1051144X.2022.2132625, 41, 3-4, 247-260, 2022.10, This research investigates the significance of creative freedom and self-expression through the visual analysis of artworks produced in a workshop under the theme ‘Visual Literacy’. This multi-layered qualitative study presents the findings from a participatory arts-based research approach that elicits students’ creative expression through their personal mandalas. Artworks collected from this creative process were assessed using the interpretive phenomenological analysis method whereas the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL) was used as an assessment tool. Supporting youth through arts-based interventions and motivating them to communicate their feelings and perceptions can be an integral part of students’ creative development. Hence, as the focus of the study, this paper aims to illustrate the youths’ perception, interpretation, and meaning-making through the artistic creative processes to stimulate their creative and critical thinking. . |
| 7. |
Marija Griniuk, Daria Akimenko, Satu Miettinen, Heidi Pietarinen, Melanie Sarantou, Multiperspective take on pluriversal agenda in artistic research, Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse, 10.4324/9781003285175-5, 40-54, 2022.12, Rigid structures and differences in the sociocultural contexts of art academies and universities across the world can limit cross-disciplinary collaboration and network building. Artistic and arts-based research has the potential to unfold a transition in art and design fields, merging them into a cross-disciplinary arena that summons radical innovation. Based on the concept of the pluriverse, this chapter explores speculative scenarios of envisioning the future of artistic research by analysing four case studies. These cases apply similar methods in engagement with diverse audiences to disseminate multiple themes or concerns (social, environmental and cultural) and to represent different medialities/medial situations and scales of collaboration, hence contributing to the concept of the pluriverse within arts-based research and artistic research projects. This chapter addresses the following four questions: For whose benefit is artistic research initiated? Who is doing artistic research? With and by whom is artistic research conducted? Why is artistic research conducted? Hence, the social aspects of artistic research are explored to better understand the relationship between collaborative practices and research. The ‘social’ in the scope of this chapter includes a wider group of agents, including nonhuman contributors. After an overview of theory behind the key themes—artistic research, arts-based research and the pluriverse—the authors proceed with autoethnographic analysis of the above-mentioned questions through the prism of their personal experiences and specific case studies from their respective artistic research practices. Further application of these autoethnographies in discussing the pluriversal agenda results in an outline of the profile of a contemporary researcher and the social aspects of her research, both in and beyond institutional settings.. |
| 8. |
Melanie Sarantou, The Role of the Arts in Mitigating Societal Challenges, 2022.05. |
| 9. |
Mariluz Soto Hormazábal, Katherine Mollenhauer, Satu Miettinen, Melanie Sarantou, Building a community through service design and responsiveness to emotions, Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research, 10.4324/9781003053408, 123-145, 2021.04, This chapter focuses on decolonising practices in service design in a quality certification project carried out for a Master of Design programme in Chile. The process resulted in a change of perspective, from that of a strict and formal quality certification process of a postgraduate programme, which is a requirement in the Chilean education system, to one that involved the co-definition and co-creation of a community. Measures of improvement of the programme were explored by integrating sensitive and fundamental emotions identified by the students, graduates and teachers of the programme. The research methods for data collection included workshops, surveys and collecting testimonials. Significant findings illuminated the role of the service designer–facilitator as the promoter of dialogue and creator of an optimal atmosphere for co-creation, and how decolonising approaches in service design through a continuous process of reflection on achievements and emotional and behavioural processes strengthened a sense of belonging and collaboration throughout the process.
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| 10. |
Melanie Sarantou, Mira Alhonsuo, Carolina Gutiérrez Novoa, Silvia Remotti, Generating Stakeholder Workshops for Policymaking in Digital Environments through Participatory Service Design, Malta Review of Educational Research, 15, Supplement Issue, 119-136, 2021.11, This article presents the design and research process of a design team of four designer-researchers, who are also the authors of this article and collaborated to develop training guidelines and a toolset for stakeholder workshops. The intention was to use the series of stakeholder workshops as a key method for developing policy recommendations about the role of arts in mitigating societal challenges. The stakeholder workshops were implemented across Europe by the partners of the European Commission H2020-funded project, Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS). Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the designer-researchers had to transfer all activities, such as face-to-face workshops and their own work processes, to a digital environment and online participation. The digital toolset and user guidelines were aimed at training the project partners to conduct stakeholder workshops and collect data for creating cultural policy roadmaps that would be context-specific for the European region where they were located. The design process for creating the digital artefacts, such as the digital toolset, user guidelines and online workshop environment, is discussed in this article, in addition to this study’s opportunities and limitations.. |
| 11. |
Heidi Pietarinen, Melanie Sarantou, Intersectional approaches to ecological restoration, recreation of commons, 2021.06, Task:
Incl.
- Artist talk with Professor Heidi Pietarinen and Dr Melanie Sarantou Melanie (25 min)
- Lecture titled ‘Atmospheric Encounters’ with Prof. Heidi Pietarinen (30 min)
The task focuses on learning that can arise from different sensory experiences through listening, seeing, feeling and other ways of perceiving the environment and the effects we can have when interacting with it. The task may expect you, for example, to look differently to see the and to see what we usually do not see. The task may also ask you to engage through different temporalities (e.g. slowness) and ways of thinking. The purpose of the task is to understand how bioart can assist us to engage with aspects of biomimicry that can enable us to understand our societies differently, in addition to reflect on our roles, both collectively and individually, within our societies.
You will work in teams to explore a way of mark-making within your environment. You can choose any medium within your environment to create traces or marks. Sustainable choices could for example be to explore working with wind or water, to create and document your mark-making. You can document your ‘traces’ with either photo or video tools available to you. We encourage you to explore techniques, such as (but not limited to) frottage, printing, embossing, non-human line drawing, non-human stitching as forms of mark making or tracing.
We also ask that you afterwards reflect through storytelling and group discussion on:
•your choices of methods
•sustainability of your choices
•ethical implications of your choices
•your ‘traces’ and their relation to bioart
•biomimicry and what you learned from it that relates to societal structures and possibilities for autonomy
Please document (method of documentation would be your choice is as well) your discussion. You can disseminate or share your findings in any medium of your choice, either in social media or in a simple folder of which you can send us the link to: melanie.sarantou@ulapland.fi.
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| 12. |
Mirja Hiltunen, Pieta Koskenniemi, Melanie Sarantou, Love Talks and Neighbourhood, Malta Review of Educational Research, 15, Supplement Issue, 97-117, 2021.11, This article will introduce the Love Talks and Neighbourhood (later Love
Talks) project, part of the AMASS, Acting on the Margin: Arts as Social
Sculpture project. Love Talks was realised in Finnish Lapland in 2020, as
part of an effort by local artists and art education students to explore how
arts initiatives can build tolerant, community-focused neighbourhoods,
while reflecting on how such activities can be scaled up to larger
initiatives. The artists and art educators involved in the project took on
the roles of teachers, developers, enablers, curators, facilitators, producers
and creators of a new dialogic operational culture. The project asked
whether socially engaged art can provide new tools for social interaction
and increased collaboration. Can it lead to a new dialogue, critical
discussions and new forums for participation? This paper highlights the
importance of paying attention to how activities are organised and
realised in the diverse and often challenging environments characteristic
of socially engaged art and community-based art education. It explores
how to promote encounters, tolerance and well-being through the use of
art, and the role of culture and art in promoting social inclusion, capacity
building, networking and participation in daily life and living
environments.. |
| 13. |
Tarja Pääkkönen, Melanie Sarantou, Satu Miettinen, Meaning Innovations with Design Support, Design Management Journal, 10.1111/dmj.12070, 16, 1, 79-92, 2021.10, This interdisciplinary article views meaning innovations as socially constructed and reflects on designing in the context of potential harmful consequences within information technology (IT) contexts. In the shift from products towards services, digital platforms and technology designers have gained a mediating and more strategic role while developing multiple connections and interactions between products, touchpoints, users and suppliers. The design manager is involved in organisational strategizing and innovating. Following key principles of design, the context of all those affected by design should be considered. Meaning innovations may emerge when designers facilitate, partially guide and are guided by strategic goals and innovation discourses in organisational settings in conjunction with numerous others. Based on a literature review and reflection on empirical findings, this article suggests paths for designing meaningfulness through an exploration of material lifecycles, digital content, algorithms and data transparency in digital contexts. The concept of meaning innovation is suggested to encourage organisations to reflect on decisions regarding responsibility, sustainability and transparency beyond the mainstream customer focus leading to improved organizational sensemaking and decisions, supported by design.. |
| 14. |
Melanie Sarantou, ‘My Piece of Heaven’, Human. Culture. Education., 10.34130/2233-1277-2020-1-100-119, 35, 1, 100-119, 2020.03, The articles discuses improvisatory processes through the recognition and actuation of affordances within specific environments and situations. The synergistic relationships between resourcefulness and improvisation, and people’s interactions within their given environments, will be addressed through two arts-based activities that were conducted with a student community in Arctic Murmansk, Russia, as part of the Margin to Margin project. The article will discuss and analyse the role that affordances play in intricate, familiar and unfamiliar environments, especially those that are associated with making, the arts and improvisation. The arts-based activities drew from varied art-based methods and narrative approaches to data collection and analysis, such as storytelling, textile arts practices and making, narrative analysis, self-reflection and diarising. The outcome of the article explores the dynamic role of improvisation to address challenges by recognising and actuation affordances within the environments in which art and design makers, but also researchers, work and function.. |
| 15. |
Melanie Sarantou, A Model of Positive Strategic Sensemaking for Meaningfulness, Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management, 10.33114/adim.2019.03.217, 2019.11. |
| 16. |
Melanie Sarantou, Ageing communities as co-designers of social innovation, China Journal of Social Work, 10.1080/17525098.2019.1700342, 12, 3, 273-286, 2019.09, This paper addresses the social phenomenon of ageing and emphasizes the importance of past experiences of ageing individuals when creating new solutions to deal with the issue of elderly care. Thus, this paper explores what role the ageing community can play in creating new service solutions for social innovation in senior care and also looks to ascertain how past experiences of the elderly can empower them to develop their own services. A comparative analysis is adopted as a method to respond to these aims. Two projects are used for this comparative analysis. Life 2.0 focused on generating information and communication technology services to provide a platform of support in social interaction for ageing people throughout the EU. BoAi focused on exploring the possibility of transferring the ‘good old days’ into current elderly care services in China.. |
| 17. |
Melanie Sarantou, Decolonising Namibian Arts and Design through Improvisation, Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management, 10.33114/adim.2019.02.364, 2019.11, The research investigates the role of service design and improvisation as decolonising practice. It is based on case study research with a focus group consisting of Namibian artists, designers, artisans and arts organisations who participated in artistic and cultural exchange activities of the Art South-South Trust (ASST), a start-up Namibian not for profit (NFP) organisation. The goal of ASST was to increase visibility of the focus group members, enable global exposure and create an arena for multi-vocality. The paper creates a practical framework for decolonising practices in Namibian arts and design by drawing on reflective practice to analyse the activities of ASST alongside interview data collected from Namibian and Australian partner organisations and participants in the program. Critical thinking is used to evaluate the impact of realised activities and processes both in situ in Namibia and in exchange in Australia. This paper explores practices that can enable decolonising processes in Namibian arts and design spheres . |
| 18. |
Melanie Sarantou, Design for Care in the Peripheries: Arts-based Research as an Empowering Process with Communities, Nordes 2019, 1604-9705, 2019.06. |
| 19. |
Melanie Sarantou, Sanna Sillgren, Laura Pokela, In her lap, Relate Nort, 84-107, 2019.12, The significance of laps, specifically women’s laps, as bodily spheres in which making, learning and other informal activities take place remains predominantly unrecognised. The relationship between making, bodily spaces, places and laps is explored herein through self-portrayals of the three authors, or artist-researchers, each of whom provide personal anecdotes, observations and reflections on their experiences with lapwork. The chapter employs the methodological strategy of arts-based research (ABR), supported by a collaborative autoethnographic (CAE) approach. Research methods used include group discussions, observations, probes and self-documentation through note taking and photography. The contribution of this chapter to knowledge is the sustainable role of lapwork in making practices in extreme environments such as the North and the Arctic. The role of laps in supporting embodied learning enables the reinterpretation of spaces that support thinking and learning while doing and making.. |
| 20. |
Melanie Sarantou, In her lap: Embodied learning through making., Relate North: Collaborative Art, Design and Education., 2019.12. |
| 21. |
Satu Miettinen, Melanie Sarantou, Introduction, Managing Complexity and Creating Innovation through Design, 10.4324/9780429022746, 1-12, 2019.04, This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a practical four-step approach to the challenges presented concerning how organisations can turn from merely feeling empathy with or for people to actions of empathy and compassion that can be implemented with and by communities. It discusses how refugee youth’s well-being and integration into societies can be strengthened through creativity and arts-based approaches, here as a way to strengthen their sense of belonging and connection to new environments. The book discusses how love and hate letters were used to gauge customer satisfaction and build empathy through digital business. It explores the relationship between historic and local stories, place making and empathy.. |
| 22. |
Melanie Sarantou, Exploring Mapping Tools for Service Design through the Voitto Project, The Lure of Lapland: A handbook of Arctic Art and Design, 2018.12. |
| 23. |
Melanie Sarantou, Fashion Design: The connective role of improvisation in new learning experiences, Universal Journal of Educational Research, 10.13189/ujer.2018.060627, 6, 6, 1358-1364, 2018.06, Improvisatory processes are considered synonymous with play, offering only second-best solutions to art and design problems. The role of improvisation in visual art processes is not widely discussed academically. This paper draws on a case study situated in Namibian art worlds to reflect on the role of improvisation in fluid and complex design and art processes. In Namibian contexts, improvisation is closely related to how artists and designers work instead of only being ‘play’, as improvisatory processes often respond to pressing demands and notions of having to do what needs to be done to sustain livelihoods. This paper documents and learns from the experiences and stories of Namibian art and design practitioners. The connective role of improvisation in design moments, allowing practitioners to negotiate multidirectional processes, often result in becoming unstuck in art and design processes. A holistic approach to improvisation, based on the understanding of lived experiences and actions within environments in which resources are utilised to solve design problems and build new experiences, is explored. Additionally, through improvisatory processes, learning is stimulated through new experiences that come about by utilizing the available resources within a given environment.. |
| 24. |
Melanie Sarantou, Margin to Margin: arts-based research for digital outreach to marginalised communities., The Journal of Community Informatics, 10.15353/joci.v14i1.3407, 14, 1, 2018.11, This paper discusses the artistic activity titled “Conversations with the edge” that was executed by communities in Australia, Russia and Finland, and curated for an exhibition at the Helinä Rautavaara Museum in Espoo, Finland in 2017. This activity was created in the context of “Margin to Margin: Women living on the edges of the world”, a larger arts-based research project that took place between four geographical margins: outback South Australia, Finnish Lapland, Russian Kola Peninsula and Namibia. “Margin to Margin” was a collaboration between artist communities with the aim to explore the relationship between art making and empowerment of makers living and working ‘on the edges’. The aim of the project was to understand the realities marginalised communities face whilst giving voice to these communities by exhibiting their art in various formats, stimulating digital participation and utilising technology for digital inclusion. The purpose of the paper is to develop a model that will guide virtual arts-based project mediation for digital outreach in both urban and regionally situated marginalised communities.. |
| 25. |
Melanie Sarantou, Laps as complex and intimate spaces, Museums and Feminism, Vol. 1, 2017.12. |
| 26. |
Melanie Sarantou, Collaborative art and storytelling as an empowering tool for service design: South Australian case study, For profit, for good: Developing organizations through service design, 1457-0068, 2016.12. |
| 27. |
Melanie Sarantou, Namibian narratives: Postcolonial identities in craft and design, 2014.12, This study presents the first holistic mapping of Namibian craft and design through narrative and commerce. At the centre of this study are the people of the Namibian craft and design world. With a focus on an independent and postcolonial Namibia, this study considers the impact of social and environmental forces on artefact makers and their artefacts. Thus, the cultural and social influences on rural and urban artefact makers, the roles narratives play in artefact making and marketing practices in different settings, and the presence of Namibian artefacts in craft and tourist markets of the southern African region are mapped. An ethnographic approach is followed in mapping the world(s) of Namibian craft and design. This approach is underpinned by scholarly work on narratives, craft and design theory and the practical application of postcolonial theory in fieldwork, analysis and representation of data.
This holistic mapping addresses the lack of coordinated strategies in, and theoretical knowledge about, Namibian craft and design. The thesis explores how Namibian artefact makers negotiate and sustain their identities and existences through their practices, and why they continue their practices in spite of the challenges they face. Their narratives reveal how their quality of life and work environments impact on their craft practices. Just as artefact making offers ways to ‘work through’ their particular life challenges, storytelling offers ways to make sense of difficult circumstances. This thesis demonstrates how stories and artefacts function in social realms and suggests that stories play a crucial role in socially sustaining Namibian artefact makers and their making practices. The potential contribution of stories to sustainable marketing is also demonstrated. Most importantly, this holistic mapping identifies the challenges of maintaining sustainable craft and design practices in Namibia and presents some opportunities for their development.. |
| 28. |
Melanie Sarantou, A dynamic identity-building process contributing to Namibian couture design, 2008.12. |
