Art-Science Collaboration: The Role of Problematization and Artefact Use

Collaboration between artists and scientists is often thought to benefit scientific creativity, the production of scientific knowledge that is both novel and of high quality. The added value of artists could be explained by the artist’s skills in problematization, i.e. the skill of criticising theories to find new interesting outcomes; and the tendency to self-create artefacts to find common ground and ease communication to bridge the languages of different disciplines. In the present paper, a first experimental look is taken at the role of problematization and artefact use during art-science collaboration in early stages of the scientific process, in a student sample, where existing knowledge is investigated to develop a research question. The results of the study showed that self-created artefacts are a valuable asset in the communication between artists and scientists, even contributing to the novelty and overall quality of research questions through the process of problematization. As such, the contribution of this paper is preliminary experimental evidence of the added value of artscience collaboration for scientific knowledge production, and the role of problematization and self-created artefacts therein.