Florian Dombois
Head of research, Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland
Claudia Mareis
Assistante scientfique, Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland
Artistic Investigations for
Managing Professionals in Healthcare
To research and interpret the managerial perception of physicians and managers in hospitals is usually a research question in sociology and organizational research. In 2006, however a group of researchers from a Swiss University of the Arts investigated this proposed topic also from an explicitly artistic/designerly perspective. The project team consisted of the following creative disciplines: media art, communication design, literary writing and drama (overview of the participating disciplines see below). The research team was joined by a practice partner from the field of education and further training in healthcare management.
Proceeding on a completed socio-scientific research effort, whose goal was to explore the individual and collective managerial self-perception of head doctors and hospital directors, designers and artists attempted to put that same interview material in a respectively specific medial form. Thereby, dichotomic research questions were of interest: on the one hand, it was a question of characterizing the extensive study material as compactly as possible in the form of a artistic/designerly presentation and encapsulate it. On the other hand, the demand for knowledge by the creative disciplines and their explicitly non-scientific presentational form should be examined. The result was an astonishing diversity and an amazing acuteness of analysis from the different creative and artistic perspectives.
The research project joined three different research perspectives. Initially, the interdisciplinary approach «Art as Research» shaped the strategy of the project: designers and artists from various disciplines did practice-led research against the background of their respective discipline on a mutual question. Secondly, specific desiderata of design research from the area of social communication were addressed. And thirdly, the socio-scientific background of the practice partner supplemented the project.
Focus of the presentation
The outlined research project offers a broad variety of issues with regard to quality questions within applied artistic research. The presentation of the full paper focuses on some selected quality aspects within the different approaches of the participating artistic disciplines. For instance different quality standards and criteria from both artists/designers and practice partner will be discussed. Besides quality standards between artistic/designerly and socio-scientific research approaches will be selectively compared and discussed.
