AMIS

Purpose & approach

The aim of AMIS is to investigate how artistic methods can be applied — and what new possibilities they open — in contexts beyond the art world. The project is timely and consequential in light of the many challenges society faces today, where artistic experiences and competencies become important resources for sustainable development and social transformation. AMIS builds directly on the artistic research project Music in Disorder (2016–19, KMH), with its focus on improvisational practices grounded in generative vagueness and productive disordering.

Research unfolds within the project's transdisciplinary group, in collaboration with artists, scholars, and co-researchers from industry. Studies take place in co-creation labs that combine artworks and aesthetic experiments to develop shared working practices nurturing both artistic creation and sustainable innovation.

The artistic research strand develops concepts and methods for how art can contribute to social transformation and engage contemporary challenges, while also producing new artworks. The innovation and organisation strand uses participatory action research to explore how arts-based methods can reshape innovation, sustainability, and transdisciplinarity in industry.

Among the questions explored: how artistic methods of co-creation can offer

• new ways of drawing on the knowledge and competencies within a team for design, innovation, or development;
• new ways of connecting to sources of inspiration and imagination beyond one's immediate expertise, particularly in relation to questions of sustainability;
• new ways of supporting the distribution of creativity across multiple persons and groups.

Expected outcomes

The project pursues three aims.

1. 01

   Generate new knowledge and understanding of how artistic methods for co-creation can be successfully applied to industrial innovation and development.

2. 02

   Strengthen the industry partners' capacity for innovation by developing individual and collective skills for artfulness, applying these in workplace settings — and potentially contributing to systemic transformation.

3. 03

   Generate new knowledge about how an artistic research methodology can invite transdisciplinary feedback loops between conceptual and aesthetic-practical domains, between art and innovation, and between academy and industry.

Artists and artistic researchers also produce new artworks as part of the project's artistic research strand.

Research questions

RQ1

How can arts-based interventions — drawing on artistic research in improvisation and co-creation — strengthen organisational capability for innovation and systemic transformation?

RQ2

How can the co-learning activities involved in the interventions contribute to both artistic research and innovation research by emphasising a transdisciplinary process-relational approach?

Partners

Partners come from different sectors — manufacturing, logistics, consulting — reflecting the cross-cutting nature of the research.

• Scania
  Commercial vehicles manufacturing
• PostNord
  Postal services
• Implement Consulting Group
  Management consulting

Team

• Klas Nevrin
  Principal Investigator · Artistic researcher
  KMH
• Janna Holmstedt
  Artistic researcher
  The Posthumanities Hub
• Nina Bozic Yams
  Innovation & organisation researcher
  RISE
• Thomas Arctaedius
  Professor of Entrepreneurship
  KMH
• Emilie Lidgard
  Project coordinator
  KMH

Key concepts

AMIS extends and translates methods developed in Music in Disorder into non-artistic settings: mobile concepts (engaging useful vagueness), enabling constraints (flexible principles instead of rigid rules), productive disordering (enhancing indeterminacy and nonlinear dynamics), and counterplay (resisting adaptation and domination). The move from music to industry tests the transferability of a process-relational approach in concrete, high-stakes contexts.

Work unfolds through a participatory action research (PAR) approach: researchers, artists, and business partners co-create knowledge in iterative cycles of experiential learning — action, experience, reflection, conceptualisation — in line with artistic research methodologies that emphasise performativity as "repetition with difference."