Melanie A. C. Sarantou

• PhD (Visual Arts), MTech (Fashion), MBA (Marketing)
• Professor (Full) at Kyushu University

The chapter serves as an introduction to this multidisciplinary edited collection on sustainable, ethical, and responsible practices for the digitisation and digitalisation of Indigenous cultural heritage (CH), providing an overview of the many issues and perspectives discussed in the chapters. It sheds light on key concepts relevant to the whole b...

This study delves into the complex interplay among digital technologies, Indigenous art practices and heritage ethics, emphasising the need to reconsider digital approaches for sharing the arts and stories of Indigenous communities. Embracing arts-based research and Yarning as the research method, the study critically examines the ethical considera...

Intractable neurological diseases decrease the quality of life (QoL) of patients due to declines in their physical functioning. This chapter illustrates how design thinking was employed by design students to generate a significant number of creative ideas for improving patients’ QoL. The idea creation program was based on a design thinking model in...

Policymaking is creating, developing, and implementing strategies that guide decision-making and actions to regulate certain areas of interest and achieve specific goals. In contexts dealing with wellbeing and health care, policymaking not only governs the delivery, financing, organisation, and regulation of services and systems, but also aims to i...

Japan has a high population of elderly people, and worldwide, the number of elderly people residing in nursing homes continues to increase every year. This study explores concerns related to the quality of life (QoL) of residents in nursing homes from an inclusive design perspective. The research aims to obtain new insights into developing new prot...

This chapter considers the alarming social and environmental impacts of fast fashion and suggests that the positive impact of entrepreneurial fashion designers is essential to limiting the damage the apparel industry is responsible for, via innovative practices and sustainable fashion principles. Indeed, fashion entrepreneurs are the driving force...

With the opening of Japan’s first inclusive playground in 2020, playgrounds within Japanese parks are progressively moving towards inclusivity. Signage, serving as a vital link between parks and playgrounds, as well as within recreational facilities of the playgrounds, plays a crucial role in guiding people’s path-finding behavior. However, current...

This study aims to explore conditions that can bridge the gap between formulating design ideas and implementing action that focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by using design methods. To this end, we propose effective education methodologies that were used to implement the SDG guidelines through project activities by students from...

Bioart is a form of contemporary art, where non-human agents, that is, forces of nature contribute to the creative process. Correspondingly, the aim of copyright law is to protect artistic works, however according to the prevailing understanding only human-created expressions can be protected. From the perspective of European Union copyright law, t...

First starting in 2019, large construction projects are underway at Lapland Central Hospital, the northernmost hospital offering both primary healthcare and specialist care in Finnish Lapland. As a service provider, the hospital also covers healthcare services for children. One ongoing integration is focusing on children’s hospital services by prov...

Missä kulkevat elävää materiaalia hyödyntävän biotaiteen rajat? Millaista tietoa jää tieteellisen tutkimustyön ulkopuolelle? Miten biotaide voidaan muuttaa taidelähtöisten menetelmien kautta tiedoksi ja taiteelliseksi ajatteluksi? Esimerkiksi näihin kysymyksiin etsii vastausta Lapin yliopiston taiteiden tiedekuntaan vuonna 2021 perustettu BioARTech...

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 pe...

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’ (2016–2017). The role of art, storyt...

This research revisits individual and collaborative artistic processes to articulate the combination of creative skills to produce and document research outcomes. Various creative processes, such as costume-making, performance-making, artistic video, photo documentation and editing, came about under particular circumstances and with different objec...

One of the key objectives of the Horizon 2020-funded project, Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) is to evaluate and develop new policy frameworks for using arts to overcome societal challenges. This book illustrates some of the outcomes of the process the AMASS project partners have undertaken collectively to develop policy rec...

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 marginalisa...

This article explores the fashion-related initiatives adopted by a Namibian nongovernmental organization (NGO)—Ombetja Yehinga Organization (OYO)—between 2006 and 2009. This NGO used fashion-based activities and performances to promote important social messages to Namibian youth. The article uses collective autoethnographic (CAE), narrative accou...

This chapter explores the value of including digital storytelling in service design for improving the quality, safety and convenience of health-related services. The aim of the chapter is to explore how stories of healthcare experiences can be shared through digital tools to garner critical insights into creating innovative healthcare services and...

This article discusses a design research project in which design practitioners and researchers collaborated to develop training guidelines and a toolset for astakeholder workshop to be implemented by partner organisations of the Arts on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS; 2020–2023) project. It focuses on the learning experiences of the d...

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...

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 abou...

This chapter explores the role of photo and video documentation in an ‘artivist’ (Penley & Ross, 1991) project. Ephemeral textile art and activist performance art were used to remonstrate against the legal sanctioning of a Finnish environmental graffiti artist who propagates environmental action against the disappearance of salmon from the Kemi riv...

This book provides a synthesis of current research and international best practice, including practitioner perspectives and a range of case study examples. It covers types of creative tourist, trends, designing and implementing creative tourism products, embedding activities in a community and place, and addressing sustainability challenges.

Memory Box: A three-dimensional quilt as an arts-based method for recollective practices and memory work Caixa de Memória: Um quilt tridimensional como método baseado em artes para práticas de recolha e trabalho de memória Caja de Memoria: un quilt tridimensional como método basado en las artes para las prácticas de recolección y el trabajo de la m...

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 develop...

Papers in this volume discuss successful pilot and experimental, art-based projects that reached out to sections of society with no or rare previous exposure to drama, music, or visual arts. The papers summarise previous research in their arts-based intervention area, identify success factors and risks and describe forms of assessment utilised and...

In an effort to challenge the ways in which colonial power relations and Eurocentric knowledges are reproduced in participatory research, this book explores whether and how it is possible to use arts-based methods for creating more horizontal and democratic research practices. In discussing both the transformative potential and limitations of arts...

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003053408/arts-based-methods-decolonising-participatory-research-tiina-sepp%C3%A4l%C3%A4-melanie-sarantou-satu-miettinen?fbclid=IwAR35P5HOSpdZvCPQ5fl8SJBf5aiy_4l73DlEuVtF5UMSb85j-L7ux36tivE

This chapter explores the role of embodied sauna practices and performance in the Finnish tradition of using a sauna. The ritual, which is usually enjoyed by Finnish people in the naked, is documented and re-evaluated from the perspective of cross-cultural use by people othern than Finnish and the role of this bodily ritual and fashion as ‘surrogat...

This toolkit is intended to help artists and arts researchers to plan, organise, document and evaluate participatory arts projects in different contexts. Its publication evolved in the context of a Europe-wide research project funded by the EU Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. This research project – Acting on the Margins: Arts as Soc...

The article explores the processes designer-makers and communities should engage in before using service design approaches to produce creative tourism experiences. These processes can yield insights into the inner processes and interactions with external environments of creative individuals and communities. Case studies from Finnish Lapland and Nam...

This paper examines the participation of various healthcare specialists and representatives in three design sprints aimed to co-design healthcare services through service design approaches. The design sprints were executed during the spring of 2019 in Gothenburg, Sweden; Tallinn, Estonia; and Rovaniemi, Finland, each lasting four to five days. This...

This interdisciplinary article explores the nature of language in design managers´ strategic contexts. Taken-for-granted assumptions behind language influence the way cues are selected and elaborated on through actors´ frames to ultimately become meanings. Language suggests and passes on cues and frames through which strategizing evolves. The desig...

This paper focuses on three design sprints aimed at co-designing healthcare services by employing service design methods and co-design approaches. The design sprints each lasted for 4-5 days, consisting of multiple teams and involving healthcare professionals, students, end-users, and facilitators from the service design field. The design sprints w...

Coping strategies have become increasingly important for businesses, especially those operating in geographical peripheries. This paper explores ways of creating more meaningful, sustainable, responsible, long term and, thus, successful business. It draws on design and art-driven, and lean start-up approaches, and combines adaptation, tolerance and...

The issue of demographic ageing is becoming one of the biggest challenges in contemporary societies, and various professional, academic and political fields have been called upon to find solutions for easing the tension demographic ageing creates in aged care. This paper investigates how elderly people’s past experiences can inform the design proce...

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 wi...

This article addresses the role of social innovation in ageing communities. Two cases are considered, namely the Life 2.0 project that focuses on generating information and communication technology services for ageing individuals and groups across Europe, while the second case is a project that was conducted with the BoAi aged care facility in Chin...

Abstract: Identities and notions of the in-betweenness of designers in management positions in Silicon Valley might be shaped by one another given changing sensemaking contexts. As organising becomes less bounded with shorter job tenures designers have been constructing their identities in interactions with diverse stakeholders. Tools, skills and v...

The Hero's Journey is an embodied game activity based on the monomyth of Joseph Campbell (1949). This participatory art-based activity served as a research instrument in a development context in southern Africa with marginalised San youth. One of the outcomes of employing this art-based activity in research was the development of the GRACE model wh...

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 per...

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 as...

This paper explores the role of improvisation in design thinking for product design processes and design research methods. Improvisation is often at the core of practice-based and participatory design, permitting flexibility. The role of improvisation in the performing arts has received considerable academic attention, however its role in design pr...

This article proposes a design perspective on strategizing by presenting a Model of Positive Strategic Sensemaking for Meaningfulness. Theory elaboration is used drawing from three related disciplinary fields; strategizing, sensemaking and design. It is proposed that positive and human-centred design facilitation enhances strategizing as an ongoing...

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 f...

Complexity is a key characteristic of many participatory and community-oriented design activities. Designers’ varied roles are being transformed as they have to manage the complexities and entanglements associated with global societal, technological and environmental change. As design turns towards a social mode of operation and application, this s...

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 f...

Arts-based research (ABR), its potential for participation and collaboration, can create insights and understanding of complex societal structures. It can also be used as an approach to find mindful solutions with peripheral communities. The paper argues that ABR, supported by practical collaborative processes, can offer suitable approaches to desi...

Coping with complexities is an everyday reality for private, public and third sectors that face intricate, overlapping, obscuring and ever-changing challenges. Developments in technology and systems of value creation are driving a new need to understand, facilitate and manage complexity. The book proposes design and design research as a solution t...

The book Managing Complexity and Creating Innovation through Design unpacks the intricate, overlapping, obscuring and shifting nature of complexities and complicatedness in relation to design and design research. These concepts need further exploration. Complicatedness and complexity are interrelated terms that are often convoluted ( Suh, 2005 ). N...

This article addresses the issue of care for the residents of the BoAi aged-care institution in China. It focuses on experience (service) design and institutional aged-care from the perspective of design practice and design research. Design often starts from the current experience of the user. In this article an understanding of senior care include...

This paper addresses the fields of social and service design in development contexts, practice-based and constructive design research. A framework for social design for services will be explored through the survey of existing literature, specifically by drawing on eight doctoral theses that were produced by the World Design research group. The work...

This article 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 a...

Art has the capacity to facilitate empowerment and wellbeing and serve as means for transformation of the community. This paper presents three case studies in which art processes enable identity construction while overcoming personal challenges and working through memories. Narratives are used to demonstrate how an artistic process creates a dialog...

In October 2016, the Margin to Margin research group carried out two art and storytelling workshops with the Anangu Aboriginal communities of South and Western Australia and the Fibrespace Incorporated textile artist group of South Australia. Women artists and craft-makers from the various communities predominantly participated in two intensive art...

This paper addresses the fields of social and service design in development contexts, practice-based and constructive design research. A framework for social design for services will be explored through the survey of existing literature, specifically by drawing on eight doctoral theses that were produced by the World Design research group. The work...

This paper explores the role of improvisation in design thinking for product design processes and design research methods. Improvisation is often at the core of practice-based and participatory design, permitting flexibility. The role of improvisation in the performing arts has received considerable academic attention, however its role in design pr...

This paper explores the varied roles of women's laps, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Namibia during 2011 and in South Australia during 2016. This paper reflects on the role of women's laps as complex, hybrid spaces that sustain livelihoods and emotional wellbeing in marginalised communities. Although multiple and complex daily act...

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...

This chapter is situated in practical service design. It discusses learning through action by employing established service design tools and processes, including learning through co-creation (Sanders & Stap- pers, 2008). Due to the iterative working approaches that involve co-design, testing and evaluation, ser- vice design enables continuous and p...

The aim of this work¹ in progress presents a technology tool as a platform for exploring data from an art-based research project in geographically marginalised communities. The perspectives of the research participants on their identity processes and art making inspired the pursuit of a HCI-based (Human Computer Interaction-based) technological pla...

This paper explores identities that come about through the narratives different actors communicate in participatory art and design projects, as opposed to the roles assumed for and by them. This contributes to the discussion of equal engagement in participatory practices. The paper focuses on the notion of narrative identity in the context of two c...

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 artefa...

This dissertation sets out to describe the processes and dynamics at play in the development of a couture design range that attempts to engage with, and enhance notions of Namibian identity. While the end product of the practical work is a range of garments that speaks to and reflects a possible Namibian identity, the dissertation engages with...