# Arts-based methods supporting participatory sense-making, agency and dialogue

Arts-based methods can be understood as a source of participatory process in a context of co-design and co-creation, the purpose of this is to build sustainable societies. In this context all involved are active citizens and have an agency in their community whether they are conscious or not about it. Part of the reason to use arts-based approach in ParCos context is that people who take part in co-creation processes become more conscious about the nature of their agency; how empowered or powerless they find themselves. In this sense this type of an approach invites you to critically think about social, cultural, environmental, emotional and political interests related to data.

Arts-based methods in ParCos are designed **to help to build up dialogue and lower barriers to make-sense, articulate and share experiences as well as imagine possibilities and future scenarios**. It is a knowledge source to find out local knowledge to citizens themselves as well as local civic organisations. (Coemans et al., 2018)


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

Ava, Milo and Sophia have been inspired by radical pedagogies when working in communities, especially they are inspired in combination where educator and philosopher Paulo Freire's ideas of critical pedagogy are vowed into a theatre director Augusto Boal's art philosophy and theatre practices. As an applied drama practitioner Ava sees their pedagogy and arts “*as an epistemology for creating a space for people to make sense of complex micro- and macro-level processes related to their lives, communities, and society*.” (Pässilä, 2012 )


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

Sophia underlines that arts-based activities are serving several purposes; research, education. Milo nodding and asking you: “*I have always had a need of becoming more and more aware of my pedagogical roots. I assume each of us have our own theoretical inspirators in our practice. I was wondering what is yours?*”

At the moment Sophia is in the midst of making sense of data and is inspired by collaboration with Ava and Milo. Milo´s vision is that arts-based methods are used in conjunction with new civic interfaces to data, which extends the previous work on civic data interfaces, combining existing principles for creating data dashboards for scaffolded interactions with data (Wolff et al., 2019; Wolff et al., 2017 ) with new tools for finding stories in data.

Ava´s vison is that taking into consideration how to scale some of these arts-based methods to support the audience who participate with those stories in the future to find their own narratives in the data and other scientific content made available for interpretation. Sophia´s vison is that arts-based methods are designed to prompt participants, citizens, towards experiential, richer, engagement with the data, that prompts deeper thinking about the circumstances where the data was collected, how it felt, how it smelled, what the people who were nearby (if any) may have been having as well as having a similar deeper engagement with narratives created based on available evidence.


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

Milo asking you: “*What is your vision*?”

On a very practical level Ava has used arts-based methods to support participatory sense-making, agency and dialogue. She has been using one particular arts-based technique based on theatre, Forum Theatre as well as theater games, she has applied it for the purpose on sense-breaking and sensemaking within the innovating citizens-groups in social service innovation context. The aim of the technique is to make visible and break the prevailing ways of acting among citizens.


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas
Ava underlines: “*The novel insights are created through social interaction, capability building and actual implementation; it can be minor change which can be implemented immediately or more complexed or system-based change which needs more time and effort. It means changes also at the socio-cultural level of the process; together deepening understanding of real-world patterns and interactions during service processes. Kind of creating a polyphonic understanding of what actually is happening and could happen*. “( Nobles, at al., 2020; Pässilä et al., 2015 )


Sketch by Anne PÄssilä, photo by Antti Knutas

**References**

Boal, A. (1979/2000) Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. by A. Charles and M.L. McBride and E. Fryer. London: Pluto Press

Coemans, S., Vandenabeele, J., & Hannes, K. (2018). Compositional ethnography: Enriching our understanding of a changing neighborhood through an aesthetically inspired approach. ECQI 2018 PROCEEDINGS, 41.

Freire, P. (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom – Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Trans. by P. Clarke. Lanham and Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.

Nobles, J., Thomas, C., Banks Gross, Z., Hamilton,M., Trinder-Widdess, Z., Speed, C., Gibson, A., Davies,R., Farr, M., Jago, R., Foster, C. and Redwood, S. (2020) Let’s Talk about Physical Activity”: Understandingthe Preferences of Under-Served Communities when Messaging Physical Activity Guidelines to the Public. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.17(8) Epub 2020 Apr 17.

Pässilä, A., Oikarinen, T. and Harmaakorpi, V. (2015) Collective voicing as a reflexive practice. Management Learning, 46(1): 67-86

Pässilä, A. (2012) Reflexive model of research-based theatre – processing innovation at the crossroads of theatre, reflection and practice-based innovation activities. Acta Universitatis Lappeenrantaensis 492. Lappeenranta University Press. Lappeenranta, Finland.

Wolff, A., Wermelinger, M. and Petre, M., 2019. Exploring design principles for data literacy activities to support children’s inquiries from complex data. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 129(41-54).

Wolff, A., Valdez, A.M., Barker, M., Potter, S., Gooch, D., Giles, E. and Miles, J., 2017. Engaging with the smart city through urban Data Games. In Playable Cities. Springer, Singapore, pp. 47-66.