Collaborative Innovation in Socially Engaged Art

Overview

Through this hands-on Contemporary Art class, students will learn a structured approach to idea generation, exploration and development, to create Art that is collaborative, addresses political or social issues, engages directly with an audience, and is often created outside institutional structures or the art market.

Students from different fields will experience group creativity and team-based design by using techniques from across the disciplines of business, theatre, design, and art practice. Students will force problem framing and solving techniques derived from critical thinking, and creative problem solving, popularly known as design thinking.

The Collaborative Innovation in Socially Engaged Art course from Nebrija University  is structured initially in lectures that will set out the theoretical, historical, and cultural contexts of socially engaged art and creative thinking, for particular innovation practices for social change, however, the majority of the course involves hands-on studio-based learning, in small collaborative groups, which will focus on addressing and bringing solutions to real-life artistic projects.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the concepts of design thinking methods applied to the development of collaborative socially engaged artistic projects.
• Participate actively in design thinking teams and conduct design thinking sessions.
• Apply both critical thinking and design thinking in parallel to solve problems.
• Develop confidence in your creative skills, and in your ability to improve those skills through artistic project-based methodologies.
• To deepen into the impact of art exploring social, environmental and ecological issues.
• Represent your own creative skills and experiences, and help promote and produce those of others.
• To recognize the latest and future issues and challenges in innovation through artistic practice.
• To propose a concrete, feasible, viable and relevant innovation project/challenge in Madrid.
• Understand the concept of participation in socially engaged practice, as a key in artistic creation.
• To develop tools to work in collaborative situations with social groups, communities and publics outside of the art world