Abstract
Interdisciplinary collaboration is now central to how knowledge is produced, yet the arts remain underrecognized as a primary research method. This paper explores how creative practice functions as hybrid inquiry—connecting scientific, social, and aesthetic forms of knowing through experimentation and embodied experience. When we treat the studio as a laboratory, art becomes a site where new relationships, materials, and meanings are tested and discovered. Drawing from thinkers such as John Dewey, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway, and from examples at the Fashion Institute of Technology, this study argues that the arts model the kind of research our complex world demands—iterative, situated, and collaborative. Projects like FIT’s Adaptive Design Initiative demonstrate how artistic processes generate insights that extend beyond disciplinary limits, engaging communities as partners in discovery. By reframing art as research infrastructure rather than enrichment, universities can cultivate creativity as a shared epistemology. This shift not only expands the reach of artistic practice but also deepens the university’s civic mission—to foster curiosity, imagination, and ethical responsibility in public life. The arts, positioned at the intersection of disciplines, make hybrid knowledge visible and actionable, reminding us that discovery itself is a creative act.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies
KEYWORDS
CREATIVE RESEARCH, ART AS INQUIRY, PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP, DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION, INTERDISCIPLINARY
