Art, Fact, and Artifact Production, Design Research and Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Lily Díaz-Kommonen

The development of digital media and information technology has altered the fabric of many disciplines including art, design, and archaeology. The emerging landscape within the arts, humanities, and sciences, is a boundary territory where multidisciplinary collaboration is no longer an option, but rather, the prescribed course for action. Within this arena there is a need for new methods for research, descriptive materials, and for the systematic assessment of the roles of the different participants involved in a collaborative endeavor.

The dissertation makes use of Activity Theory to compare different aspects that play a role the creation of knowledge artifacts in the fields of art, design, and archaeology. Two complementing voices, one building theory and the other reporting on practice, are brought together within a dialectic interaction of a project-driven methodology. The method suggests that research questions can emerge and be driven by the work done in as part of a professional design research project. In this manner, the project-driven method differs from traditional scientific modes of research where knowledge is based and built around a static foundation.

The thesis proposes that Activity Theory and the project-driven method are tools that can be successfully employed in collaborative multidisciplinary design research projects. Through these, a symmetrical approach to the understanding of knowledge that allows for comparison of the work of the artist, the archaeologist, and the designer, is facilitated.

The activity of art is described as producing objects that can be seen as artifacts of expression and expressive artifacts dealing with aesthetics, cognition and ethics. The activity of design is depicted as encompassing the creation of design representations. Archaeology is presented as an activity that, in order to produce knowledge, makes use of diverse methods, crafts and design.

This dissertation also documents an example of such collaborative projects. The work presents a case involving artists, designers, and archaeologists working together at different points in time. The final objective is the creation of the Raisio Archaeology Archive. This is an archive consisting of digital representations of archaeological materials about the culture of southwestern Finland from the late Iron Age to the early Middle Ages. A digital networked environment, a controlled vocabulary that allows for navigation through the contents, as well as an authoring tool that enables the contents selected by guest visitors to be displayed in the form of a dynamic 3D Gallery, are some of the tools included in the archive. (See: http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/mulli)