Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practice-led Research

During the last decade, research in art and design in Finland has begun to explore new dimensions. Artists and designers have taken an active role in contextualising and interpreting the creative process in practice, as well as the products of this process, by looking at the process itself and the works produced through it. From this new point of view, the knowledge and the skills of a practising artist or designer form a central part of the research process, and this has produced a new way of doing research. In this new type of research project, part of the research is carried out as art or design practice. The central methodological question of this emerging field of research is: how can art or design practice interact with research in such a manner that they will together produce new knowledge, create a new point of view or form new, creative ways of doing research? In this article, the making and the products of making are seen as an essential part of research: they can be conceived both as answers to particular research questions and as artistic or designerly argumentation. As an object made by an artist–researcher, the artefact can also be seen as a method for collecting and preserving information and understanding. However, the artefacts seem unable to pass on their knowledge, which is relevant for the research context. Thus, the crucial task to be carried out is to give a voice to the artefact. This means interpreting the artefact. During the process of interpretation, furthermore, the artefact has to be placed into a suitable theoretical context. In this process, the final products (the artefacts) can be seen as revealing their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody.     

Relative contributions of kind- and domain-level concepts to expectations concerning unfamiliar exemplars: Developmental change and domain differences

Two inferential routes allow children to produce expectations about new instances of ontological categories like “animal” and “artefact.” One is to generalise information from a “look-up table” of familiar kind-concepts. The other one is to use independent expectations at the level of ontological domains. Our experiment pits these two sources of information against each other, using a sentence-judgement task associating properties with images of familiar and unfamiliar artefacts and animals. “Strange” properties are compatible with the ontological concept, but not encountered in any familiar kind. A look-up strategy would lead children to reject them and an independent expectation strategy to accept them. In both domains, we find a difference in reaction to strange properties associated with familiar vs. unfamiliar items, which shows that even young children do use independent domain-level information. We also found a U-shaped curve in propensity to use such abstract information. In addition, animal categories are the object of much more definite domain-level expectations, which supports the notion that the animal domain is more causally integrated than the artefact domain.