Category: Playful or Cool

Human Beans is a provocative design group that I read about in a great article “Unstated Contributions – How Artistic Inquiry Can Inform Interdisciplinary Research” by Chris Rust in International Journal of Design (vol. 1, no. 3, 2007.) Rust cites Human Beans as an example of designers experimenting with fictional products (like the Family Project) as a form of conceptual art. Their information page says,

Human Beans create provocative concepts.

We make fictional products by hacking commercial culture and we design new services by working with real people

Our aim is to challenge assumptions and point in new directions, we diffuse our thinking through spam, the press, shop shelves and exhibitions.

Rust’s article gives examples of a number of ways that creative practices can intersect with research without becoming research. Artists can generate a world within which researchers can understand and pose questions for methodological research. Artists can provoke questions. Artists can re-present knowledge in more communicative ways. Above all, for Rust, the contribution of the artist is not the explicit propositional knowledge that can be reviewed and tested. The contribution of an artist is something that the audience has to interpret and complete. It isn’t art if an artist studies the use of their work and tries to plan its interpretation to constrain a particular thesis. I should add that Rust seems to have been involved in the UK discussions around what we call research/creation here in Canada.