The relevance of artistic research in a social context

Artistic research is a relatively new form of research that makes use of the attitudes and methods of artists and designers during the research process. This simply implies that researchers work from a visual and associative perspective and have an open attitude that makes it possible for them to notice that which others may fail to see. For a better understanding, we will place artistic research next to three other research paradigms in this text: design-oriented research, practice-oriented research, and academic research. We do this in order to make the social relevance of artistic research visible, a notion that stems from the direct ambition to create a space for artistic research in which the elderly, caregivers, and researchers can gather new insights. Not only does this topic require extra attention because artistic research has a different social value, but also because it is still relatively young: artistic research needs to develop its vocabulary to make itself intelligible towards the already more developed forms of research. This article is an initial attempt in doing so.