ThinkARTank 
Mira Alhonsuo & Melanie Sarantou

AMASS investigates how art can act as a vehicle for mitigating societal challenges in the margins of Europe. It seeks to develop policy recommendations and roadmaps at the national and European levels for the participating countries, addressing how arts can impact issues pertaining to marginalisation. As part of the policy action, a series of online stakeholder workshops were conducted to collect data and develop regional policy roadmaps. The workshop was implemented by the partners AMASS partners, in Malta, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, Sweden, the UK and Finland. Thy initiative was changed to online modality due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, in early 2020. As part of this initiative the University of Lapland team, Mira Alhonsuo and Melanie Sarantou, worked with design students Chau-Hsien Kuo, Maarit Alikoski, Yiling Li and Petja Tuisku to experiment with arts-based methods in online policy making approaches. Stakeholder workshops are frequently used as methods in policy making, but the design team aimed to create more empathic, engaged and bottom-up approaches to such workshops hosted in a virtual format. The online workshop was based on service design, gaming elements, arts-based and futures research methods to generate an online journey in the whiteboard platform Miro that would serve as the outline of the stakeholder workshop. The online journey started with an introduction and an ice-breaker, followed by the needs and opportunities assessment and a best-practice conversation that aimed to collect existing and imagined good practices for policy-making and implementation on the stakeholders’ part. Various arts-based approaches were used, such as virtual collage and postcard making, in addition to storytelling and group discussions. The final step in the workshop journey was to bring all the elements of the workshop together in a metaphorical forest titled “the good practice conversation tree” that aimed to gain a holistic oversight of the workshop outcomes. The collected data were collated and documented by the team and added to the data set that was used to develop the policy roadmap for the Lapland region in Finland.

Using design thinking to develop instructions for the participant journey. Author: Mira Alhonsuo (2021).

Postcard created in the Miro Platform. Author: Emmanuel Tauch (2021).

Postcard created by Amna Qureshi in the Miro platform. Author: Aman Qureshi (2021).

Collating stakeholders’ needs, good practices and envisioned actions by using the tool ‘opportunity tree’ developed by Mira Alhonsuo (2021).

Birds-eye view on the user journey for the arts-based stakeholder workshop using the Miro platform. Author: Mira Alhonsuo (2021).

Publications

Sarantou, M., Gutiérrez Novoa, C., Remotti, S., & Alhonsuo, M. (2021). More Patience and Creativity: Team Learning in Online Stakeholder Workshop settings. In (pp. 1-28). In Huhmarniemi, M. & Hiltunen, M. (eds.), Art(s) as an Expanding Social Sculpture, Research in Arts and Education, 3(2021). https://wiki.aalto.fi/download/attachments/203105171/Sarantou_at_al.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1642009351042&api=v2

​Sarantou, M., Alhonsuo, M., Gutierrez Novoa, C., & Remotti, S. (2021). Generating Stakeholder Workshops for Policymaking In Digital Environments Through Participatory Service Design. In Vella, R. & Raykov, M. (eds.) Supplement issue on Socially Engaged Art and Global Challenges (pp. 119-136), Malta Review of Educational Research, Vol. 15. http://www.mreronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/7-MRER-15-Supplement-Melanie-Mira-CarolinaSilvia.pdf