THE CHALLENGES OF DESIGNING THE INTERACTION DESIGN OF A COLLABORATIVE ART PROJECT

While many of us researchers dream about the opportunity to design a collaborative art project that would connect our youth with big, mainstream cultural and educational institutions, we seldom analyse the challenges of such collaborations. This paper presents the most prevailing issues that arose during the user-centred, interdisciplinary interaction design (ID) of the collaborative digital art project. The design is made in collaboration with the young participants of the Meet the Ministry project run by the Dance Company of the Opera House (DCOH) in Gothenburg, and the members of The Swedish School of Library and Information Science Social Media Studies (TSLIS) research group. Using the research through design approach to augment the outreach of the collaborative digital art project, enhance youth engagement with the contemporary dance, and learn from the young participants, we analyse the implications introduced by inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. Finally, by looking at the results of this project, we claim that interdisciplinary collaborations are extremely risky because they are unpredictable in their cost, process, and outcome. Even though literature offers advice for successful interdisciplinary cooperation there are no guarantees that the risks can be fully avoided. Still, we argue that such collaborations are necessary and need to be continuously developed as they seem to be successful tools for interdisciplinary learning and bridging social capital acquisition. If nothing else, we should at least foster the practices of learning from our younger generations who seem to be interested in partnering with us in exploring communication and collaboration in digital art projects creation.