Long abstract:

This paper reflects on our roles as boundary workers in the EU-funded Better Factory (BF) project, spanning four years and two rounds.

Better Factory assembled 16 diverse empirical cases comprising SMEs, artists, and technology providers, with a central goal of transitioning manufacturing SMEs into cyber-physical systems and establishing lean-agile production facilities. Our involvement included mentoring the artists of 16 of these Knowledge Transfer Experiments (KTE), and our primary focus was to foster collaboration and facilitate meaningful contributions. This involved actively promoting collaborative synergies and empowering artists to contribute significantly to redesign and co-create innovative solutions and visions.

The BF methodology, an Art-driven Innovative Collaborative Method, leverages the Collaboration Toolkit from S+T+ARTS. Employing Challenge-driven and Mission-Driven approaches, the former involves artists collaborating with SMEs or technology providers to address industrial and societal challenges and prototyping solutions for defined SME problems. The latter encourages artists to explore new paths in response to future speculative designs aiming at social as well as technological impact, driven by notions of care, ethical and responsible innovation. This dual BF methodology offers a versatile framework for addressing specific SME challenges or exploring innovative solutions using arts-based research and critical making.

In our role as 'art mentors,' we guide artists through ideation, experimentation, and prototyping cycles. Our 32-month mentoring period involved research by practice where we used reflexive and active observant approaches to improve the Artist-Industry Collaboration toolkit and deliberately design collaborations for mutual benefit across art and industry.