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Short abstract

Collaborative Art-Science Installations are interactive platforms build around a particular theme, functioning as catalysts for ethical reflexivity and stakeholder engagement. They served as a tool for embedding ethics within STAGE, a technoscience multidisciplinary research consortium.

Long abstract

The STAGE consortium is a six-year European research project exploring how to stay healthy as we age. This large-scale research collaboration involves 22 partners from 11 countries. There are ten work packages (WPs), which differ significantly from one another. Some conduct research on environmental aspects, ethics, exposome, multimorbidity and biomarkers, while others develop an AI model, digital tools and a data portal, neighbourhood atlas, among other outputs.

STAGE implements an Embedding Ethics and Social Sciences (EESS) strategy to address the complex and multidisciplinary aspects of research and interventions. Group workshops are organised to reflect on the ethical aspects of the research process and outputs, and meetings are held with the WP coordinators to propose action points, such as mitigation proposals if an ethical challenge is identified. Other focal strategies are implemented according to WP focus.

As the ethics WP identified ageism as an important ethical issue in the field of ageing, we started considering how to engage researchers with this concept beyond merely discussing it. Working alongside the WP responsible for communication, we agreed that an interactive approach that could produce visual evidence of the ethical aspects of ageism would be more impactful. To this end, we developed our first Collaborative Art-Science Installations (CASIs) on the topic of ageism. Seeing how powerful the CASI tool was, we started developing it further and applying it to more topics. This proposal aims to share CASIs as EESS tools by focusing on our experience of ageism.