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Ricardo Dutra  is a social designer, researcher and educator working and collaborating in diverse global contexts. He holds a MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a PhD in Design for Education from Monash University, Melbourne. Ricardo is currently a University Lecturer in the field of Arts-based Social Practice at the Department of Art & Media, Aalto University, Finland. For more:

Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness

Today, many societies are struggling with polarization, disengagement from democracy, constant digital acceleration, and fewer spaces where people can simply be together. These conditions weaken the social ties that make communities sustainable. Although sustainability is often approached through technical solutions or information, there is less focus on how people learn to live together in the face of difference and uncertainty. In addition to social and political fragmentation, contemporary societies are marked by a weakened relationship with the more-than-human world. Modern ways of living often distance people from ecological processes, places, and non-human forms of life, making sustainability something that is known intellectually rather than lived relationally. This separation undermines the capacity of communities to care for shared environments and to live within ecological limits. 

The Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness project is a research- and practice-based initiative developed over more than ten years, and particularly advanced in the last two years with Erasmus funding and an art residency at Aalto University. It explores how we experience being together and how such capacities can be intentionally fostered in society. One of the project’s outcomes is an emergent, open pedagogical curriculum for working with the theme of togetherness, especially with young people. The curriculum cultivates embodied, relational awareness of others, places, materials, and more-than-human systems—strengthening social connections and supporting forms of togetherness essential for resilient, sustainable communities. 

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Christina Lüthy is a postdoctoral researcher and Browaldh Fellow at Lund University School of Economics and Management. Her research is interested in the affective, material, and temporal dimensions of creative organizing and entrepreneurship and draws on process-oriented and feminist theories to explore challenges of responsible organizing. Her work has appeared in journals such as Organization Studies, Human Relations and the Journal of Management Studies.

Affective temporalities in music production: embodying and spacing time in creative processes

The research project investigates from a spatial and affective perspective the role of temporalities in the creative process in the field of music production. Although time and temporalities in organizing creative processes in the cultural and creative industries have recently started to gain more attention, research still tends to focus on ‘clock time’, neglecting time as an aesthetic and embodied experience and affective force that shapes relations and engagement in creative processes. Christina emphasizes how time as an affective force shapes bodily capacities and relations, which shifts the attention from time to temporality. The conceptual shift might provide new critical inroads to contemporary understandings of ‘time management’ in creative processes, as well as the entanglement between humans and nonhumans in creative processes.

Maria Uusitalo is a doctoral researcher in Organizational Communication at the Department of Management Studies, Aalto University School of Business. She holds a BA in communication studies from the University of Vaasa and a MSc (Econ.) degree in International Design Business Management at Aalto University.

Mundane encounters in Organizational Cultures of Creativity

The research highlights how creativity emerges in the small, subtle and mundane encounters. In particular how seemingly tiny things can open possibilities to relate, think and act differently. By paying attention to the mundane, we might be able to understand and value creativity differently: not only as extraordinary, such as innovations, leaps, major shifts, but as something that flows and emerges in the everyday life and work in organizations. Her research shows how the creative process is shaped by interactions among multiple actors challenging notions of individuality.