Art Thinking Lounge 2025

The Art Thinking Lounge invites visitors to engage with Art Thinking as a creative mindset to navigate contemporary societal challenges. In 2025, it offered a set of interactive tools under the curatorial framework of “Future Citizen Kit”: designed to broaden perspectives, experiment with new visions of the future, and spark meaningful conversations.

The Art Thinking Lounge is a collaboration between Hakuhodo Inc. and Ars Electronica, first presented in 2024. The platform highlights practices and insights that demonstrate how art can drive transformation in both business and society, fostering a shift from Consumer Thinking to Citizen Thinking. At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Hakuhodo, and the Fashion Frontier Program (FFP) contributed unique experiences as part of the Future Citizen Kit, inviting participants to engage as citizens of the future.

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The Ars Electronica Futurelab applies Art Thinking as a strategy for prototyping the future. For the Art Thinking Lounge, the Futurelab presented Citizen Manifesto, an interactive installation for civic participation where visitors could share their ideas against panic in uncertain times. Using AI, the installation transformed participants’ claims into posters that became part of a collective manifesto, fostering collective dialogue and imagination.

Hakuhodo Inc.’s Sei-katsu-sha Insight R&D Institute, the company’s research and development arm, showcased tools that focus on the “small voices” of citizens at the People Thinking Lab. One exhibit invited participants to explore creative questions and tangible tools to perceive everyday environments from new perspectives, uncovering overlooked insights. Another allowed visitors to visualize human emotions in relation to technology in daily life, deepening their understanding of individual experiences of technology.

People Thinking Lab @ Art Thinking Lounge, photo: Bettina Gangl

Citizen Manifesto @ Art Thinking Lounge, photo: Bettina Gangl

The Fashion Frontier Program (FFP) is an educational and incubation initiative by designer Yuima Nakazato. It nurtures artists who aim to shape a sustainable future for fashion. At the Lounge, FFP exhibited future visions through clothing, offering a platform for visitors to experience and to provide feedback on future-oriented fashion concepts.

In addition to the exhibition, Ars Electronica festival visitors could join the Art Thinking Experience Tour to explore the Lounge’s concepts in greater depth. Upon entering the platform, participants received an Art Thinking Bingo sheet, allowing them to apply key ideas to societal challenges. The activity encouraged hands-on engagement and offered new ways to experience artworks at the festival through the lens of Art Thinking.