Arts for All: Aalto University-Wide Art Studies

The University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) programme at Aalto University offers all students, irrespective of discipline, the chance to explore and study art and design-based practices and processes. This is a vehicle for the wider ambition of the institution to encourage the formation of transdisciplinary communities of teachers, students and researchers, with a view to tackling global challenges in imaginative and meaningful ways. There is an understanding that art and design should be considered to have a deeper purpose than the simply aesthetic: creativity can help society to be renewed.

The value of the programme is fundamental and, amongst other benefits, can be understood as a mechanism for inviting external experts to contribute to University life, alongside supporting the pedagogical development of staff to better respond to present and future societal challenges together with students. In UWAS, collaboration across disciplines involves both learning and unlearning existing frameworks of knowledge in art, science, and business in order to reach truly dialogic education.

The impact of the approach cannot necessarily be articulated through typical metrics but lifelong learning and promotion of the need for reflection are of note, bringing renewed perspective in a general, philosophical and historical sense.