NAVET - A hub to navigate to unexplored regions between art, technology and design - Projects 2019-2021

NAVET is a centre with the overarching goal of becoming a meeting place for research and projects in the intersection of art, technology and design, with the purpose of facilitating and creating opportunities for exchange and research collaboration among artists, designers, engineers, humanists, natural and social scientists.

NAVET started as a collaboration between KTH Royal Institute of Technology, KMH Royal College of Music, SKH Stockholm University of the Arts, Konstfack, Tekniska - The National Museum of Science and Technology and Scenkonstmuseet - The Swedish Museum of Performing Arts. The centre partners joined in this effort after several years of collaborations at different levels and in different configurations with a vision: 

NAVET's long-term vision is to create an internationally competitive centre for research and development in Art, Technology and Design. The partner institutions guarantee a unique competence in the field and with a practical, and critical approach the centre will stimulate research, innovation, creativity and the development of a sustainable society.

NAVET wants to put the human in the centre, which also implies to question what the human is in an age of technology. The centre provides a place for soft-networking that can accommodate and initiate new collaborative research projects and supports them by sharing of resources in terms of laboratories, equipment, courses, teaching programs.

NAVET started to be operative in June 2019 and the first action was to boost research collaboration between partner institutions from the very beginning for sharing methods and knowledge, and for experimenting with unexplored combinations of competences. We achieved this by launching calls for Small Visionary Projects (SVPs) which have been the core of NAVET's activities during the period 2019-2021. Through three calls, project proposals have been  peer reviewed, and thirteen SVPs have been funded, all of which were based on interdisciplinary creative and innovative research with participating researchers from at least two of NAVET's partners. During the same period, a two-year postdoctoral position funded by NAVET has resulted in a large number of activities, both in Sweden and internationally, including collaboration with researchers in Austria and Germany, workshops and talks in Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin and Stockholm, concerts in Graz and Berlin, as well as streamed online concerts (Swiss and Italy).

Despite the special period characterised by the COVID-19 pandemic all the projects were completed and their results have been documented in scientific publications and presented in public exhibitions, workshops, installations or performances in different forms. Most importantly, the NAVET projects and related activities have contributed to the most fundamental result of NAVET's work, namely all the collaborations created as a direct result of the centre's many initiatives. Over 75 researchers, research managers, doctoral program managers, curators, museum educators, artists, composers, engineers and more have met, worked and created together in various constellations during NAVET's first activity period. 

In this book we present a catalogue of all the projects with most of the photos taken during exhibitions of the projects in different locations. The catalogue itself has been a design project that has seen the closed-loop collaboration between researchers involved in the Small Visionary Projects, layouter Håkan Ullberg, photographer Rikard Nilsson, everything coordinated by NAVET director Roberto Bresin and NAVET Post-doc researcher Ludvig Elblaus.

This project catalogue is complemented by writings from the members of the NAVET board (Magnum Bärtås, Cecilia Roos, Henrik Frisk, Katja Tollmar Grillner), tackling the theme Art, Technology and Design from different perspectives, and by the invited essay written by artist and innovator Håkan Lidbo, who has been navigating and exploring for several years the multifaceted, challenging, and inspiring regions between art, technology and design. 

NAVET is a research hub open to all institutions and their members interested in developing a cross-disciplinary research network that spans the traditional school and department boundaries.

We hope that this book can inspire the reader to join us in the NAVET (ad)venture!