ABSTRACT
Looking for the specific role that the arts can play in social environments, Anke Coumans and visual artist Herman van Hoogdalem developed the “I spy with my little eye” project. In “The Artistic Attitude in a Social Context,” she describes how students in this project portrayed elderly people suffering from dementia. The aim was not so much to solve problems quickly, but to truly empathize with the other. Instead of looking for “solutions,” Coumans focuses on understanding and explaining a particular situation. In this process, she is looking for a way to design environments so that other professionals, for example in healthcare, can become design-oriented.
