Reclaiming Experience

Masters thesis

Lene Aareskjold
Executive Master 2023-2025
System Oriented Design
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
15.01.2026

Prologue

This is a journey about moving with a systemic design practice. It is a journey of idealism, workouts, burnouts, passion, resilience and how it all connects. This thesis set out to look at the relationship between art and culture and business industry. My aim was to develop a better facilitation practice between the two sectors. I executed conversations and mapping sessions with stakeholders dealing with this intersection in their positions and I read reports from different appliances for the cultural industry. “The only constant in life is change” a known quote from the Greek pre-Socrates philosopher Heraclitus, his word has been repeated by many from Platon to Patti Smith. Last one is well known for her incredible life story from a young starving artist to becoming the Godmother of rock’n’roll. In her books Just Kids and Woolgathering (Smith, 2012) she is blending experiences from her personal life, creative journey, reflections and relationships. Her authorship is a good demonstration on how personal life and artistry is intertwined. This inseparability points to the challenges of separation between professional and personal life that could be the root cause to some of the misconceptions regarding art and culture and how we separate our feelings and actions into compartments of experience rather than viewing it as a whole.

What repeatedly came up in the conversations and mapping sessions I did was the divergence in the stakeholder’s work. Holding positions as administrator, general manager, curator or architect, what they all had in common was that they had to manage several different roles in their position accordingly to different scales in the situational process they found themselves in. The stakeholders I spoke to all mentioned challenges in bridging silos, fulfilling political demands, time management and the lack of decent resources. In the art and cultural field, it is common to operate and manage a broad spectre of different skills, juggling roles resulting in a jack of all trades persona or the less attractive label potato, referencing to the vegetable’s multitude of use. Holding this position over time reports high stress level. For my own experience, I’ve never felt adequate in my work, never a’jour, putting out fires instead of preventing them. This constantly state of lagging can trigger dopamine not unlike the rush we get from notifications from social medias. The vibration of an incoming message or a blinking icon indicating activity keeps triggering our brain. The dopamine kicks can become addictive; the alert state is the new normal and the constant condition for a lot of people working in art and culture. It is probably also relevant for other fields of industry as well, but I will claim that people working in the art and culture are in more vulnerable positions than the major population, knowing how financial insecurity impacts our mental health. The lowest overall incomes for artists are found among visual artists, who have a median income of NOK 309,000,- (Kleppe & Askvik, 2023, s. 10) dancers and jazz musicians following. In comparison the nurse index, which is used to calculate the median income in Norway was reported to NOK 680,000, -. This index number is from 2025 whereas the last national report on artistic income is from 2019 the comparison is far from accurate, but it still shows some significant gaps in what is acknowledged as a sufficient income in Norway and the reality most artists are facing. Financial worries and psychological stress are a subjective experience but the correlation between financial worries and mental health have been well researched and documented.