Community Engagement:

Community engagement is working collaboratively with a group of people to solve an issue or create something for that certain group of people. Community engagement, from what I have learned personally, is being able to connect to and engage the group of people (community) that you are creating something for successfully. On top of that, community engagement requires the artist to build relationships with the community they are working with on a personal and social level (this may even take years) to benefit the community. In terms of design practice, before you can start designing you need to know everything about the community you are working with. If you fail to get to know your community and what they need or how they work, the design of your work might not fit the community appropriately.

Research:

Research from a dictionary’s definition is basically searching for and gathering information to draw conclusions and gain more knowledge about a given topic. From my experience this semester, research can be done in so many different ways. Some types of research are archival research, secondary research and participant observation research.  Since participant observation research is targeted at becoming familiar with a group of individuals on a more cultural level, this is the kind of research that I feel is most successful when it comes to creating a piece of community engaged art and the main form of research I used in my studio final. Participant observation is more informal in the sense that it comes from a wide-range of methods such as interviewing, discussing, documenting your experience with the group, and making analyses afterwards which works more directly with the community.