Through arts- and nature-based interventions, Artful Inquiry offers an open, yet structured, process to explore pressing professional and personal questions. Arts- and nature-based interventions support an open awareness through working with artistic materials such as clay, paper, or crayons or by immersing oneself in the restorative power of nature. Each intervention encourages new insights, creativity, and change through experiencing the wholeness of the situation. The interventions are selected through a focus on both their creative and health benefits to ensure that the applied methods have potential for enhancing both creativity and mental well-being within a design process. Drawing on the benefits of art- and nature-therapy, Artful Inquiry moves beyond a personal therapeutic process, focusing on collective exploration and creative problem-solving. With an emphasis on enhancing creativity and mental well-being, Artful Inquiry nurtures the development of new ideas while fostering a sense of calm and emotional balance.

Our model of Artful Inquiry is grounded in Carl Gustav Jung’s four psychological functions^[2]—intuition, feeling, sensation, and thinking and Otto Scharmer’s Theory U[3]. Together, these theories create a powerful framework for changemaking that links the quality of the results to the awareness and attention we bring to our inner experience. Jung’s four functions describe the flow of energy in our psyche, and each function plays a vital role in understanding the world in a holistic way. Jung noted that we often develop one dominant function, and in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, thinking tends to overshadow the others, creating a disconnection between the various dimensions of our inner selves and, by extension, in our society. However, just as a compass has multiple directions, these functions can be consciously realigned to provide a more balanced perspective. Artful Inquiry helps guide this process, using arts- and nature-based interventions to awaken and engage all four functions. By re-engaging with these functions, we aim to restore balance within the individual, and place equal emphasis on the external context and the internal experience of the individual. This mindful approach encourages a shift in awareness, expanding our focus from a personal, ego-driven perspective to a broader, eco-system awareness. This process encourages the unfolding of tacit knowledge from both our personal and collective unconscious. Such knowledge can reveal hidden blind spots and reinvigorate our connection to the larger systems of which we are a part. This sense of interconnectedness is a cornerstone of mental health, as is the practice of regularly engaging in dialogue with our inner experience, as Jung advocates.