Populating and Staying with Methodological Surprise

Abstract This submission shares methodological experiments, cultivated in practices of composting by staying open to a surprise in art and design education research. Openness towards a surprise reduces a need to control a defining momentum of inquiry and instead welcomes composted and layered unknowns through multisensory learning experiences. In this visual multisensory essay, authors collectively experiment through making and producing approaches that could better live with and respond to the ecological and relational layers in art and design educational research. We experiment with how methodological compost brings recycled yet speculative productions, materials, and knowledge generation processes to living and our relations. Furthermore, collectively populated artistic and methodological spaces potentially promote creative and relational processes without explaining, solving and understanding surprises and surprising events. Methodological surprises during the composting processes cannot be predicted. Ecological forms and more‐than‐human practices enable educators and researchers to decenter the human and speculate different and unforeseen educational futures. Collaboration and relations also set ground to become attuned to others' alterity, directing inquiry towards unpredicted experimental futures. Surprising ideas often follow unwritten codes, and they may build on shared artistic and educational practice as well as composted elements of inquiry and methodologies. Additionally, multisensory methodological composting stimulates situations, such as seeding, knowledge transfers, the cycles of co‐living, tilting, nurturing and arts‐based experimentation. In this essay, authors create suitable circumstances and fertile conditions for surprise, exchanges and repurposing of educational experiences.