Elena Raviola grew up in Italy and moved to Sweden as a PhD student in 2005. She took up the professorship in Design Management in 2018 and her research focuses on how professional structures and ideas are adopted, changed and maintained in practice and how technology transforms over time what is considered professional.

The meeting of culture, art and economy

My academic growth has varied between disciplines, but also between countries, languages and groups. I don't feel fully attached to one place, one group or one discipline. So it is perhaps not surprising that my research has been increasingly about what happens when differences meet, when that meeting is smooth or when it catches fire.

I am interested in how the so-called creative and cultural work, as well as design work, organized and how the relationship between economy and culture is changing with digitalization. My research examines the everyday and not so everyday negotiations, conflicts and compromises between management (with norms of efficiency, control and profit) and creative professions (with norms such as autonomy, independence and quality) especially in creative industries. My studies have mainly been about how digitalization is changing by providing new opportunities for action, as well as influencing new relationships and introducing new measurement instruments.

New ways of organizing creative and cultural work are being developed, providing new relationships with both audiences and funding.

My studies have so far focused on design and media. I have been inspired by ethnographic methods and over the years I have chosen some so-called work tribes and workplaces to understand the everyday processes. For example, I have followed the work of several newsrooms in countries such as Sweden, Italy and France. This type of research follows a long, Scandinavian, scientific tradition of qualitative studies at the University of Gothenburg.

Cross-border research

Right now, my research has two tracks. The first track is about automation and its impact on creative and cultural work. I want to understand how autonomous systems and artificial intelligence are developed and used in artistic creation, in a broad sense, and what role new technologies have in practical aesthetic judgment. The boundary between technology and humans but also their interaction is changing over time. The idea that new technologies can do the boring work so that humans can focus on the creative work is interesting to study. I also see that there is a need to contextualize the development and use of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence both historically and organizationally. Therefore, I want to understand how new technologies can change how cultural and creative work is organized and how the relationships between the actors in those fields are affected.

The second track is about the importance of design work for sustainable urban development. My research group wants to investigate the role of design in how collaboration between different actors - public as well as commercial, creative as well as bureaucratic, professional as public - develops and succeeds or fails. For example, we focus on on how city light and its design can evolve and shape sustainable urban development.

As holder of the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Chair in Design Management I have the privilege to build cross-border collaboration between different parts of the University of Gothenburg - Faculty of Arts and the School of Business. This is of course also an honorable challenge. Hopefully, more people will jump on the bandwagon to create equal between culture, art and economy that changes the world, the city and us ... at least a little bit.

Elena Raviola, University of Gothenburg