When creativity and enterprise meet – sound artists on the Volvo production line

Changes have been made at one time and in one format or another to make people’s work places and working lives more inspiring using culture, generally in the hope of honing a competitive edge. TILLT, a creative company from Sweden, has taken this a couple of steps further: quite literally to the production line. And since they’ve met with customer satisfaction, we can only assume they were a step in the right direction.

What you’re about to read will probably sound a little strange at first, but it characterises the creative economy way of thinking perfectly. So, a routine working week… in an artistic performance?!
TILLT have taken it upon themselves to bring culture and the working environment together, every which way they can, in both the public and private sectors. Their goal is not to drown the workers in cultural information and event market entertainment, but to offer them ways of making their working lives more productive by implementing culture and tools simultaneously.

So how does it work?

Into the company comes a singer, or actor, or painter, or photographer, or dancer, or sound artist, or some other professional from the field of culture, and settles in to its everyday way of going about things. They take part in meetings and production and development activities and interpret everything they see through their own creative prism. They are a creative consultant: they don’t just sit and watch, but actually influence processes through their creative input.
What this means is that sooner or later the rhythm of work in the company starts to tick in time to the artist. Creative processes are observed that manifest themselves when the artist comes into contact with the life of the work place. What sort of artist will best suit a particular kind of company is determined on the basis of an analysis of its needs and profile.
Although superficially it sounds quite loopy, the approach is designed to put the creative potential concealed in culture to work in the interests of the arduous path to development and changes in the company. The artist registers the changes and developments taking place within the organisation and translates them into a language that everyone understands. In many cases this has provided clear benefits in terms of use of working time, unambiguous clarification of responsibilities, undiscovered problem areas and of course new ideas.

All to make the company more competitive

Sound artist Jesper Norda dealt with technocratic and behavioural psychology at Volvo and developed new car warning signals. Bodil Karlsson from Volvo summed up the experience by saying that Jesper brought art to the production line and charted the undiscovered country on their development map.
Other well-known Nordic companies that have reaped the rewards of such an approach are Paroc, AstraZeneca, Santa Maria, ABB and ICA. Many public sector organisations have also benefitted from it.
AstraZeneca sales director Lars Olemyr is quoted as saying that the ‘half-crazy’ idea of employing an artist in their production process more than paid off, generating a lot of added value for the company.
By the end of 2008 a total of 1100 ‘cultural attaches’ had been posted in 150 companies, taking in 50,000 people. Financially, growth in turnover has doubled since the programme was launched in 2001.
The most obvious results of interweaving business and aesthetics can be seen in such areas as the working environment and health; creativity and motivation; cooperation and teamwork; events and openings; communication; values; and participation.

The news was published at the newsletter (August 2009) of the Creative Estonia.