Building Intercultural Spaces through Co-Creation: Insideness in Shared Living Spaces

Abstract

We explored the role of art in facilitating intercultural communication through a project in which undergraduate students from the United States and Japan co-created a digital collage of shared living spaces. Through the creation of personal dioramas and a collaborative collage, students shared personal stories and objects that were meaningful to their identity formation. Our research found that incorporating personal memories and cultural objects into art-making was an effective way of evoking a sense of insideness with a place and bridging cultural differences. The collage was a learning space where students negotiated differences and worked together to create a more inclusive place through vicarious insideness. This study highlights the potential for using art to facilitate intercultural communication and engage a sense of insideness in unfamiliar places among individuals from different cultures.