From Puzzle Pieces to Patterns
Collage for Art and Research
I absolutely love collage.
As an art form, it’s endlessly forgiving and endlessly surprising. You don’t need perfect drawing skills or expensive materials, just a pile of scraps and the curiosity to see what happens when you put them together. Collage invites you to mix textures, clash colors, splice realities. It’s a way to tap into creativity that bypasses your logical brain and lets your instincts take the lead.
In the studio, I start with a loose pile of pieces including torn bits of painted paper, fragments from magazines, patterns I’ve printed, etc. It’s like assembling a puzzle without knowing what the image will be. You shuffle the pieces, follow a hunch, move something over a tad, swap it for something else. Slowly, the fragments begin to merge into something whole.
Here’s a collage I worked on over the weekend (still in progress.) I had no plan for the image, but as I’ve mentioned here before I have been exploring themes related to feeling adrift, separating from our childhood homes, and wondering what comes next. I’m also interested in how the houses here on the Outer Banks are built on stilts so close to the water, some of them losing the battle with climate change and shifting shorelines. So, it’s no surprise that those topics are showing up again in this piece, tentatively titled The Flooded Room.
But as always, this collage also contains some things that surprised me: it has a feeling of being caught between sinking and floating, with both freedom (the birds) and heaviness (the anchor). Just by mindlessly putting the pieces together, the page started to reveal a story that I was unaware of before.
And here’s what is really interesting: you can do the exact same thing as a research method.
Collage for Research: The TaskRabbit Example
In the early days of the sharing economy, TaskRabbit was brand new. The founder wasn’t sure how people felt about the core idea: inviting a stranger into your home to do a task for you.
I designed a workshop to explore that question without asking it directly. I split people into small groups, briefed them neutrally on the concept, and handed each person a stack of magazines, scissors, and glue sticks.
The instructions were simple:
Think about what you’ve just heard.
Cut out any images that feel connected to the idea, without overthinking why.
Let your subconscious guide you.
Once everyone had a small pile, they shared their images with their group, talked about why they’d chosen them, and then created a team collage.
What Surfaced
The resulting collages were revealing in ways a survey or interview might never have been.
Image 1 – “Safety, Security, and Value”
This group’s collage revealed a mix of reassurance and practicality: stop signs, security imagery, confident leaders, and symbols of value like coupons and family life.
Image 2 – “Aspirations with a Side of Absurdity”
Here, order and aspiration meet humor and unpredictability, from organized closets and luxury travel to a grinning pug. A subtle signal that people feel overwhelmed, and that trying something new to find calm moments feels both exciting and strange.
Image 3 – “Red Light / Green Light”
One side brimmed with fear, mistrust, and uncertainty; the other with happiness, ease, and status. A visual split between hesitation and enthusiasm for inviting a stranger into your home.
These collages didn’t just answer whether people liked or disliked the idea. They surfaced latent feelings:
The desire for security and control.
The appeal of convenience and saving time.
The hesitation about letting someone into private space.
The curiosity about new ways of getting things done.
Why Collage Works in Research
What makes collage so effective for research is the same thing that makes it powerful in art: it bypasses the rational, self-edited part of the brain. Participants don’t have to articulate their feelings in neat bullet points; they can point to an image and say, “This is how it feels.”
This isn’t just anecdotal. Academic research has shown collage to be a legitimate and effective qualitative method:
As Lynn Butler-Kisber and Tiiu Poldma point out in The Power of Visual Approaches in Qualitative Inquiry, collage can serve as a “visual, interpretive tool” that captures tacit aspects of understanding: the things people know but can’t easily articulate (read here).
Kathleen Vaughan, in Pieced Together: Collage as an Artist’s Method for Interdisciplinary Research, frames collage as a dual epistemological tool, blending visual and linguistic ways of knowing: a practice that feels very familiar from my own studio and workshop experiences (read here).
And Paula Gerstenblatt’s Collage Portraits as a Method of Analysis in Qualitative Research demonstrates how collage can surface expressive, non-linguistic narratives that are especially powerful in group settings (abstract here).
In other words: this method has both intuitive appeal and scholarly rigor.
Two Worlds, One Process
Whether I’m making a surreal “fish person” collage in my studio or helping a team uncover hidden assumptions in a strategy workshop, the process is surprisingly similar:
Start with fragments.
Search for patterns and juxtapositions.
Arrange and rearrange until something new takes shape.
In art, the goal might be expression; in research, it’s insight. But either way, you’re connecting dots that don’t announce themselves until you start moving the pieces around.
That’s the magic of collage… it works in the studio, and it works in the office (you can even do it on a MURAL board!)
I’ll be sharing more creative techniques reflections and resources weekly(ish), along with updates about my upcoming courses on creative reinvention. If you're looking for a more meaningful way to work, without giving up your day job, you might want to stick around.
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