The Relevance of Artistic Research (originally published in June 2017 in Dutch at ScienceGuide http://www.scienceguide.nl/201706/de-relevantie-van-artistiek-onderzoek.aspx) Recently we received word that our application for the ZonMw fund was rejected, which led us to think about whether it is possible as artistic researchers to adequately explain the added value of our research. ZonMw supports practical research within the context of the elderly, and although our ambition was to improve the elderly care, it became clear to us that there is a gap between the practice-directed quality of practice-oriented research and the practice-embedding quality of artistic research. Artistic research is a relatively new form of research that makes use of the attitudes and methods of artists and designers during the research process. This simply implies that researchers work from a visual and associative perspective and have an open attitude that makes it possible for them to notice that which others may fail to see. For a better understanding, we will place artistic research next to three other research paradigms in this text: design-oriented research, practice- oriented research, and academic research. We do this in order to make the social relevance of artistic research visible, a notion that stems from the direct ambition to create a space for artistic research in which the elderly, caregivers, and researchers can gather new insights. Not only does this topic require extra attention because artistic research has a different social value, but also because it is still relatively young: artistic research needs to develop its vocabulary to make itself intelligible towards the already more developed forms of research. This article is an initial attempt in doing so. In another light By 2015, a group of students and nurses participated in a photo walk at Het Blauwbörgje, a home for people with dementia. This photo walk was created by artist Lino Hellings as a method [1] to develop new insights together with a diverse group of people within the setting of the Blauwbörgje, as the institution is an environment in which one group of people must live and another group works as caregivers. Hellings did not develop this method with the intention of creating well- thought-out, ‘beautiful’ photographs, but she wanted to instantly take pictures of whatever presented itself. In the following days, a selection of the images, made in only a few hours, was uploaded on a website and provided with comments from the one who took the photo. In a meeting with the management of the nursing home, the students and caregivers shared their comments and carefully formulated impressions based on the pictures. The management and team leaders of the Blauwbörgje were deeply impressed by the sincere, personal and new perspectives of the environment; an environment they themselves could no longer look at that way. “What struck me in the exchange between staff and students was the slow process. We are accustomed to a quick process that immediately deals with things, and we discovered how different perspectives emerged as a result of the slowness of this new process” (Carla Dijkslag in an interview [2]). For example, the students and caregivers discovered that the emptiness in the common areas was partly due to the fact that people with dementia like to take things with them. This resulted in the Tugstuff prototypes: big stuffed animals with long arms that can be dragged everywhere, specially developed for the residents. They also discovered the strong separation between the inner spaces, that contain the people with dementia, and the outer spaces in which visitors and staff can move