Working with biologist Heather Kharouba and her students, Chartrand used carefully selected materials to reveal the impact that rising temperatures have on flowers essential to monarch survival. Her art exhibit, entitled “”, led to future collaborations and sparked new scientific questions: could climate change be reshaping not only the quality of nectar, but also a flower’s visual cues, on which pollinators depend?
What began as an artist-in-residence collaboration at the Kharouba Lab soon grew into something larger. Along with Chantal Rodier, a professor specializing in multidisciplinary design at the Faculty of Engineering who has long championed cross-disciplinary teaching, Kharouba and Rodier helped lay the groundwork for a movement that blends art, science and engineering to spark fresh ideas, inspire students and design climate solutions that reach beyond the lab. This movement was enthusiastically supported by multidisciplinary artist Annette Hegel, who joined them on this climate action art, engineering and science adventure.
How creative practice is changing scientific research
The Kharouba Lab studies how climate change alters the delicate interactions between plants and insects. But because Chartrand’s artistic lens was woven into the process from the beginning, the research generated new data, and even more importantly, this artistic lens shifted how that data was collected and what questions it could answer.
In their current collaboration, Chartrand’s ultraviolet photography revealed floral patterns invisible to the human eye but crucial for pollinators. Chartrand with Kharouba and her students began to ask: what happens to these visual cues under climate change? If warming shifts not only when flowers bloom, but also how they appear to monarch butterflies, what does this mean for the monarch’s survival?
The art pieces produced as part of Flutterings were not simple illustrations of existing knowledge. They were provocations, nudging the research in new directions. The lab found itself looking at climate change through data points and models, yet also through altered perspectives of vision and perception.
For Kharouba, research takes on new dimension. “One of the things I find most exciting about this collaboration is what it shows my students,” she says. “They see that the way we ask questions, the way we design experiments, can change when someone with a completely different training is in the room.”
“[Students] see that the way we ask questions, the way we design experiments, can change when someone with a completely different training is in the room.”
Heather Kharouba
— Professor, Faculty of Science
By embedding artistic practice early, collaborations like these transform research from a narrowly defined experiment into a shared exploration.
From the classroom to real-world solutions
For years, Chantal Rodier, a professor and artist-in-residence at the Faculty of Engineering, has been putting the principle of multidisciplinary collaboration into practice in the classroom. As STEAM Projects Coordinator, she has led a multidisciplinary design course where engineering and visual arts students work together on real-world challenges. In 2024, Heather Kharouba and her students were invited to join this multidisciplinary design course to add a scientific perspective to creative, solution-focused design.
The results were impressive: teams tackled urban ecosystem problems presented by City of Ottawa natural systems partners and proposed solutions that blended creativity and engineering with scientific insight. One collaboration with the City of Ottawa showcased how floating island ecosystems can help purify the water in Dow’s Lake. This idea is currently under review by the City and the National Capital Commission, and may help them achieve their preexisting goal of making the water in the canal swimmable.
The University’s Office of Campus Sustainability is currently reviewing another project, which involves using mini forests in urban environments to maximize health and ecological benefits.
These classroom experiments have suggested a larger possibility: what if this boundary-crossing model could expand beyond a single course? Inspired by their collaborations, Rodier and Kharouba decided to organize an art-science-engineering symposium. They soon joined forces with artist Annette Hegel to begin the planning in the Fall of 2024.
Turning insight into action: a call for structural change
While this teaching initiative was taking place, planning was underway for the . Over 50 scientists, artists, engineers and policymakers came together to share examples of multidisciplinary success stories involving climate action and to imagine better mobilization across disciplines to tackle climate and urban challenges.
Unlike typical conferences, participants joined all sessions of the 2025 Crossing Boundaries Symposium in order to encourage real dialogue and information exchange. More than just a showcase, the symposium became a catalyst: participants committed to building a national Boundary Crossing Network to support and scale multidisciplinary collaboration. The sense of urgency and passion was palpable, and participants left feeling inspired to carry this momentum forward. The room buzzed as scientists debated with artists.
While individuals left the conference inspired, the challenges remain: these collaborations work, but they rely too heavily on individual effort and ad hoc funding. Institutional and funding systems are not yet designed to support multidisciplinary climate work.
Fostering the growth of a national network can help move the needle from exception to expectation: a future where artist residencies in labs are commonplace, where cross-faculty courses are aplenty, and where shared funding streams are easy to access. After all, for climate solutions to advance, new ways of knowing must be structurally supported.
Universities are responsible for leading this type of research and bringing specialists together to solve these complex contemporary problems. “Addressing “wicked problems” requires not only multidisciplinary engagement, in which disciplines work side by side, but also transdisciplinary collaboration, in which knowledge is co-created across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries, with the meaningful involvement of non-academic and creative actors,” says Chantal Rodier.
“Addressing “wicked problems” requires not only multidisciplinary engagement but also transdisciplinary collaboration, with the meaningful involvement of non-academic and creative actors.”
Chantal Rodier
— STEAM Projects Coordinator and Artist in Residence, Faculty of Engineering
From UV images of hidden floral patterns to floating islands in Ottawa’s waterways, these projects show that when artists, engineers and scientists work as co-creators, they don’t just answer questions—they change which questions are asked.
