Text

The field of creative arts therapies increasingly requires sensitive methods for developing and evaluating complex interventions. Drawing on recent research under review, we describe approaches to tracing change that attend to subjective and relational dimensions of therapy, and to the emergent, nonlinear qualities inherent in creative practice and complex systems. To communicate complexity, health researchers often rely on logic models to map interventions before trials. Yet conventional logic models typically present linear causal chains of inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes, oversimplifying interventions and contexts and limiting transferability and implementation. We argue that this paradigm reflects reductive positivist assumptions that sit uneasily with the processual, relational, and emergent nature of creative arts therapies and their environments.

Our workshop proposes an evidenced adaptive alternative: living logic models that foreground iteration, feedback, simultaneity, and contextual contingency as foundational principles. We present a case study from recent doctoral research by Nehama on art therapy with displaced families, where a dynamic, nested theory of change was developed to represent overlapping and mutually influencing spheres in which therapeutic outcomes occur. This visual approach moves beyond linear causation toward understanding interventions as events within complex adaptive systems, where change emerges through multiple simultaneous processes rather than predetermined pathways.

Participants will engage experientially by creating visual representations of situated practices as nested models, then collectively exploring additions such as dark logic, iteration, and nested emergence. The workshop concludes with critical discussion on nonlinearity, emergence, diffraction, and complex systems, considering implications for research design, evaluation, implementation science, and policy.