Several people have asked about the story behind our name, MishMash. Some also wonder whether it is an acronym for something. It is not; we are thinking about it as a descriptive part of our full centre name: “MishMash Centre for AI and Creativity”.
I can reveal that the name has been heavily discussed in our consortium from the beginning of our application process. If I recall correctly, it first appeared during a conversation with my colleague Ragnhild Brøvig in late April last year. We had to submit a sketch of our application ideas to the Faculty of Humanities and had to come up with a title. Our thoughts were scattered, and we still did not have a clear idea of how to structure things; it all felt like a “mishmash”. We kept it as a working title and even included it in the sketch we submitted to the Research Council of Norway in June last year.
The MishMash name was present in the sketch we submitted to the Research Council of Norway last year. The sketch focused on music and AI and we later broadened to creativity after merging our ideas with three other sketches.
Initially, we thought of it primarily as a working title and numerous other names were suggested. This included endless lists of acronyms with “AI” permutated with other letters (often a “C” for “centre”). None of them felt good, though, and I recalled how “RITMO” was highlighted as a meaningful (and non-English) name some years ago. That told me that centres do not need to have boring acronyms, and the most important thing is to create a “brand” that works.
It was after the pitching sessions at the Research Council in August last year that I realized how well it works. We were 100+ people pitching centre ideas in one go. Weeks later, people came to me and commented on the name we had chosen and how it got stuck with them. Several people in our consortium worried that it wasn’t serious enough and that we could never get funded with such a name. However, we have proven them wrong. We did get funded!