Creative Research Process Research Articles

Know-why? and know-how? in the development of nuclear talents: An analysis of recent nuclear engineering Ph. D. research

The relationship between the industry and academia is widely considered the key driver or obstacle in producing and using new knowledge. This is, at least in part, a consequence of different forms of knowledge being of different utility for the industry and academia (conceptual, e.g., why? and procedural, e.g., how?). In so-called “high-tech” industries, where the attraction and development of new talents are in significant part carried out through academic research-based higher education system, successful cooperation in the development of new knowledge automatically results in successful attraction and development of new talents. In well-established, strongly regulated, and very procedural industries, such as nuclear power, the pragmatic focus on procedural over conceptual knowledge may also result in the pathways of talent development outside of the research-based higher education system. Some definitions, features, and risks of different approaches to conceptual and procedural knowledge are outlined and discussed in the paper and an attempt is made to connect them with the notions of basic and applied research. It is suggested that suitable sequences and balance of know-why? and know-how? may lead to the best results in the attraction and development of new nuclear talents, while minimizing the risks of reduced ability to manage unexpected, reduced need for innovation and weakening the nuclear knowledge centers outside of the industry and regulators. This is supported by an analysis of 51 Ph.D. theses in nuclear engineering developed in Slovenia since 1993 to discern their contributions towards basic or applied research. The Pasteur’s quadrant, developed by (Stokes, 1997), was used as the underlying framework. Ph.D. graduates and supervisors were independently asked to evaluate the basic and applied contributions through three variables, describing the stages of the creative research process: input, processing, and output, respectively. The predominantly mixed (basic and applied) contributions of the analyzed Ph.D. theses indicate that academic nuclear engineering education is an enabler of successful careers in academia and industry.

Practice-Based Research: Working in Crip Time

This essay investigates the negative consequences of higher education’s ableist obsession with individualism, objectivity, and results, positing practice-based research as a powerful crip alternative to traditional academic models. While traditional models of scholarship aim to separate knowledge from the body that created it, practice-based research locates the body as the source of wisdom, a source to be recognized and celebrated. This essay makes legible the messy bodily experience I had during its writing and intertwines it with an explanation of the autoethnographic research process I undertook to better understand my disabled embodied self during a multi-year creative research process. I situate my experience creating "Awaiting Tiresias" within a tradition of disabled scholar-artist-activists who seek to create time and space for themselves within higher ed. Alison Kafer defines this experience in Feminist, Queer, Crip as reimagining “notions of what can and should happen in time” and “bend[ing] the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (27). Indeed, crip scholarship prioritizes the health of those who engage in it and the transformations that occur through the research and dissemination process instead of results. This essay argues that through its commitment to challenging assumptions, participating in ongoing and collaborative research methods, and recognizing the central role of the researcher’s body in the research process, practice-based research serves as a crip intervention in ableist scholarship practices.

Co-Creation in Community-based Storytelling

The emergence of immersive media and new technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) has contributed to the shift in interactive documentary and community-based storytelling practices. Under the umbrella term known as Extended Reality (XR), the new technologies intervene with and provide the author with a space to negotiate authorship of interactive documentaries in a co-creation setting with the Salako community in Malaysia. Malaysia is a country in the Southeast Asia region. It occupies the Malay Peninsula and part of the Island of Borneo. There are over 120 different communities in Malaysia, and Sarawak, the largest state, has the most diverse communities. The Salako community migrated from West Kalimantan Province of the Indonesian Borneo to Pueh, Sarawak, in the 1870s due to political and geographical reasons. Today, the Salako community members are still involved in farming, and they perform various rituals to seek blessings to avoid harm to their crops. This study investigates the Salako community's storytelling practices in Pueh, Sarawak. It focuses on the co-creation of an interactive documentary storytelling of the paddy farming rituals among the community. Furthermore, it also aims to understand the dynamic relationship negotiated by the author and the community members. Therefore, the questions guiding the study can be framed as follows: How can practice-based research be used in negotiating collaboration with the Salako community? What insights can the author learn from the Salako community that contributes to the creative research practice? The study considers the concept of rhizome, introduced by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as an approach to decolonising storytelling structure in the co-creation of community-based storytelling with the Salako community. The conceptual and theoretical framework bring together recent studies on community-based storytelling and empirical evidence on interactive documentaries and co-creation with a focus on community storytelling practices. The author engages practice-based research as the creative research practice in this study. In the interactive documentary titled Listening to the Salako: Voices of the Paddy and Human, the author will share the creative research process involved in the initial phase of the study. Highlighting the observations and perspectives drawn from the interactive documentary storytelling project with the Salako community, the article offers insights into understanding the nexus of care, collaboration and craft. In addition, it also looks at how practice-based research is used in community engagement and the negotiation of authorship through a participatory design process with the Salako community in Malaysia. In this study, the author argues that while practice-based research is central to navigating the layers of complexity in community engagement, the element of care, collaboration and craft present additional dimensions that can further unpack and contribute to the understanding of creative research practice. The article ends with a discussion of the impact and implications of practice-based research in empowering both the author and the Salako community in negotiating collaboration in the co-creation of the interactive documentary, Listening to the Salako: Voices of the Paddy and Human.

Open Science in Russia or the Enforcement of Scientific Creativity

The executive power of our country, by the statement of Deputy Prime Minister D. Chernyshenko on March 7, 2022, recognized that the current system of management of domestic science does not meet the national interests of Russia. The concept of open science implies not only open access to the latest achievements of world science, which can be achieved with the development of modern means of communication, but also the fulfillment of a number of principles of honest scientific research. One can agree that easy access to theresults of domestic scientific research may be contrary to the national interest of the country. But this problem is probably quite solvable through scientific and technological expertise at the stage of preparing material for publication. The main problem, in our opinion, is related to the fact that numerous scientometric indicators of “successful” scientific work transform the creative research process into an operational type of intellectual activity. In our opinion, the problem of the examination of a scientist’s scientific activity should be reconsidered. The purpose of expertise should be to assess the quality of scientific work: the personal contribution to the scientific problem being developed; reliability and sufficiency of the data obtained andfor the conclusions formulated; reproducibility of observation results; absence of plagiarism and duplication of publications; depth of understanding of the scientific problem; degree of involvement of the researcher in the creative work of the whole scientific team within a given scientific or technological topic. Only examination of the attitude to creative scientific work within the framework of periodic certification process can prevent domestic science from becoming just a means of earning money.

“A story with many rooms”: Twine as a tool to expand life writing practice about place and space

This article will explore how hypertext technology in Twine might be used by writers to expand and augment creative nonfiction life writing about place and space. Twine is a digital storytelling platform for creating interactive, nonlinear choose-your-own-adventure type narratives. Using a case study of a personal essay on homesickness written by the author of this article using Twine, this paper argues that Twine’s functionalities can be employed to represent and explore associative networks of memories and multi-directional thought pathways. Drawing on place theory by Gaston Bachelard and Edward Casey, it responds to the questions: how might writers represent living and moving through the multi-directional and multi-temporal nature of place? And what new mediums could be employed to reflect the exploratory creative research process of life writing about place?

A Creative Research Process for a Modern African Graphic Design Identity; <br/>The Case of Ivory Coast

This study seeks to define a research method in graphic design that would result in a new graphic design with an African, identity, (particularly an Ivorian idendity). In this study we used a descriptive research method with the purpose of demonstrating how to create a graphic design that reflects the national spirit and identity. This paper first analyzes the concepts of culture and cultural identity as a basis for creating this African identity in modern graphic design, then explores the African visual language as a means to enrich this new African graphic design, and finally analyzes the application of traditional graphic symbols and cultural concepts in graphic design based on a comprehensive understanding of these traditional elements important in development of an African design style (the case of Ivory Coast). Based on data collected, this research concluded that in modern graphic design, the use of elements from the culture of a country, such as cultural concepts, graphic symbols, traditional colors, and other traditional art components is an excellent way to create new features. It allows to bring out the national identity in our work through development of creativity that relies precisely on the elements of this culture. This practice is common today. Concisely it contributes to enrich and developing modern graphic design.

A new master of the cultural domain? Google’s role in the transactive memory systems of advertising copywriters and art directors

Creative practice in advertising is often lauded for its novelty, which is recognised in industry awards and other forms of peer evaluation. However, advertising is commonly required to address broad audiences, which means it needs to reflect popular and common cultural ideas. When developing ideas for a new project, advertising creatives usually undertake a research process that allows them to draw upon popular culture texts and previous advertisements. In the pre-digital era, this activity largely depended on the creative’s relationship to their social milieu, but following the arrival of the Internet and the search engine, the creative research process has expanded in scope and become much faster. However, the idea that search, and we refer particularly to Google search, neutrally supports creative practice requires greater scrutiny. In this article, we explore how Google connects advertising creatives to cultural references by considering research on practitioners’ everyday actions through the lens of transactive memory theory and models of creative process.

Empathic Cultural Mapping: Little data, big data, knowledge transfer and exchange

IntroductionA healthy city is one that continually creates and improves psychosocial and social environments and expands community resources allowing people to develop to their maximum portential. The role of SEDoHs is incontestable, yet we continue to face many of the same SEDoH-related problems despite what we know.
 Objectives and ApproachThis project presents the idea of "Empathic Cultural Mapping" (ECM). ECM is an interactive story map which brings together vignettes taken from individual stories curated with "big data" derived from places such as Statistics Canada, the City of Calgary, and library holdings at the University of Calgary. ECM seeks to challenge users to re-imagine long held constructions around sectoral, and disciplinary driven interpretations and categorizations of lifestyle, consumption, health, and the environment. ECM seeks to encourage knowledge users from multiple sectors to think beyond what is known and to consider what might be possible.
 ResultsECM is a creative interactive undertaking. In developing ECM, a range of creative research processes have been used to record and tell the stories of a small group of newcomers (defined as those who migrate, seek refuge, or claim asylum in Canada) and position these within large data. A desire to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and communties through opening processes of dialogoue between local government, non-government organizations, communitites, and individuals lies at the heart of this project. Knowledge and sense-making are key features of individual and community empowerment within the ECM and are viewed as powerful stimuli for change as well as powerful allies for health and a buffer against its threats.
 Conclusion/ImplicationsECM creates, shares, and brings together individual stories and 'big data'. It identifies needs that impact health in the everyday. It seeks to improve awareness of the world around us. It encourages people to communicate their experiences. Finally, it achieves its goals by using creative processes.

Performing the castaway

ABSTRACTThis work begins to explore a new story and encounter, and also examines the practice of scriptwriting as a creative practice, as creative writing and research. In particular this work investigates the interactive process of creating, representing multiple voices from historical texts, archival research, the researcher, the writer, the characters and the performers. It aims to contribute to the growing body of work within the academy that explores the nexus between scriptwriting as creative writing and research. While the historical researcher might be more concerned with wanting to accurately analyse and communicate information, the dramatic scriptwriter has to give consideration to aesthetic elements, as well as the multiple contributions of performances and audiences. A creative research process, about nineteenth-century shipwreck survivor Barbara Crawford's story, has therefore begun with a focus on the imagining and writing as research, not considered separately but interrogated as part of the creative process and new work.

PAN & ZOOM: Reflections on Panoramic Practices

The oscillation of local and global, stasis and movement, expansion and inversion, and human and nonhuman collaborations, suggest how personal and collective movement experiences are in fact the result of mediated spatial practices. In this paper we draw on our interactive and participatory installations PAN & ZOOM, exhibited at the 2015 PSi event in Melbourne, to discuss how creative research processes reflect current media practices and generate new performative practices of mediated “panoramic” movements. A panorama makes perceptible the ways in which we stitch together our experiences of place and space and collectively modulate our experience of internationalism. Rethinking internationalism through participatory artwork is what shifts the panorama from artefact to performative practice. Discussing the context of the artworks, the paper explores how collectively constructing panoramas activates a performance that traverses international aesthetics and media. The idea of an inverse panorama, which zooms in amplifying the construction of personal experience and showing how creative techniques and activations can be understood as expanded collaborative practices. We suggest that a contemporary panoramic aesthetic is indicative of creative practices that respond to internationalization and new modes of collective existence.

Participatory methodologies in research with children: creative and innovative approaches.

To describe the use of participatory methodologies in research with children. Experience report with a qualitative approach, conducted with children between six and eleven years of age, from a municipal school in Pelotas and in the Psychosocial Children and Youth Care Center, in São Lourenço do Sul, both municipalities of the Rio Grande do Sul State. Data collection was based on records made in field and observation diaries, held from April to July 2016. The report pointed out that the Photovoice promoted motivation in the group, in addition to increasing the self-esteem and self-confidence of children. The Five Field Map made it possible to help children express feelings through the game. Photovoice and the Five Field Map are seen as tools that enable new methodological approaches in research with children, facilitating the construction of the proposed activities aimed at innovative and creative research processes in health/nursing.

Augmented Fotonovelas

Augmented Fotonovelas are a multi-modal new media object centering the knowledge of the Latina/o community in ways accessible and meaningful to multiple audiences by incorporating video interviews, photographs, interactive mapping, smart phone technology, and Augmented Reality (AR) to produce Augmented Scholarship. Augmented Fotonovelas are visual counter-stories highlighting the role of race along with other forms of subordination, focusing on lived experiences, and engaging Communities of Color as co-collaborators in a creative research process. They are pedagogical and social justice tools with the power to raise public consciousness, elicit community action, and social change.

Art Practice as Research in the Classroom: Creative Inquiry for Understanding Oneself and the World

The article describes Art Practice (APR), an art pedagogy in which students independently investigate and interpret a theme of their choice. Based on the concept that art practice is a form of research, this approach blends inquiry and thinking skills associated with the natural and social sciences with interpretive and inventive methods linked to art. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, APR calls for a structured yet open-ended inquiry-based curriculum. Equally inspired by the International Baccalaureate Program in Art, it stresses in-depth, prolonged investigations by students using Research Workbooks as tools to develop and record their inquiry. In emphasizing critical inquiry, creative visual interpretation, and text-based reflection, two important goals are achieved. Students construct deep, personal, and fresh understandings of ideas and issues that are particularly significant to them, and also become acutely aware of their creative research processes. This is evidenced in the work of one typical student from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California.

Engaging Cooperative Research

Cooperative research involves upstream engagement of practitioners, introducing diverse knowledges and expertise in ways that can, in theory at least, generate new knowledge that is socially robust and publicly accountable. And yet, judging cooperative research solely in terms of accountability may underplay the transformative and nonaccountable/nonconvergent nature of research—the production, in other words, of the new when collectives are drawn together. Using examples from research that sought to provide environmental civil society organisations (CSOs) with the resources to shape cooperative research, this paper argues that cooperative research may not simply mark an extension of public engagement with science but can also seed an anticipatory and thus creative research process. For cooperative research to play this role there is a need to highlight the human and nonhuman attachments that underpin cooperative research activity. We argue that such activity might best have as its aim the empowerment, not simply of participants, but of the political situations that CSOs can help to foment.

A passion for sleep measurement

Nancy Redeker talks to Les Gelling about the joy of immersing herself in the creative research process

Metasynthesis and Bricolage

During the past decades, new approaches to synthesizing qualitative data have been developed. However, this methodology continues to face significant philosophical and practical challenges. By reviewing the literature on this topic, our overall aim in this article is to explore the systematic and creative research processes involved in the act of metasynthesizing. By investigating synthesizing processes borrowed from two studies, we discuss matters of transparency and transferability in relation to how multiple qualitative studies are interpreted and transformed into one narrative. We propose concepts such as bricolage, metaphor, playfulness, and abduction as ideas that might enhance understanding of the importance of combinations of scientific and artistic approaches to the way the synthesizer "puzzles together" an interpretive account of qualitative studies. This study can benefit researchers by increasing their awareness of the artistic processes involved in qualitative analysis and metasynthesis to expand the domain and methods of their fields.

Skeletal (in-)visibilities in the city – Rootless: a video sculptural response to the disconnected in Cape Town

This article follows the construction and outcome of a series of installations based on an artwork created by the author, a life-size replica of a human skeleton made of tree twigs and branches, which journeyed across central Cape Town on a day tour. The work drew on museums, heritage and cities research, seminars and colloquia at the University of the Western Cape that problematised memorialisation, land, landscape, tourism, human remains, memory, archive and silences in histories in Cape Town. In a collaboration with another artist, Kitty Dörje, the skeleton was performed and set up in installations at Table Mountain National Park, Iziko Museum, Prestwich Street Memorial, Rhodes Memorial and the Table Mountain view from Blouberg beach. Along the journey new connotations began to occur between the skeleton and the places visited, the skeleton performing as a linking device. The resulting short film, Rootless, combined poetry, visuals and music, and was dedicated to ‘the silenced and forgotten people of Cape Town.’ This article traces the experiential process of the construction of the artwork installations and the performance of the skeleton in different environments, as a creative research process. The skeleton artwork constructs visual and conceptual links between spaces and histories in the city. It is argued that this visually disturbs the material silencing and erasure of past and present communities through evoking plural perspectives and histories, thus raising questions on issues of representation in which landscape and artwork become alternative forms of archive.

The Creative Research Process: Delights and Difficulties

This paper reports on an arts-informed approach to education research aimed to critically develop and promote teachers’ creative practice and understanding of creativity for both pupils and teachers. The creative research process is described to reveal how it developed 20 students as researchers in a secondary school in England. The students’ perspectives impressed artists and enlightened expert researchers into new ways of thinking and doing research. A reciprocal relationship was developed that unravelled novel data and promoted pupil voice.

Epicureanism and the poetics of consumption

Consumption, ‘to use up, to destroy’, is a dirty word. It conjures piles of rubbish; it suggests an extravagant attitude. We, each one of us hoping to be a unique, careful individual, can feel offended at being referred to as ‘the consumer’. Yet, ‘to consume’ is not only a human activity, it is one of the fundamental processes of nature, a natural aspect of the creative process. In this paper, I will emphasize connections between the creative research process, poetics and consumerism. I suggest that research can be envisioned as a cycle of consumption and renewal. Our tools in such a natural philosophy are the contemplation of natural events, and the insights that a poetic understanding of language can give us. To this end, I draw on the ancient Epicurean philosophy, as demonstrated in De rerum natura, written by the Roman poet, Lucretius, in the first century BCE. Lucretius gave a scientific explanation of the universe, in poetry, to demonstrate that natural laws can be derived by reason, contemplation and by the use of the senses. Further, Lucretius' use of language, as a creative medium, modelled the actions of the universe. This insight provides a link between poetry, science and research, one which is still relevant to twenty-first-century scientific research generally. In this paper, I will suggest that it is also specifically relevant to the design and practice of consumer research. For instance, both research and creativity are aspects of that urge to move beyond subjectivity, towards knowledge that is whole and shared. In Epicureanism, subjective engagement provides access to that which is universal. We can conceive of consumerism, and of consumer research, in the same terms, as a striving for completion, and as a poetic, natural and reciprocal act, involving the transformation of the consumer, and that which is consumed.

Documentation in Performance-Led Research

This article begins by setting the question of why practitioner-researchers engage in the practice of documentation within the context of academic research conventions. The assumption that performance requires documentation for dissemination is brought into question through reference to Caroline Rye's provocative suggestion that documentation should be banned from the ‘practice as research in performance’ debate to bring into view transitory and provisional forms of dissemination. The article goes on to inquire into documentation's capability to provide knowledge that is similar in nature to the contributions of live performance, and to question whether documentation and performance should be defined as oppositional practices. These concerns are then addressed through the presentation and evaluation of philosophical notions surrounding the concept of ‘liveness’, drawing on the writings of Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander and Martin Buber. The focus then shifts to examine how audiovisual documentation may become a dialogic knowledge-producing encounter. This question is pragmatically addressed through the presentation of a documentation method which is designed to articulate provisional and divergent perspectives on creative research processes. The article then concludes by evaluating the role of documentation in mixed-mode research (drawing on the work of Susan Melrose), while pointing towards a growing recognition of the need for a new model of performance-led research validation that accounts for the corroborative relationship between performance and documentation practices.