Practice-led Project Research Articles

From Third Place: Illustrations and Observations of Connection in the Inner City

From Third Place is a practice-led project that explores the concept of third place in relation to society of the inner city, specifically Auckland CBD, using the traditional cultural anthropological methods of fieldwork and observational drawing to explore third places in Auckland. This project addresses the concept of third place and its role within society and the individual, reflecting on how we connect within our environment. This project is heavily influenced by my previous degree in cultural anthropology and art history. The inquiry is explored through the publication in three chapters of observational illustrations which focuses on the main third places used in everyday life by residents of Auckland CBD; cafes, parks, and pubs. The resulting publication is a series of snapshots of life in the city. The aims of this project is to explore connection of individuals in the city and celebrate the third places that facilitate them.

MARIA MARIA! Exploring Filipina Identity Through Mixed-Media Graphic Design

This practice-led project explores Filipina Identity through mixed media graphic design, asking how two halves of a Pre and Post-Colonial female identity may exist in visual and narrative harmony. Through a series of seven assemblages, the practitioner takes the bold landscapes and bright, colourful creatures of Pre-Colonial Philippine mythology into the intensely sacred space of devotional shrines. In doing so, the project reviews key areas of Western Storytelling; Filipino Cubism; and 20th Century Assemblage. By using Western devices to frame indigenous content, the practitioner hopes to create a timeless, familiar narrative with a native twist.

Mutual learning through participatory storytelling: Creative approaches to climate adaptation education in secondary schools

Unprecedented global temperatures have brought the question of how to teach sensitive issues of climate change to the fore. In this paper we suggest that a refocusing on adaptation productively shifts the debate to climate justice and practical solutions to building community resilience. The paper examines a practice-led project that sought to innovate and test the use of participatory storytelling with young people to explore climate adaptation. Our insights relate to two areas: first, the benefits of mutual learning through engaging in dialogue with frontline communities; second, how participatory storytelling supports emotionally intelligent sensemaking, agency and leadership by providing both ‘connections’ and ‘containers’ for engaging with climate.

Creative practice as research: an undergraduate practice-led project in Communication Design in New Zealand

In the past three decades, designers have adopted an innovative position as practitioner- researchers in universities by conducting academic research through their creative practice. Many scholars have acknowledged and discussed the will to communicate through creative means. Such endeavours have always been part of the learning and teaching in Graphic Design but how practice-led research sits within university institutions at the undergraduate level requires further investigation. This article offers insights into five design practitioners developing research projects led by the practice, of academics at Auckland University of Technology, in Auckland, New Zealand. These undergraduate candidates are undertaking research by creative practice in the broad field of Visual Communication Design. These new practitioners/researchers to the academic space feel profound and unsettled tensions, for whom traditional research approaches seem too ordered to capture the dynamism of the inquiry process, which lies at the heart of their creative practice. They seek an approach that can offer high levels of interdisciplinarity and focus on skill and competence to produce insights into a socio-material iterative design process. The article presents, with a commentary on practice, five projects operating in the context of complex problems young designers face and their understanding of the design work as it relates to practice and research. The article contributes to advancing a shift in higher design education towards creative practice as an approach to research, promoting the social and the cultural rather than design that is industrially driven. While working within this scope, it is envisaged that some arguments and inferences will have applicability beyond the Aotearoa and for other creative practices, practitioners and researchers.

City Symphony

City Symphony

Immersive Photography: a review of the contextual knowledge of a PhD practice-led research project

Despite its 35 years of academic presence, practice-led research is still in the process of building its status regarding definitions and its discourse. One of the fundamentals of this type of research is that practice-led expands the study to encompass questions that emerge from practice. Practice-led maintain the scientific, academic protocols and observing academic rigour, following structures and themes with the characteristics of rigour: the study goals, the methods for specific media and processes, the substantiation of the process of discovery, and nevertheless, its historical and theoretical context. This article presents the contextual and historical review of knowledge of the practice-led project developed for my PhD project: ‘The process of immersive photography: beyond the cognitive and the physical’ and considers a process methodologically and conceptually, demonstrating its nature and the manner in which it occurs in a photographer’s practice. This process enables a deeply internal yet communicative interaction between the photographer and the land. The aim is to contextualise the main notions and concepts that informed the inquiry, and this article focuses on two of these concepts: immersion, and embodiment while contributes to clarity about the contextual and historical background that informed the research.

An Investigation Into Safe Printmaking Methods With Etching Without Acid, For Art & Design For Higher Education Institutions In Pakistan

The purpose of this research was to explore healthy, environmentally friendly, effective, and economical alternatives to traditional acid-base printmaking practices. The research took place in Pakistan, where chemicals and acids are widely used for printmaking in Art & Design higher education institutions as well as in artist’s workshops. These approaches pose serious health and safety issues for teachers, students, and practitioners alike as well as causing environmental damage. However, no research on safer alternatives had been previously carried out in the country. The investigation filled this gap using a mixed-methods research design: a practice-led project focused on the design, development, and testing of an electro-etching machine made entirely from economical and locally available components; the opinions and ideas of experts and practitioners were gauged through questionnaires and structured interviews; and, finally, the technical and aesthetic qualities and possibilities of the proposed machine were tested and evaluated through a print workshop involving students, professors, and print artists. The research found that the proposed method met the inquiry’s main objectives, namely: to produce high-quality artistic prints using a safe and economical alternative to acid. The researchers conclude by arguing that the research has the potential to move educational and artistic practices in Pakistan away from unhealthy and damaging methods and towards safe and sustainable forms of print production.

You Can’t Get There From Here: Discovering Where to Begin a Practice-led Inquiry – Notes and Reflections from Thailand

This article focuses critical attention on an often-overlooked aspect of practice-led research in art and design – how and where practice-led research projects begin. In particular, the article describes and discusses an MFA class in Visual Communication at a Thai University that provides a structured approach to producing what the author describes as good beginnings. Rather than resulting from the decision to continue existing approaches to practice or selecting a new topic for inquiry, the author argues that good beginnings emerge from an intensive period of pre-inquiry that, at one and the same time, invites students to engage with and unpack the motivations and concerns that underly their practices, explore these through practical experimentation, locate them within relevant theoretical contexts, and by so doing, begin the process of reimaging their practice-in-itself as a form of practice-as-inquiry. Working in a situation where artistic inquiry is dominated by conventional understandings of research and the hegemony of linguistic forms of the presentation of knowledge, the author pays particular attention to addressing the complex entanglements of words and works in the development of practice-led projects in a university setting.

Testimonies and Literature as Alternative Transitional Justice in Algeria

This essay emerged from a practice-led project, in which Algerian women survivors of the Civil War of the 1990s narrate their first-hand testimonies in the presence of authors who endeavoured to translate them through literature. It explores Khatibi's novel Hatab Sarajevo (Firewood of Sarajevo) (2019) which combines the unheard voices of these women survivors as well as survivors of the war in Bosnia. In it, first-hand and secondary witnesses are communicated through the medium of testimony as a genre and through language in its literal and figurative forms. The essay aims to influence the debate around transitional justice, symbolic reparation and the role of literature in the provision of remedy for historical injustice, particularly in a situation where processes of transitional justice have been absent, aborted or misused, as in the case of Algeria. This essay brings approaches from a variety of disciplines to explore the power of literature in challenging established narratives through testimony. It compares and contrasts the different forms of witnessing produced by first-hand eyewitnesses with those communicated and translated through literature, in this case Khatibi's novel Hatab Sarajevo (2018), to present a practical case of a survivor-centred approach. It will illustrate how “translated” stories go beyond the traditional way of representing the past and searching for truth, to empowering survivors. I argue this collective writing project gives agency to survivors to create a corpus of “mnemonics literature” (i.e. of mnemonic collected works). In doing so, it generates “alternative archives”, which could be either a contested or a confirmed version of history, as well as enabling the empowerment of “mnemonic communities” as a whole. I conclude that testimonies in their different forms both promote healing processes and symbolic reparations and shape sociopolitical debates surrounding collective memory.

Sinclair Wetlands: A case study of practice-led research in community projects

Report from the Art+Water, art and science project 2019.This paper documents two community art projects with Glen Reilly, kaitiaki for Sinclair Wetlands. It has two parts: research undertaken for the Sinclair Wetlands projects and a reflection on practiceled research as a methodology based on Sinclair Wetlands as the research topic. The Create Art and Plant Trees project was an area of investigation during my postgraduate study in 2019 to frame my research around human emotions within the natural environment. A second project for the “Art+Water: Mountains to the Sea” exhibition was a community-engaged art project, designed to foster collaborations and positive emotions between artists and the community. The framework consisted of a research topic supported with interdisciplinary theories, practice-led research methodology and studio practice. This paper demonstrates how practice-led projects influenced my postgraduate research and reflects on this learning experience from both academic and community perspectives.

Could the picture steel words

Abstract This paper reflects on a practice-led project that examines the relationship between drawing, writing and environmental concerns. This paper, and the artworks discussed wherein, is an encompassing interpretive gesture that tries to make sense of the possibilities that manual work, grassroots sustainability, unconventional architecture and drawing can support in the context of significant anthropogenic global warming. Using a case study of a specific countercultural building manual, the efficacies of paper, drawing and the written word are explored in spatial terms. Specifically, the role of the vernacular is examined in both the realms of architecture and language as key to understanding new possibilities for the production of social space. How can practices of land use be understood through vernacular architectures and environmental grammars? And when does drawing make contact with the physical realm of the world?

Practice-Led Project as a Creative Method to Enhance Theoretical Knowledge in Art and Design Education

Practice-Led Project as a Creative Method to Enhance Theoretical Knowledge in Art and Design Education

Hide and Seek: Mimesis and Narrative in Ekphrasis as Translation

This paper reports on my continuing engagement as a poet with the visual arts. It outlines the nature of a book of ekphrastic poetry sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain (AHRC), how this project relates to my previous work in this field and seeks to set this practice-led project in the context of recent developments in ekphrastic theory. It is concerned especially with the concept of mimesis as this term applies in both ekphrasis and translation. I will begin by outlining briefly what I take to be the main trends in current ekphrastic theory and practice before relating them to the two collections of poetry I have worked on in recent years.

Creative Assemblages: Organisation and Outputs of Practice-Led Research

In this note we explore the organisation of creative, practice-led projects and the variety of research outcomes they produce, in order to question assumptions about their potential benefits.

The relevance and consequences of academic literacies for pedagogy and research in practice-based postgraduate design

Research degrees are a recent phenomenon in the emergent academic design disciplines, and design practitioners and academics still debate their characteristics. Practice-based degrees may incorporate studio and other project work as part of the submission and the dissertation may exhibit variation in the visual and textual modes employed. The production of hybrid practice-based dissertation genres has consequences for research, supervision and writing pedagogies. The academic literacies approach stresses the need for students, faculty, and others to acknowledge the fundamentally underdetermined forms and conventions of dissertation writing and to work together for greater transparency in giving and getting feedback. If design fields wish to pursue the hybrid genres that practice-led project incorporating projects demand, a relevant writing pedagogy must be developed which looks beyond current conventions. Including evidence from an analysis of four recent practice-based doctorates with data from qualitative interviews with design educators, this paper argues for the relevance of academic literacies for dissertation writing and project work in design. In the final part of the paper I argue for the particular relevance of academic literacies for design research practice.