Editorial Page

	Editorial by Adjunct Professor Richard Vella
	Management Committee Response - Post SPIN
	Closing Comments from Dr Barbara Adkins

Editorial by Adjunct Professor Richard Vella

Since the Dawkins era, the recognition of creative work as research has been important for Australian academics. In 2005 the Government's issues paper announced its preferred model for determining a Research Quality Framework (RQF)¹. This was followed by the recommendation from the Australian Research Council working group to include creative work as one of the twelve research field assessment panels (Panel 12)². These are steps in the right direction as, to date, there lacks an acceptable system for monitoring the publication and presentation of creative work as research.

The SPIN conference enabled discussions on representation, evaluation and transferability. Representation refers to the use of symbols, texts, gestures, sounds and space to communicate research findings; evaluation refers to measurement against some criteria; and transferability is the translation and application of the research findings into another context. It is in representation, evaluation and transferability where many of the problems involving creative practice as research lie. What does a creative work 'mean' as a research investigation, how does one judge the creative work and communicate these findings to another context?

In compiling the SPIN publication, and acknowledging the recent publication³ by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS), three themes emerged (1) embedded knowledge; (2) knowledge impact and (3) knowledge relationships. In some situations one cannot discuss one theme alone.

1. Embedded knowledge: discusses knowledge generation such as new discoveries; knowledge manifestation as exemplified by exhibitions, performance, etc; embodied knowledge and the authority of the knowledge claims that are inextricably linked to practice-based research.

2. Knowledge impact: examines applications of practice-based research across communities and the creative industries. These include knowledge engagement such as modeling, problem solving, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary intersections; and knowledge diffusion (the adoption of research findings through education, capacity building and communication).

3. Knowledge relationships: investigates issues around collaboration and stakeholders in practice-based research and knowledge production (intellectual property, industry partnerships and commercialization)

These classifications slightly differ to the aforementioned CHASS document which groups knowledge impact and relationships under the topical heading of knowledge transfer⁴. In her keynote address to the Knowledge Transfer and Engagement Forum (6/6/06)⁵ Education Minister Julie Bishop defines knowledge transfer as having "quantifiable economic benefit for the community". In response, Professor Malcolm Gillies, president of CHASS states that while measurable outcomes are required, they should not be based solely on economic criteria (www.chass.org.au). It is the various types of transactions of knowledge, their complexity, associated ethics and transformation via collaboration that Professor Paul Carter addresses in his keynote speech.

Linking knowledge transfer to economic outcomes is important. However, to make a pun, this only deals with "one side of the coin" as value obviously is not only economic. Crucial is the realisation that creative work provides discovery, new insights and transferable models in the social, technological or cultural domain. These insights can be articulated with reference to some set of criteria that define the creative work as research. Thus the creative work's realisation of the criteria enables knowledge transfer across and outside the creative practice's knowledge field⁶. This is what sociologist Basil Bernstein⁷ refers to with his terms realisation and recognition: the newly discovered "meanings" of a creative work, their framing and legitimatisation, involve realisation and recognition. These are necessary criteria for knowledge impact and therefore knowledge transfer. Professor Arun Sharma's conference keynote addresses knowledge impact within and outside a discipline with the Australian government's research quality framework issues paper in mind, while Professor Rod Wissler keynote elaborates on the relationship that impact has with research capability.

The CHASS document proposes impact measurements such as benefits to various communities beyond the immediate knowledge-making domain of a discipline⁸. It suggests that these could be based on high, moderate and low impact. This is very useful as it includes outcomes that broaden and enhance people's lives. However measurements outside of commercialisation (licensing, spin-offs, etc) can be difficult to define. This is why embedded knowledge is crucial to the discussion. Impact can only have 'value' to a particular community through experience which is fundamental to the process of realisation and recognition. The discussion on recognition and realisation in relation to evidence is further discussed in Dr. Barbara Adkins' essay in the Closing Comments section of SPIN.

It is important to state here the reason for grouping embodied knowledge under the embedded knowledge theme. Embodied knowledge refers to representations of knowledge unique to a particular practice and to some of the conference papers, cannot be formalised. It is its placement within a particular context that enables embodied knowledge to become embedded knowledge and consequently formalised, extracted and transferable.

Recognising embedded knowledge and knowledge impact in the creative arts and their relationship to knowledge transfer will help change the crisis facing many creative academics. One example is the reporting of creative work in formats acceptable by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) data collection criteria. For many whose work is non-textual, DEST's focus on written reports alone such as journals and books is limiting. It fails to capture the various manifestations of research activity in the visual, temporal or spatial arts. Bibliographic (textual) reporting disallows the "experience" of the creative work as being central to the research argument. Often, the creative work is relegated to support material. However, the preferred model for determining the RQF proposes the inclusion of a portfolio of creative work and its relation to impact. This is a very positive step forward. The concern will be in what ways can this be reliably measured? It is for this reason Dr Kate Oakley's keynote address on evidence and its relationship to government policy is particularly important and timely.

Finally, knowledge transfer necessitates discussions on ownership, relationships and application. These can be intellectual copyright as in the case of collaboration and process, or ownership of material in the case of client driven research. Hence the knowledge relationships theme is crucial in any discussion involving creative work and its application within the creative industries.

It is within the above context that QUT, in association with Real Time Arts, launches its on-line publication: Speculation and Innovation, applying practice led research in the creative industries.

Biographical statement
Richard Vella is a composer and Adjunct Professor in the discipline of Music and Sound within the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology. He has consulted many music institutions on research. Some of the outcomes from these consultancies have been summarised in Dennis Strand's Research in the Creative Arts, Evaluations and Investigations Programme, DEETYA, 1998. He is currently research leader for the ACID Press project, a rich media annotation system for the evaluation of creative work as research, within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID).

Endnotes

¹ Department of Education, Science and Training. Research Quality Framework: Assessing the quality and impact of research in Australia -The Preferred Model. Retrieved July 10, 2006 from the World Wide Web, http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/
research_quality_framework/rqf_preferred_model.htm

² The Assessment Panels Working Group Outcomes from RQF EAG Working Group 2: Assessment Panels, 14/11/05. Retrieved July 10 2006 from the World Wide Web. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:qXUQLXgBvtYJ:www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/
policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/research_quality_framework/documents/rqf_preferred_model/
assessment_pdf.htm+Panel+12,+RQF&hl=en&gl=au&ct=clnk&cd=1&ie=UTF-8

³ CHASS Occasional paper 2 Measures of quality and impact of publicly funded research in the humanities, arts and social sciences, Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, November 2005, p49-50.

⁴For an overview to the government's position on knowledge transfer see:
http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/commercialisation/
knowledge_transfer.htm

⁵ Julie Bishop. Knowledge Transfer and Engagement Forum, Keynote Address, retrieved July 13 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/Bishop/2006/06/b001160606.asp

⁶ For further discussion on the relationship between criteria, creative work and research. see: Richard Vella. Keeping the degree creative, Real Time Arts, Issue 68, August September 2005, Open City, Sydney. http://www.realtimearts.net/rt68/content.html

⁷ Basil Bernstein, 2000, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory research, critique, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Lenham, Boulder, New York, Oxford, revised edition, p17 -18.

Bernstein writes: "The recognition rule, essentially, enables appropriate realisations to be put together. The realisation rule determines how we put meanings together and how we make them public. The realisation rule is necessary to produce the legitimate text. Thus, different values of framing act selectively on realisation rules and the production of different texts. Simply, recognition rules regulate what meanings are relevant and realisation rule regulate how the meanings are to be put together to create the legitimate text".

⁸ Council for Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, op cit, p74-78

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From the Management Committee - Post SPIN

by Nike Bourke, Brad Haseman and Daniel Mafe

In the months since Speculation and Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries­, it became clear to us that major forces are at play in shaping the mood of Australian researchers across the creative arts, media and design sectors. As co-convenors we felt that, while the predominant mood at the conference was enthusiastic and confident, there was also an underlying sense of unease or nervousness about what these changes might mean, what might be expected of us and how we might best prepare for the challenges to come.

Perhaps this sense of unease is not surprising. Seventeen years ago the Dawkins Reforms created a unified higher education system in Australia. Twelve years ago the first research publication collection was gathered. This was the first attempt by the Commonwealth Government to assess the quality of research outputs, focussing on blunt instruments, such as research publications and bibliometric instruments, for comparative analysis and ranking.

In the years before the Dawkins Reforms, the principal focus of academics in the creative arts, media and design disciplines had been on professional and vocational training and undergraduate course innovation. Many of us were initially unprepared for the research challenges that emerged; the need to build a strong postgraduate research culture and successfully compete for external research funds. 

Since its inception, defining research quality through publication has largely functioned to exclude recognition of the quality and impact of research undertaken by researchers in the creative arts, media and design, particularly research that is evidenced in or through practice.  Apart from categories H (Designs) and J (Creative Works) in the 1994, 1995 and 2002 collections, many researchers across the creative industries have struggled to build a recognised research profile or increase research funding to their disciplines. Despite the fine work of the Strand Report in 1998, we continued to stand on the periphery of Australia’s main research game.

At the conference and in many of the papers collected here there is unease around the methodological choices available to researchers in the arts, media and design. Much innovative and intellectually rigorous work has been done in articulating challenges to the positivist research methods and research outputs characterised by print-based journals and monographs.  This is evidenced most clearly in the development of a range of research strategies that incorporate and value the research processes and outcomes of practice. Known by many terms across the creative industries – creative practice as research, practice as research, practice-based research, studio practice as research, and so on - these strategies are increasing in popularity and sophistication.  Indeed, the SPIN conference was motivated, in part, by our abiding interest in practice-led research; a strategy we feel has the capacity to effectively capture the nuances and subtleties of these emerging research strategies.  However, tensions and challenges remain. For example, some hold that practice is research, and that the outputs of practice stand, and should be recognised, as legitimate research in their own right. 

The sector is also grappling with the challenges of impact and commercialisation.  It was clear at the conference that the emerging research agenda being framed around commercialisation and the application of research to meet narrow national priorities has limited or problematic appeal.  For some, this agenda sat uncomfortably with their understanding of the roles and outcomes of their practice and research concerns. There were fears that prioritising commercial outcomes and end-user assessment stood to undermine the independence, for example, of curiosity-driven research. Troubling questions demand answers: Will research that seeks to enhance human, social and environmental wellbeing be valued? How can we effectively measure or assess the social impact of our research?

There is unease, too, around the status and recognition of our research capacity, particularly in terms of when and under what conditions and constraints we will gain appropriate and consistent access to the national research infrastructure and funding.  Practice-led research is, with some exceptions, treated with scepticism within the ARC, with researchers frequently finding their grant applications rejected on the grounds that it does not conform sufficiently to pre-existing, recognisable research paradigms. Similarly, the Australia Council is not surefooted with practice-led researchers; their funding programs explicitly exclude work undertaken as part of a higher research degree.

For many in the creative industries our worst fears can be summed up in a single, but vitally important, question:

In the emerging context of a new research quality framework for Australia, will arts, media and design researchers lose out once again in an environment that fails to understand creative or non-text publication and the embodied and embedded knowledges that form the epistemological foundations from which the creative arts contribute to national benefit and understanding?

Given what is at stake it is hardly a sign of weakness that there has been some nervousness or unease. It would be a mistake, however, to allow this nervousness to be the final word or to be viewed as a single homogenous whole, for to do so would distort the overall picture. The unease is made up of a complex amalgam of concerns. From one perspective the unease is historical, a left-over from the very real difficulties we have faced in adjusting to a new working world where the creative industries are now firmly ensconced within academia.  From another perspective it is a response to a prolonged period of research funding deprivation, complicated by the inheritance of an inadequate research language and infrastructure. Finally, it reflects an understandable, ‘existential’ response to our sector’s adaptation to the new and unfamiliar demands of an ever-more-quickly evolving knowledge society.

What a negative, anxious focus on the nervousness does, however, is mask any positive acknowledgment of the progress we have already achieved in negotiating and adapting to these radical changes.  These emotional states can be extremely productive because they allow us to attune ourselves to the world.  Recognising a collective nervousness helps us to acknowledge and respect our history and our position within the wider research culture. It provides us with a necessary sense of wary hope and excitement while encouraging us to engage with the changes thoughtfully and with conviction. Forums like Speculation and Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries­ and its subsequent online journal, are an opportunity to signal our preparedness to engage with and shape Australia’s future research culture.

Biographical statement

Nike Bourke
Nike Bourke won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Emerging Author in 2000 for her novel The Bone Flute. She has a PhD from Griffith University, and teaches Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology. Nike lives in Brisbane with her four children. Her first children's book, What the Sky Knows, was published in May 2005.

Brad Hasemen
Professor Brad Haseman has worked as a teacher and researcher for more than 30 years, during which time he has pursued a fascination with the aesthetics and forms of contemporary performance and education. He is Director of Research in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology.

Daniel Mafe
Daniel Mafe is a lecturer in Visual Arts in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. He completed postgraduate studies in Painting at the Royal Academy in 1983-6 and in 1986 was the winner of the Europe Prize for Painting in Ostende, Belgium. He has continued to exhibit regularly since his return to Australia and is currently represented by Jan Manton Art in Brisbane and Esa Jaske Gallery in Sydney.

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Closing Comments by Dr Barbara Adkins

In discussing creative work as research at the level of an international conference, we carry a significant responsibility. We must go beyond everyday or received understandings of its nature, purposes and impacts in the service of an analysis capable of addressing the critical issues that confront the role of creative work in Australia and internationally. Specifically it is crucial that these papers on speculation and innovation form part of an impetus for the assertion of creative work as a key contributor to innovation frameworks required for our knowledge economies.

Economic texts on the knowledge economy document the progressive shift of attention from production, to knowledge level dynamics. This is due to the increasing role that production and distribution of knowledge plays in determining innovative performance¹.With respect to policy, the Australian government proposes that this development requires a strengthening of our ability to:
1) generate ideas and undertake research;
2) an acceleration of the commercial application of ideas; and
3) the development and retention of Australian skills.²

The strong emphasis on commercial uptake of ideas has led to a policy focus on products and services whose economic value is apparently most readily understood and calculated. This has led some commentators to point to the neglect of the arts and humanities in policy frameworks. The key problem here is seen to be the relative absence of understanding of the social and cultural diversity of innovation and economic advancement in these domains.³

This state of affairs presents some clear issues for the way in which the impact of creative work can be understood. In terms of the Australian research quality framework,
Research will be assessed as to the extent that it has influenced short-term social, cultural, economic and/or environmental outcomes for industry, government and/or other identified communities, regionally within Australia, nationally or internationally. It is noted that social outcomes include health and lifestyle outcomes⁴.

The framework is thus articulated as a program in which research produces identifiable outcomes. In this respect it is clear that creative work as research must optimise its capacity to apply received indicators of quality and impact in the field of research and development - citations, grant income and so on. However, the SPIN conference has highlighted key additional issues associated with the nature of knowledge in creative work, the processes through which it might be identified and the way in which it influences outcomes both within and outside the field of creative industries. These issues persist because of a sense of an inadequacy in present approaches to identifying and articulating the knowledge produced in creative work.

In this context, the analytical tasks set in the keynote addresses were formidable. Oakley argued for the creative industries to engage with the ongoing requirement for evidence of impact, in the full knowledge of its problems and dilemmas. This opens up questions associated with identifying the nature of knowledge produced in creative work and its outcomes both within the field of creative industries and in other sectors, and the capacity to locate and analyse them in policy frameworks. Otherwise, she correctly warns us, we will be confronted with measures and explanations of impact that are inappropriate, that do not capture the full value of creative work, and lack legitimacy.

Wissler's concerns with impact turned to the consideration of three areas as key contexts for the development and transfer of the value of creative work: students and staffing, infrastructure, and the links between teaching, research and industry, echoing Oakley's concerns for approaches in these areas that enabled the diffusion of creativity to diverse sectors and the attainment of demonstrable social benefits. Broadly in keeping with these principles, Carter turned his attention to the knowledge processes in practice based research, conceptualising the notion of practice-based research as invention where principles of ethically sustainable design evolve in the research process itself. In this respect he embraced Lefebvre's distinction between work and product, allowing an emphasis on the knowledge and processes embedded in the process of invention that is not necessarily reflected in representations and appropriations of product. Sharma's address placed these principles in the context of a 'logic' of impact that was not identical to the logic of acclaim in the academic field. He thus focused attention on the problematic of articulating the insights produced through creative work in fields that may apply different values and priorities to those that might be taken for granted in spheres where creative work is predominant.

While the keynote speakers represent quite different disciplines, we can locate in their analyses a crucial intersection in a concern for the process through which creative work is given value not only within the field of creative industries but in fields such as economics, politics and civic life. These issues also converge with the exploration of practice and conceptual aspects of creative work as research in the conference papers, revealing the complexity of processes involved in the production of embedded knowledge, knowledge impact and knowledge relationships. However, out of this complexity, a clear agenda has emerged. There is an urgent need for a coherent scholarship that offers the conceptual, methodological and creative resources to identify value in creative work, in a way which enables it to be taken up and appropriated in diverse fields, and thus in knowledge economy and innovation frameworks.

This scholarship should be based on an understanding of the broad social relationships in which the impetus for identifying and representing the value of creative work as knowledge is embedded. The work of Basil Bernstein in capturing changes in the knowledge landscapes of higher education is salient here. He noted the erosion of previously strong boundaries between singulars (traditional disciplines such as physics, chemistry, sociology) - involving discourses that were only about themselves and thus with very few external references. In the latter half of the twentieth century we witnessed what he termed a regionalisation of knowledge, where, for example, medicine, architecture, and, more recently creative industries, come to constitute a domain of knowledge made up of a mix of singulars. However, it is not only the boundaries between singulars that are at stake here. The regions also encompass "the interface between the field of production of knowledge and any field of practice" ⁵ The creative industries are thus experiencing the weakening of boundaries between both singulars and the interface with fields of practice. Further, however, following Oakley's recommendation, there must clearly be a weakening of boundaries between all these domains and innovation policy frameworks.

The lessons for articulating creative work in terms of knowledge economy policy frameworks from Bernstein's perspective lie in the tasks at stake in engaging with policy. The convergence of disciplines within creative industries and the interface with practice are creating the requirement for new discourses which 'recontextualise' these domains. Discourses on practice-led research are an example of this. The conference has demonstrated the pervasiveness of this discourse as a means of discussing and debating approaches that characterise the creative industries within the domains of creative work. However, given the concerns in the keynote addresses, we cannot assume that the discourses we employ are equal to the task of identifying and communicating the knowledge produced in creative work outside of the field of creative industries In Carter's terms - how do we represent the invention in creative work for this purpose?

First, a scholarship of creative work as knowledge must contribute to a means of representing this knowledge within the regionalised domain of creative industries with its mix of disciplines and interfaces with practice. This will enable common (albeit debated and contested) discourses for the recognition of knowledge in the field. For Bernstein, these issues of recognition routinely arise with the erosion of previously strong boundaries. They are critical for the knowledge and meanings in creative work to be realised i.e taken up and articulated. It stands to reason that a means of systematically identifying and articulating knowledge and meaning is central to questions of measurement of creative work as research.

Second, however, as indicated above, there is a further knowledge interface to address: one that engages with questions of the measurement and judgement of quality and impact outside of the field of creative industries and in the context of innovation policies. As theorists of measurement remind us, measures must not only be faithful to the phenomena they represent, they must also translate the phenomena into a coherent framework in which the measures will be taken up and used⁶.This means that understandings of creative work as knowledge must then be translated into a form that allows for recognition and realisation in knowledge economy frameworks. For this reason, the scholarship advocated here must be capable of addressing the interface between (1) the recontextualising discourses within the creative industries and (2) discourses, values and priorities of policy frameworks.

A scholarship committed to influencing measurement of quality and impact must also turn its attention to the processes that underpin the causal relationships involved. As outlined above, the research quality framework is by necessity founded on assumptions around the propensity for research to influence the wider society. For example, a recent overview of qualitative indicators of research impact in the field of culture by CHASS points to the salience of values such as (1) "enriching public life through the research development of exhibitions, performance and film" and (2) contributing to an innovation economy through the creative and cultural industries"⁷. Developing systematic ways of identifying instances of these outcomes must draw on understandings of local processes of creative work, but must also encompass knowledge of the mechanisms that have produced effects outside of these immediate fields of practice.

Contemporary approaches to program development and evaluation recommend that we examine programs to determine if, when and how they work. The approaches must develop plausible theories about the causal processes underpinning them and the conditions under which they are most likely to produce desired effects⁸. This allows us to get behind the appearances of creative work and patterns of impact to the tendencies responsible for producing them (Bourdieu's "relational networks" and Bhaskar's "mechanisms")⁹. With reference to the values described above, it is important to understand the properties of creative work that provide for "enriching public life" and "contributing to an innovation economy". Furthermore we must understand the characteristics of "public life" and the "innovation economy" that are influenced by those properties of the creative work. This inquiry will undoubtedly lead to the identification and refinement of measures of quality and impact and also enable a more strategic navigation of this policy environment. This is clearly in line with many of the principles espoused in the keynote addresses.

One thing is clear from an observation of current policy changes in the identification and measurement of research quality and impact. It is an increasingly volatile and contentious policy environment, driven by imperatives associated with linking research and development with identifiable outcomes for knowledge economy and innovation frameworks. The recent anxiety expressed by vice chancellors in Britain over the use of metrics in their research quality framework is a case in point¹⁰. In this context the enrichment of our current understanding of the nature and manifestations of creative work as knowledge through systematic scholarship will lead to a greater capacity to engage in program and policy frameworks that ultimately determine whether and how creative work matters.

Biographical Statement
Dr Barbara Adkins is a senior lecturer and researcher with the Centre for Social Change Research and the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design at QUT.

Endnotes
¹ Brusoni, S (2002) "Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: A Summary of Research Issues" Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex.
² Commonwealth of Australia (2001) Backing Australia's Ability: An Innovation Action Plan for the Future Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
³ Bullen, E., Robb, S., and Kenway, J (2004) "Creative Destruction: Knowledge Economy Policy and the Future of the Arts and Humanities in the Academy" Journal of Education policy 19.
⁴ Commonwealth of Australia (2005) Research Quality Framework: Assessing the quality and impact of research in Australia Canberra: Commonwelath of Australia, p 24.
⁵ Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique Lanhan, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
⁶ Pawson, R. (1989) A Measure for Measures: A Manifesto for Empirical Sociology London and New York: Routledge.
⁷ CHASS Occasional Paper 2 (2005): Measures of quality and impact of publicly funded research in the humanities, arts and social sciences Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, p65.
⁸ See for example Dahler-Larsen, P. (2001) "From Programme Theory to Constructivism: On Tragic Magic and Competing Programmes" Evaluation 7 (3): 331-349.
⁹ See Vandenberghe, P. (1999) "The Real is the Relational: An Epistemological Aanlysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Generative Structuralism" Sociological Theory 17 (1).
¹⁰ "Metrics not a reliable guide to Excellence" News and Media, Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Australia.