Navigation

Though it can be said to share a common goal with other forms of knowledge production—academic scholarship and scientific research—creative research differs in important ways. Creative research simultaneously generates knowledge and material expressions of that knowledge. This deepens, strengthens, questions, assesses, and otherwise provides input into an artist’s or designer’s work as it produces knowledge for the artist, their communities and publics.

There is no one “creative research.” The field of research-based art practices has grown in parallel but discrete form to design research. While the later grounds itself in either the scientific method or in the rhetorics of futuring, the former leaves much more space for individual definition and methodologies. Both have much to learn from and share with one another.

To that end, this session has two goals: to connect art and design educators approaching creativity as research, and to create a cross-disciplinary community of educators and practitioners art seeking to further the discourse. We welcome proposals that address or explore the following questions:

• What project strategies successfully instill the idea that “making is learning”?
• How are research project questions and criteria established?
• What methods and modes of creative research are employed in the classroom and/or studio?
• How can the work of creative practice become an emergent learning process?

We seek proposals from art and design educators, as well as creative practitioners who have strategies to share about their approaches to teaching and mentoring creative research. We welcome graduate students whose work explore these questions.