On Theory and Creativity

According to its online description, the New Scholars is a fellowship scheme for PhD students and Early Career Researchers designed to support their research journey in the field of creativity. What happens though, when creativity embarks on a journey within the field of social sciences? How can we, as researchers doing research through arts and design, bring into, and learn from, established research methods? And what was the role of New Scholars in shaping these questions, but also in helping to cope with them in the everyday?

These were amongst the questions that kept coming up during our regular meetings, bi-weekly coffee breaks, and creative workshops. I will attempt to address them in a reflexive and by no means absolute manner, by drawing on my personal experience as a designer doing a PhD in the School of Management at the University of Bristol.

Before starting my PhD, I was working as a design researcher in higher education, and I was, therefore, familiar with doing research. Or so I thought. One of the first things I realised after joining a social sciences school is that the same concept might have different meanings in different disciplines, and also that it might have different weights. In design, for example, philosophy is much more closely associated with the methodology; it’s an approach or an attitude of how to go about making and/or studying things. Studio-based work and participatory design, for instance, represent two different design philosophies. In social sciences, philosophy is somehow more distinct from methods, and has value in and for itself - of course, these divisions are neither absolute nor set in stone. In this regard, taking the time to read (and write) is crucial. Supervisors can be valuable allies in this, as they can quickly navigate and filter the vast amounts of scholarships for and with us.

But what are the implications, both intellectual and practical, of the intersection between research through hands-on practise, and theory and philosophy? First, creativity can become more self-aware. Whilst creativity can be a praxis of autonomy, it can as well operate within wider structures that cherish specific types of creativity over others, and channel them towards specific ends. I, for example, had been part of the celebrated hackathon culture for years, before realising that some of them - by no means all can be means of value extraction from participants, offering little in return.

Second, philosophy can open new directions for art and design. Responding to critiques of eurocentrism, design scholar Cameron Tonkinwise has suggested that critical and speculative design – a strand of design pedagogy and research I am influenced by – can evolve into a kind of applied philosophy (Mitrović et al pp.73). In some ways, philosopher Federico Campagna realised Tonkinwise’s proposal, by designing a strategy videogame based on a variety of philosophical parameters (Campagna 2021).

Third, and more practically, a theory might initially appear as a hurdle for a practice-based methodology, but, with good mentoring, it can support it. It’s often the case that we, creative researchers, struggle when it comes to describing the outcomes of a creative process in advance, a process that is inherently uncertain. How can we talk, for example, about data analysis methods, when we are not quite yet sure what our data will be? One of the greatest pieces of advice I got during my PhD was that we cannot perhaps predict the results of an emergent methodology, but we can understand, and write about, the process of emergence itself. That is, to understand its mechanisms, theoretical underpinnings, practical ways to handle it, and so on.

Fourth, this has wider ramifications on how research-through-design is conducted in praxis. My research is concerned with the -often invisible- maintenance and service labour carried out by university workers in cleaning, estates, and the library. Together, we have set up a ‘Work Futures Community’ and explored hidden realities and utopian futures of university work through art and design, including photography, printing, and speculative fiction. In order for this process to work, I progressively became less preoccupied with producing polished artefacts, and more with the process of creativity itself. In other words, my focus shifted from art as a product, to how art is produced, and how we are reproduced individually and collectively along the way. Or, in what Kae Tempest has framed as creative connection: the power of creativity to tackle alienation (Tempest 2020 p.3).

Images of the Work Futures Community. We spent 10 days with a single-use film camera, documenting aspects of work and life.

At this point, I should perhaps mention that if this text were to address a more traditional academic audience, it would certainly emphasize more on what theory can learn from praxis. For now, suffice to say that research attitudes and methodologies that aim to intervene outside the academic context itself, such as live sociology, participatory action research, and co-production, are becoming more prevalent within the humanities and social sciences.

This journey is still in progress, and I am sure that there is still lots to learn. Instead of a conclusion then, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors for their generosity, guidance, and genuine interest in creative methods. If they are the first pillar, then the New Scholars network is the other one. My interactions with my peers, the organisers, and the mentors, perhaps less preoccupied with the nitty-gritty of a PhD, were able to infuse a sense of creativity which can be easily left behind along the way. They always maintained focus and specificity, but they were also elevating and ecstatic. And it is through the synthesis of these three communities, I think, an intellectual one, a creative one, and a community of practice, that some balance was achieved, in all its fragility and elusiveness.

References

Campagna, F., 2021. Thesis, Metaphysics and metaethics in the design of strategy video games, PhD thesis, Royal College of Art.

Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J. and Helgason, I. eds., 2021. Beyond Speculative Design: Past–Present–Future. SpeculativeEdu; Arts Academy, University of Split.

Tempest, K., 2020. On Creativity. Faber & Faber.