Art, Design and Architecture

The Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice

The Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice

The Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice (CRICP) is founded on a critical presence that aims to traverse the dominant disciplines while simultaneously enabling the margins of practice to co-exist.  Subject areas come together through critical and constructive debate by exploring and defining their activity in conceptual and in practical terms within interdisciplinary contexts. The Centre for Research emphasizes participation for all and encourages collaboration and creative speculation as a research sensibility.

The Centre also emphasizes scrutiny to research work as practitioners, critics and writers so different points of view can flourish and be understood within a research community. In 2008 we reviewed the existing research activities of staff and began to collate this history into a site of critical engagement between practicing artists, designers, architects and postgraduate research students committed to testing new methodologies and models of practice.

Art, design and architecture research is undergoing a new exodus in respect of developing an excellence framework; who is the research for and how is it accessed or understood beyond the campus, something now being addressed by the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework's (REF) emphasis on impact. All academic staff engage with an annual audit of their research work and outputs, and how their work is contextualized within broader social, economic and cultural entities.

Research Groups and Research Units

The Centre for Research is organised as an interdisciplinary matrix that includes two overarching Research Groups: Creative Practice in Cultural Context and Creative Practice in Pedagogy. Four thematic Research Units intentionally intersect the Research Groups; where all academic staff are encouraged to join one Research Unit.  Each unit offers an open investigatory approach, encouraging critique and critical rigour, where healthy disagreements can open up the complexity of the discussion, subsequently leading to new insights, dialogue and intersubjective encounters. The units are purposeful in this intent and do not disadvantage the very system staff have elected to join.

The Research Units are:

• Sustainability and Ecology in Creative Practices
• Digital Media: Materiality and Performativity in Creative Practices
• Creative Knowledge and Cultural Economies
• Constructed Environments: Space and Place
  

The conception of a cross-school Centre for Research involved debates on the nature and role of experiential knowledge in contextual study and creative practice-led disciplines, and its significance for the emergence of new knowledge and understanding in both research and knowledge. For the purpose of the Research Units a practitioner is defined as a thinker, writer, maker and researcher. Artists, designers, theorists and creative practitioners have long been concerned with placing their work and practices in relation to advancing their career, arguably aiming to create new work that has currency in both academia and the creative industries.

Postgraduate Students

All postgraduate students are invited to join Research Units. We currently have three scholarship students who are located in different units. For more information please see Research Degrees and Doctoral Programmes.

Featured picture: Spencer Roberts and Anneke Pettican, Tie me in a dream, Nagoya, Japan 2008.