Research Note
In this note we explore the organisation of creative, practice-led projects and the variety of research outcomes they produce, in order to question as-sumptions about their potential benefits.
Authors
Alex Wilkie, Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK a.wilkie@gold.ac.uk
William Gaver, Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK w.gaver@gold.ac.uk
Drew Hemment, ImaginationLancaster, The Roundhouse, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, LA1 4YW, UK d.hemment@lancaster.ac.uk
Gabriella Giannachi, Department of Drama, University of Exeter, Thornlea, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4LA UK. g.giannachi@exeter.ac.uk
Creative Assemblages: Organisation and Outputs of
Practice-led Research
The pursuit of practice-based research in the UK is increasingly coloured by a sustained policy preoccupation with understanding and stimulating the con-nections between ‘creativity’, industry and research in order to promote eco-nomic development. Looking to the ‘cre-ative industries’ as a source of economic strength is nothing new in the UK (one need only recall the ‘Cool Britannia’ branding of the last decade), and reflects broader policy shifts towards economi-cally harnessing creativity (e.g., the United Nations Creative Economy Re-port advocates creativity as a potential economic driver for so called developing countries) [1]. With economic prospects looking increasingly grim both nation-ally and within higher education in par-ticular, however, it is no surprise that creative, practice-led research is being looked to more and more as a resource for potentially commercial benefit, and that the potential of delivering such ben-efits is an ever more important criterion for such work [2].
The danger of looking for commercial pay-offs from practice-based research is that it may construe the organisation and potential outcomes of such investigations too narrowly. Given that such research commonly produces a variety of techno-logical prototypes, it is tempting to as-sume a linear model of technological transfer whereby basic research can reap commercial reward through application, development and diffusion as the most direct and measurable form of impact for such collaborations [3]. However, our exploration of collaborative modes sug-gests that forms and impacts of creative partnerships may be wider in scope and less straightforward in development than assumed [4]. The purpose of this note, then, is to explore the variety of research outcomes, or impacts, produced by cre-ative, practice-led projects, and the or-ganisational forms that such projects take in order to produce those outcomes, in the hope of questioning assumptions about the benefits that might properly be expected from this style of research.
Case Studies: Energy, the Environment and Practice-Led Research
In order to inform our exploration of creative, practice-led projects, we con-ducted a survey of interdisciplinary pro-jects involving creative practitioners to better understand how they were organ-ised and the types of outcomes and im-pacts they made. We focused on projects dealing with the energy and the envi-ronment as a methodological device for narrowing our search while providing access to a wide range of practices that are both active and topical. In choosing such practice-led collaborations we sought to expose novel mediations be-tween technological research, energy related practices, the environment, pub-lics and users.
The case studies we explored exhib-ited a wide diversity of forms in terms of disciplinary contributors, forms of col-laboration, outputs and outcomes, and approaches to engagement. For instance, forms of collaboration included various groupings of university departments, large and small corporate organizations, funding agencies, government depart-ments, galleries, museums and homes. Outcomes ranged from domestic appli-ances to journal articles, and from par-ticipatory workshops to Ph.D. theses. The sites of engagement range from con-temporary art to consumer products and from industrial trade shows to policy intervention. Finally, the case studies revealed different ways in which publics and users were mobilised during both project development and dissemination. Moreover, our case studies often blurred the distinctions between collaborators, users, process and output. Reporting the full range of collaborations and outputs embodied by the 100+ examples we looked at is beyond the scope of this paper. For the purposes of this discus-sion, then, we briefly describe three case studies, the ‘Wattson’ energy meter, ‘ERAR-AT’ environmental monitor, and the ‘Static!’ Project, which illustrate research configurations typical of our results.
Wattson is a consumer product that al-lows people to monitor their domestic electricity consumption. It was designed and is marketed by the London based product design studio DIY KYOTO. Wattson indicates energy consumption via a numerical display and by emitting one of three ‘ambient’ colours to signify light, medium or heavy usage. DIY KYOTO present Wattson as a device to promote and facilitate more cost-efficient electricity usage practices. Ar-guably, the novelty of the monitor lies in its aesthetics as an artefact that can be placed on display amid the landscape of other decorative objects within the home, rather than hidden away as a mere meter. Of relevance here is that the collabora-tion involved relatively few authors and stakeholders, the output was restricted to a commercial product (as opposed to, for instance, descriptions of process) and prospective users were conceived as environmentally concerned consumers rather than, for example, collaborators or discussants.
The ERAR-AT (Environmental Risk Assessment Rover) is an artwork created in 2008 by two artists, working under the name EcoArtTech. It is an apparatus that uses its own GPS coordinates to gather local risk and environmental data (for example air quality, local road traffic accident reports and current US terrorist warning levels) for video projection onto nearby surfaces. EcoArtTech articulate the device as a sustainable technology that draws attention to the persistent technoscientific failures of modernity and the ensuing technological practices and discourses of risk. It is one of a number of artworks by which EcoArtTech draw attention to issues relating to the environment. This project also involved a limited number of con-tributors, but in contrast to the last its output is an artwork that depends on the variety of sites within which it operates for its meaning. Consequently it encour-ages discussion and comment among an open-ended public rather than addressing the end-user simply as consumer.
Our final case study is the STATIC! Project, run by the Swedish Interaction Institute between 2004 and 2005. STATIC! set out to investigate and pro-mote awareness of energy use through the discipline of interaction design. In contrast to the previous two projects, disciplinary contributors were diverse, and there were multiple stakeholders including academic, government and commercial agencies. In addition, the project used a variety of design-led methods to encourage cooperation be-tween designers and prospective users. Outputs of STATIC! included domestic product prototypes, such as an energy aware power cord that emits light pat-terns signifying varying levels of energy being used, but the project also resour-ced the production of postgraduate the-ses, symposiums, workshops and seminars, and publications.
Even these three case studies reflect a bewildering range of participants, organ-isational arrangements, practices, out-comes and potential impacts. In the following section, we introduce the no-tion of creative assemblages to help un-derstand the possibilities for research illustrated by these projects.
Creative Assemblages
Inspired by developments within the sociology of science and technology, we draw upon the notion of assemblage to help us understand the interweaving of practices, technologies, institutions, authors, knowledge and issues constitut-ing the case studies [5]. The notion of creative assemblages is useful in sensi-tising us to how practice-led research is heterogeneously composed, the manner in which such initiatives occupy, or terri-torialize, contexts of interdisciplinary knowledge, how they can be continually in the process of development, circula-tion and dissemination and to the assem-bling practices of creative practitioners in building outcomes, alliances and pub-lics. In short, the notion allows us to appreciate and make legible a range of project forms, including not only simple collaborations producing easily articu-lated outcomes, but also the more sprawling, multidimensional collectives that produce a variety of seemingly less coordinated outcomes. The conjoint term creative assemblage attunes us to how creativity can be acknowledged as an effect of such assembling process rather than the residual capacities of an indi-vidual innovation author. With this in mind we have tentatively identified three models of creative assemblages:
1) Compact and closed assemblages are efforts explicitly oriented to a single outcome, a specific issue and a particular use such as product development. The organisation tends to involve relatively few participants, and crucially, this form of assemblage is characterised by protec-tion of intellectual property and devel-opment process. The Wattson energy monitor is a case in point.
2) Compact and open assemblages: again, undertakings concentrating on a single outcome, however compact and open assemblages disclose intellectual property, technologies and processes and as such demonstrate openness. This al-lows the potential for a wider variety of impacts than the ‘product’ alone, includ-ing public participation, media attention, and potential spin-offs of the technolo-gies themselves. The ERAR-AT typifies this model.
3) Loose and open assemblages are en-deavours supported by multiple agen-cies, mobilizing interdisciplinary knowledge and practices, resourcing multiple outcomes and in doing so occu-pying diverse contexts, seeking rele-vance to and enrolling multiple publics, users and audiences. Such projects work to make as many connections as possi-ble. STATIC! exemplifies the loose, emergent mode of such assemblages.
Of course, the three modes are not mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive (for instance, we suspect loose but closed assemblages occur, though we did not find examples of these). Rather, our characterisation is a heuristic allowing us to consider ‘logics’ of interdisciplinarity beyond accountability and transfer and to avoid linear conceptualisations of innovation.
Beyond Unitary Outcomes
Implied in the models of assemblage we suggest above is that practice-led pro-jects can be characterised by two under-lying dimensions of ‘looseness’ and ‘openness’, and moreover that these di-mensions are correlated. In other words, assemblages that are relatively compact in terms of their disciplinary collabor-ation and goals will tend to produce out-puts that are relatively closed and constrained, amenable to intellectual property protection. These are the sorts of projects that the transfer model fits well. Some of the most exciting assem-blages we discovered, however, were both loose and open. They involved a dynamically shifting cast of contributors ranging from core project partners to network members and ad hoc partici-pants, and produced outcomes ranging from prototypes on the one hand to community events, press coverage, post-graduate researchers and a research com-munity on the other. Rather than producing a clear transfer of intellectual property for commercial gain, such pro-jects arguably create the conditions in which intellectual property can be devel-oped by a wide variety of people in a broad range of settings.
Clearly our report is preliminary, and in this brief note we can only highlight some of our findings. We hope to contri-bute, nonetheless, to a discussion about the vast range of creative collaborations that occur, the wide variety of beneficial outputs these might produce, and how the notion of creative assemblages can help us understand these benefits in ways that go beyond simplistic notions of transfer. For it is certainly the case that creative, practice-led research can pro-duce economic as well as cultural ben-efits. But it is equally certain that too narrow a conception of the appropriate organisation and outputs of such re-search will result in its unique benefits being lost.
References and Notes
This research was undertaken as part of the Creator Project (www.creatorproject.org/).
1. United Nations, 'Creative Economy Report 2008: The challenge of assessing the creative economy towards informed policy-making', (United Nations: 2008), p. 357.
2. We have in mind here research characterised by what Gibbons et al. identify as ‘Mode 2 knowledge production’ involving direct relevance to a context of application, interdisciplinarity, organizational heterogeneity, non-hierarchical structure and ac-countability. Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schartzman, Peter Scott and Martin Trow. The new production of knowledge (Sage; London, 1994) p. 4.
3. Benoit Godin. “The Linear Model of Innovation: The Historical Construction of an Analytical Framework”. Science Technology Human Values 31, No. 6 (2006) pp. 639-667.
4. Andrew Barry, Georgina Born and Gisa Wesz-kalnys, “Logics of interdisciplinarity”, Economy and Society 37, no. 1 (February 2008), pp. 20-49.
5. For the notion of the assemblage see, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, trans (London, U.K.: Continuum, 1996). For exam-ples of how the notion has been adopted in the sociology of science and technology see, Alan Irwin and Mike Michael. Science, social theory and pub-lic knowledge (Open University Press; Bucking-ham, 2003) p 119. For its utilization within anthropology see, Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Col-lier. Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (Oxford, U.K. Blackwell, 2005).
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