Creative Practice Conference: Making Research and Researching Making (Sep 2015, Aarhus, DK)

Dates: 10-12 September 2015
Location: Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark
Website: http://adapt-r.eu/creative-practice-conference-aarhus/
Deadline of Conference Call: 16 March 2015

‘Making Research and Researching Making’ is an international conference for creative practice research, aimed at practitioners undertaking research through the medium of practice, and researchers interested in practice-based research. The focus of this conference is to better understand designed and/or contingent processes of how creative practice research happens, understanding research as an embodied, emplaced, material and social undertaking.

·       How do you, as a practitioner, initiate research within your work?
·       How does research connect and intersect with the processes of making within your practice?
·       Where does making research take place?
·       Who and what can be involved in the processes of making research?

We invite contributions to the conference in the form of exhibits of creative practice research, papers explicating creative practice research, and workshops exploring processes of making research and researching making.

The following four themes are offered as a catalyst to ideas:

‘Knowing How’
We wish to foreground the actions, materials and techniques of creative practice as a means to research. We recognise that rather than preconceived ideas or clear research questions, creative practice research often begins with generating things, working with and responding to materials (Ingold 2010).

Experiment and Surprise
Latour and Yaneva’s (2008) terming of the ways in which the products and by-products of the design process ’astonish’ their creators raises the question of control in creative practice. What about surprises, ‘mistakes’ or unforeseen consequences?

Sites of Making Research
Nowotny (2010) points to an expansion over time in the sites of creative practice and production, and a concomitant changing role of the artist as worker and researcher. What is particular about the sites of making research: studio, academy, factory, building site, museum, city?

Contributions of Making Research
There is an ongoing debate about how the materials, works, and artefacts practitioners make are ‘counted’ as research; how they contribute to research knowledge or other ways of knowing (Kjørup 2006). We want to hear your experiences of, and thoughts about, what your research does or will do, and how it does this.

The full conference call is available here: http://adapt-r.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Making-Research_Researching-Making_Call.pdf

This event is initiated by the Architecture, Design and Art Practice Training research (ADAPTr) Initial Training Network, a four-year collaboration between seven creative practice research institutions. ADAPTr aims to significantly increase European research capacity through valuing practice and creative processes. At its core is the development of a deep understanding of the knowledge and the knowledge processes which are embedded in a creative practice. ADAPTr ITN has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013.