Creative Research

The Theory and Practice of Research for the Creative Industries

Hilary Collins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474247108
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Recherche dans l'éducation

Academic research in design can seem daunting – let Hilary Collins show you the building blocks of a great final project. The perfect companion for a research project in fashion, design or visual communication, this 2nd edition of Creative Research walks you through:
· Choosing a topic
· Deciding your approach
· Using previous research and writing a literature review
· Obtaining your own data and using it appropriately
Useful case studies show best practice, revealing the links between a researcher's choice of method and the conclusions they draw. Packed with advice on how to manage your time and structure your project effectively, this edition also includes new sections on design thinking and ethnography.
Collins marries theory and practice from start to finish, showing you everything you need to confidently embark on your creative research project.

PART 1

Designing the research problem

Having outlined what research is and the context within which research is set in the creative industries, this section moves on to outline the issues and processes involved in defining a research project. This is the stage at which research projects are conceived; the focus is on identifying a problem to investigate in conjunction with reading the theory underpinning the problem you are considering researching and finding a research framework that is workable for your needs. This stage involves generating ideas and refining them.

Chapter 1

What makes a good research topic?

If you are doing a research project as part of your studies, one of the most important factors to consider is whether or not your idea will meet the requirements of the examining body. Consequently, you need to choose your subject with care and you must carefully check the details of the project you are planning against the assessment criteria.

Interest

It seems an obvious point, but your project should be something that you are genuinely capable of doing and it must be based on a subject that really interests you. You may be working on the project for up to six months or longer, so you need to be really enthusiastic about it – otherwise, it may very quickly become a chore rather than a pleasure. You need to link your research project to the relevant parts of your course and demonstrate how they inform your topic.

Focus

One of the attributes of a good research project is a clearly defined set of research questions and objectives. You therefore need to ask yourself whether or not your research questions will provide you with enough depth to give you a substantial project. If you have been given a research idea, perhaps by an organization with which you are working on an internship, you will need to ensure that your questions and objectives relate to that idea.

Available knowledge

Interest and focus, combined with a good knowledge of the available literature, will enable you to understand how you can gain new insight into the topic. Try to consider whether or not there is sufficient published knowledge in the field that you are considering working in. It is important that the issues you are considering researching are linked to a relevant theory. You also need to use the available literature to put your topic into context.

Data availability

Some topics may be too large for you to complete in time, while others may not provide you with the focus or depth to meet the assessment requirements. You may have chosen a topic that is sensitive, such as the issue of housing for the homeless. Collecting the relevant primary data for such topics may prove difficult, so you need to reflect on how this might be resolved. You may also require additional finance for travel, or other resources to undertake your primary research and you will need to make sure that this is available before you begin.

Career goals

It is important to consider your own career goals. You can use your research project as an opportunity to pursue a particular subject or to focus on a particular industry. Your research project can be used to introduce yourself to potential employers and will demonstrate up-to-date knowledge of research and findings that are pertinent to your expertise.

THINK BOX
Should I do this?

Use this set of questions to ask yourself if you should proceed with your chosen topic:

• Is it feasible?

• Are you really interested in the topic?

• Do you have the research skills necessary to undertake the project you have defined?

• Can you do the research within the given time frame?

• Will the subject be up to date when the project is finished?

• Do you require additional finance to undertake the project and do you have access to it?

• Can you gain access to the data you need?

• Is it worth doing this project?

• Does the topic fit the specifications set by the examining body?

• Does the research topic contain issues that have a clear link to theory?

• Are your research questions and objectives stated clearly?

• Will your proposed research provide new insights into the topic?

• Will your findings be pertinent whatever the outcome?

• Is the research topic in line with your career goals?

Chapter 2

Generating and refining research ideas

Before you can refine your research into a research question or proposition, you need to generate some ideas. Have you ever wondered how creative artists, designers and inventors come up with their remarkable ideas? Even though idea generation may seem a mysterious and random process, there is a practical, simple method we can all apply to help us to increase our chances of having great ideas: by using connections. Any idea, no matter how small, is an association between previous, established ideas. These connections happen in our minds all the time – often spontaneously and when we are barely conscious of them.

Finding connections

An interesting characteristic of these connections is their unpredictability. Many times, ideas are formed by associating two completely unrelated concepts, in unexpected or unusual ways. To create movable type, Johannes Gutenberg connected the idea of the wine press and the coin stamp. To create the concept of a mass-circulation newspaper, Joseph Pulitzer combined large-scale advertising with high-speed printing. Great ideas may even seem to be random at times – but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do to develop them. Mick Pierce, an architect working in Zimbabwe, was asked to design the largest building in Harare – without air conditioning. For inspiration, he turned to the termites of the African savannah. Despite temperatures dropping to as low as 6 degrees Celsius at night and soaring as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day, termites are able to keep temperatures in their mounds at a constant 31 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Fahrenheit). By opening and closing a series of vents around the mound, the termites redirect air breezes and maintain a constant temperature. Pierce used exactly the same principles in his design for the building. Omitting the need for air conditioning units immediately saved the build millions of dollars, and the building now uses about 90 per cent less energy than any other building around it despite having a constant static temperature of about 22 degrees Celsius (71 degrees Fahrenheit). In early 2009 he designed an educational centre to encourage visitors to value water in Doha, Qatar. The solution was a large dome covering 5,000 metres squared with an eye as the crown. The Doha eye, modelled on the human eye with a lens and a retina, followed the sun in order to harvest energy to be turned into electrical power. The white-painted dome would collect dew at night at its perimeter, where it would run into a circular constructed wadi (a shallow valley) surrounding the dome. The dome was to be placed in a water park demonstrating the principles of salt water farming using groundwater, in which a water tower would act as an energy source.

The conscious generation of ideas is often the starting point for an innovation journey. There are many techniques to support idea generation; the most widely used one is brainstorming. Most companies do not see the generation of new ideas as a problem. The question tends to be how to generate quality ideas, and how to select which of these ideas are to be taken.

— Bettina von Stamm.

How to create a lot of ideas

Idea generation happens randomly, so having great ideas is not a task that can be approached directly. The only way to increase the likelihood of having great ideas is to increase the amount of ideas that you have at your disposal to form connections. Simple ideas are the raw materials for higher-level ideas. The more ideas you have, the more material your mind will have to associate and generate good ideas. Being prolific, then, is the key to having great ideas. There’s no trade-off between quantity and quality; they are intrinsically linked and it is only through quantity that you get quality. If the best way to get quality ideas is by creating them from a vast pool of ideas, then we need to have as many ideas as possible. Here are some ways that can help you to develop a pool of ideas from which to start funnelling down to a narrower and deeper focus.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a way for you to come up with many ideas in a short period of time, by working in a group. It’s based on the way that your mind naturally works when you’re being creative, and it is something that you can do intentionally when you need to create more options or ideas for your research project:

• Defer judgement: no criticism right now. Do you remember how people once said that flying was impossible? Don’t be one of the naysayers. At some point, it is important to judge an idea, but don’t do it while you’re trying to generate ideas.

• Go for quantity: the more ideas you come up with, the more likely it is that one or more of them will be a great idea.

• Look for unusual or wild ideas: worry about how to make it work later, so look for as many ‘crazy’ ideas as you can – the wilder the better.

• Combine and build on ideas: ‘piggyback’ one idea onto another to create a new idea.

By using these principles when you look for new ideas or options for your project, you give yourself permission to come up with ideas that you might not otherwise pay any attention to, but that actually make sense when you tailor them, or add something else to them. Start with a problem that interests you and come up with ideas about how to research it: what is the problem? How does it connect with other contexts or problems? Before you start, tell yourself how many ideas you want to come up with – maybe thirty ideas if your problem is well defined or hundred ideas if you want some really bizarre ideas – and don’t stop until you come up with that number. You may want to give a value to each idea and double the value for the next idea and so on. The aim here is to stretch for one more idea, because it may be worth a lot.

Movement ladder

You can also use a movement ladder to generate ideas. This works well when you already have a good research idea but need some inspiration. You can use it to define your concept, by looking for the idea behind the solution you need. If your project concept is to research levels of motivation in designers in SMEs, the broader concept is not perhaps motivation, but the overall performance of the design organization. You then think about all the specific things that fit within this concept.

Figure 1.1 Laddder abstraction

Go up the ladder: What wider categories could it be an example of? Something to drink from, made of clay perhaps, a gift, if you chose to think of it as something to drink from and you laddered up you could ask what would be an example of this? It could be a small container, something to hold fluid.

If you ladder down and build on the concept of ‘a small container’ what are some examples of small containers? Perfume bottles, old ink bottles, plastic containers, milk bottles and so forth.

If you ladder up again and take the example of milk bottles you might think ‘what are they examples of?’ An answer might be recyclable containers. What are recyclable containers an example of? An answer might be water reduction, ecological policies and so forth.

In general laddering up towards the general allows you to broaden out towards new areas and laddering down allows you to focus on to specific parts of these new areas. If you alternate between the two it helps you explore a wide territory.

Random word

The random ‘word technique’, originally devised by Edward de Bono as an aid to research, is another useful, fun and unique way to generate new ideas. Choose an object at random, or a noun from a dictionary, and assoc...