Design Futures: Engage
From increasingly large and technologically complex urban spaces, to new ways of interacting with digital technologies, to the learning experiences of children from their earliest years, to the entirety of leisure and entertainment industries, conscious design principles now pervade human experience at every level. QUT is recognised as a national and international leader in the most important aspects of design-oriented disciplines currently shaping our future. The Design futures research domain brings together researchers from the Faculties of Built Environment and Engineering (BEE), Information Technology (IT), Education (Ed), and Creative Industries (CIF) to investigate and shape the future of design innovations.
Sub-domains of Design Futures are:
Interaction design: Embracing studies of human-computer interaction, architecture, usability studies, human factors, and the social sciences, researchers participating in the interaction design sub-theme are concerned with the role of technology in shaping personal, social, and environmental relationships.
Cities and regions in future: Creating new and better urban spaces has become a concern for every level of government, for property developers, for architects and urban planners, and for communication researchers and sociologists alike. Cities and regions in future researchers collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to understand the future of cities and regions, taking into account spatial arrangements, political concerns, socioeconomic blending strategies, communication and health infrastructure, educational infrastructure, and the role of the performing arts and communication in urban and regional development.
Aesthetic experiences: As design principles are applied throughout the range of public, corporate, and private domains, as new technologies provide new ways to combine and communicate symbolic material, and as cultures interact at global and local levels, new understandings of beauty, pleasure, desirability and engagement emerge. Understanding and creating new aesthetic experiences has become a practical and theoretical concern for the performing arts, fashion, the media industries, business, built environment, and communication design.
Designing the curriculum: To design curriculum is to design experience. New technologies, demands for new skills and literacies, and changing economies and cultures have all resulted in a need to reimagine the experience of education at every level. With every Australian high school student soon to be supplied with a personal computer, new requirements for the use of space, light, and security will place unprecedented pressure on Australia’s industrial era schools. Changing attitudes to visual, aural, and written texts, and their new media, will place new demands on curriculum content design and delivery. The Designing the curriculum domain includes research into the design of learning spaces, learning interactions, and learning networks.
Designing identities: Designing identities researchers investigate the powerful role of design in the formation of identity. Fashion, music, interior design, architecture, education, and popular culture are all heavily implicated in the formation of contemporary Australian identities. They are as much social forces as they are the basis of massive industries. They may exercise inspirational, liberating or possibly damaging influences. Research into how they intersect and manifest at a personal level – as minds, attitudes, and bodies – is essential for imagining and shaping Australia’s future.
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Creative Pedagogies: Nurture
Questions about whether creativity can be taught or learned are equalled in importance by questions about the practical roles of creativity in learning environments more generally. Innovative approaches to teaching involve arts-based methods, new technologies, multimedia, and strategies for broad inclusion in intellectual engagement. QUT’s Faculty of Education is Australia’s largest Education faculty, and its Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) is recognised as a national and international leader in early childhood, literacy and maths education research, and more broadly in learning for professional futures. The Creative Pedagogies domain brings together key researchers in Education with those in IT, CIF, and Law to understand the role of creative practice in teaching and learning innovations across a variety of disciplines.
Sub-domains of Creative Pedagogies are:
Classroom practices and systemic trends: The classroom is the educational coalface for developing the skills and interests that lead to national knowledge generation. Teachers develop strategies to cope with the different socioeconomic, behavioural, developmental, and interpersonal challenges that are unique to every classroom situation. Fast-changing demands upon classroom teachers stem from new curricula, new technologies, political currents, and cultural shifts. Understanding how teachers deploy successful creative practice and strategy in the classroom is essential for developing creative pedagogies of the future. Similarly, understanding how educational systems respond to and drive innovation is paramount.
Learning before and beyond the school: The policy impetus for "lifelong learning" programs implicate sites of teaching and learning beyond the traditional locus of classroom or lecture hall. From community-based arts programs to personal mentoring relationships, competencies and expertise in creative practice have been passed on informally for centuries. Understanding the "pedagogic moment" in such situations will help develop, and implement creative pedagogies which enhance knowledge, culture, personal experience, and general teaching practice.
Multiliteracies and multimodality: Prior to the diffusion of digital technologies, access to the technologies needed to manipulate high quality images, video, and audio was limited to an elite group of professionals working in the media industries. Today, all that is needed is a personal computer and access to the internet: the range of free and open source software, as well as high-quality raw material, is seemingly endless. This trend has already had far-reaching effects. The quality of multimodal pedagogies will be a determinant of Australia’s cultural success in the foreseeable future.
Scholarship of creative pedagogies: The scholarship of teaching and learning confronts the conceptual dichotomy between teaching and research to render visible the knowledge involved in exceptional teaching. Whether teaching creative practice, or using creative practice to enhance teaching, the scholarship of creative pedagogies reveals and disseminates the methods, means, and strategies of teaching creatively and teaching creatives.
Educating the creative workforce: The role of education within the creative economy requires an understanding of the roles of formal and informal education in the development of creative capacity for digital environments. Students are now content creators generating and infringing Intellectual Property, creating and participating in networks of knowledge and creativity. This sub-domain is hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation.
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Innovation Systems: Build
Recent moves to see institutional, cultural, technical, and social relationships as Innovation Systems have led to new understandings of the national, local, regional, and sectoral dynamics of whole societies. Innovation Systems research takes as expansive a view as political economy, focusing on conditions amenable to producing invention, new knowledge, and conceptual advances. Innovation Systems researchers are equally concerned with the movement of information and ideas as they are with the development of new products and the role of technology in society. The challenges of Innovation Systems research involve researchers from Business, BEE, CIF, Education, Law, IT, and Health.
Sub domains of Innovation Systems are:
User-led innovation: Wikipedia, Second Life, YouTube, and the Uganda rural battery charging service are all examples of user-led innovation. New tools, new opportunities for symbolic production and exchange, and new approaches to social marketing are all feeding the drive to harness the knowledge and creative impulses of consumers in the quest for innovation. The sub-domain includes research into content co-creation, media remixing, responsive market intelligence, and the conditions that allow innovation systems to flourish.
Innovation and the law: Aside from the high-profile controversies over peer-to-peer filesharing, illegal downloads of music and movies, and "fair use" issues for schools and universities, legal challenges associated with new technical environments extend into production, education, and remote collaboration. Clarity over which rights authors can and should be able to exercise has become increasingly problematic. Media education is fraught with copyright challenges around the use of image and music. For creativity and innovation to flourish, appropriate legal frameworks oriented to cultural and technological trends need development. QUT researchers in Law, Business, and IT are at the forefront of IP developments for innovation systems nationally and internationally.
New collaborations: The networked world offers new potential for connections across national, regional, social, professional, and cultural lines. Understanding how new relationships contribute to creativity and innovation is important for organisational analysis, policy development, and innovation strategy. At an applied level, developing technologies that better support remote collaborations is essential. Those technologies will be supported by social and cultural analysis, and by policy development. New collaborations includes researchers in Business, IT, CIF, Education, and BEE.
Innovation policy and industrial innovation: State and National policy settings directly shape the potential and scope for successful innovation. In turn, industry-led innovations shape policy concerns. From performing arts and schools to media and communication industries, appropriate policy is essential for healthy innovation systems. QUT has leading innovation policy researchers and analysts in CI, Law, Business, IT, and Education.
Communicating innovation: The creative industries are increasingly being called on to communicate the outcomes and advances of science and technology to the wider community. Television, film, journalism, communication design, designers, creative writers, actors, curators, and musicians are all elements of the media and entertainment system presently communicating the advanced, complex, and often contentious outcomes of science and technology. QUT’s strong Media, Communication, and Journalism research interest in communicating innovation includes researchers from CIF, Business, and FIT
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Creative Enterprise and Entrepreneurship: Pursue
Dramatic falls in the cost of production technologies, the wildly disruptive force of new networks for distribution and exchange of symbolic goods, fast-shifting patterns of taste, and increased literacies in media and technologies have combined to erode the industrial base of whole sectors in the Creative Industries. At the same time, a new class of media entrepreneurs has emerged. Giving creativity and innovation maximum leverage, taking advantage of new investment landscapes and rapidly changing cultural and technical environments, the new entrepreneurs are reshaping what we understand about business models, the character of creative labour, the nature of public and private spheres, and the assumptions of economics. For creatives at the grassroots, changes are less visible but just as dramatic and widespread. As permanent and freelance employment opportunities disappear in established advertising, television, film, and music industries, new opportunities emerge in games, toys, programs, mobile phones, corporate contexts, and public sector organisations. The artist becomes producer, performer, and entrepreneur. Creative enterprise and entrepreneurship researchers from Business, CI, Education, Law, and FIT investigate new business models and strategies, new forms of entrepreneurship, and new ways of working in creative enterprise.
Sub-domains of creative labour are:
Business 2.0 and beyond: The social networking phenomenon called Web 2.0 brings with it new ways to do business on a worldwide basis. It offers new ways to be creative, to do business more generally, and to create new communities of interest. Web 2.0 is a metaphor for Business 2.0: management, marketing, design, production, distribution, and collaboration must be reconsidered in light of the new hard and soft tools being used for social interaction at an increasing rate. From issues concerned with the management of creative labour in a creative economy, to issues concerned with creative innovation through cross-cultural influences, Business 2.0 researchers from Business, CI, and IT are working to understand the implications of technological developments in social networking environments.
Creative experience: To fully develop Australia’s creative industries sector, research will benefit by harnessing the wealth of experience held by its established creatives. The most successful creative enterprise integrates traditional business principles with new ones. Understanding how new business relationships work, and how creative knowledge and skills are transformed and capitalised upon within new contexts, is essential in identifying and understanding future enterprise development and innovation.
Artistic sustainability: One of the greatest challenges that has always faced creative labour is the difficulty in maintaining a living through creative practice. With new and potentially larger audiences, new means of creative production and distribution, and new opportunities emerging in sectors traditionally considered to be outside the Creative Industries, the way forward for sustainable creative practice is open but not yet clear. Researchers in CI, Business, IT, and Law are researching the many new opportunities that artists have to make a comfortable living.
Creative entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship is at the core of innovation. It combines skills, attributes, attitudes, resources, and opportunities in pursuit of success. Understanding the principles for successful entrepreneurship in the new creative environment is essential for the sustainability of individual artist, as it is for the reinvigoration of large sectoral concerns in the Arts and Entertainment industries, and for the development of new industries for the future.
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Creative Ecologies: Connect
Creative ecologies research investigates the notion that creativity and innovation are products of specific environments, and that some environments are more amenable to creativity than others. Technical, legal, architectural, demographic, and policy concerns are all part of the ecology of creativity. Culture is also part of the mix. Understanding what mix of circumstances, resources, and attitudes are required for the creative spirit to flourish is necessary to harness Australia’s creative potentials. An ecological perspective permits many views on the barriers and stimulants to creative activity. The creative ecologies domain brings together researchers from CI, Law, Business, BEE, and Education to investigate and understand the environmental factors in creativity and innovation.
Digital cities: New developments in architecture and urban planning are attempting to understand the informatic role of new technologies in urban environments. Whether in new peri-urban developments or revitalisation plans for the inner-city, new technologies are being considered as drivers of social and cultural capital, as seamless tools for navigating new and unfamiliar territory, as repositories of local knowledge and history, or as personalised marketing tools for local services, the digital city is the local dimension of the global information commons. Researchers in CI, Business, IT, and BEE are working to investigate these new challenges.
Cultures of creativity and innovation: The cultural dimension of creativity is perhaps its most important yet impenetrable aspect. As creativity emerges as the preeminent force driving growth in contemporary economies, the impetus to understand comparative advantages and disadvantages through the lens of culture is of the highest importance. Cultures of creativity in China, Korea, Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore stand in various relation to those in the USA, Europe, UK, Canada, and Australia. Researchers in CI, Business, and Education are working to understand the unique and comparative dimensions of culture in relation to creativity.
Organisational networks: New ecologies mean new ways of organising. Work, activism, journalism, and creative practice of all kinds are reconfiguring around new levels of connectivity, new patterns of trust, and new communities of interest. Researchers from CIF, Business, and IT are working to understand how creative ecologies relate to organisation practices and innovation in traditional and emerging sectors of the creative industries.
Technosocial networks: The life of "things" in human societies has long been of interest to sociologists and technologists alike. Actor Network Theorists (ANTs), among others, have long understood that our technical objects partake in the life of people at many levels: games, new media, human-computer interaction, cultural geography, theatre, music, and the visual arts are all fields of research that benefit from an understanding of the technosocial character of contemporary society. Researchers from IT, BEE, CIF, and Business are currently working to understand the role of techne in the formation and transformation of sociality.
Mapping creativity and innovation: Creatives move in and out of work, work in sectors outside what are typically considered as creative industries, often working alone or remotely, sometimes collaborating internationally. QUT has been awarded a number of nationally funded research programs that map creativity and innovation: Researchers from CI, Business, Cultural Studies, and Geography.
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Creativity, Health, and Happiness: Thrive
Health and wellbeing are increasingly understood in expansive terms that extend well beyond the strictly medical. Whether as preventative, prophylactic, diversionary, or remedial, creative practice is being recognised as a necessary feature of healthy cultures. Music; visual arts and crafts; new media arts; and radio, film, and television are all being used in community health projects throughout Australia and worldwide. Health informatics has been designated as one of the 14 greatest engineering challenges for the 21st Century, implicating technology, communication, information schemas, and connectivity. A broader view sees the informatic domain as extending beyond information to communication, cultures of knowledge, creativity, and social connectedness. Happiness is no longer the stuff of soap operas, fairy tales, and the tertiary realms of self-actualisation; rather, it is increasingly clear that health and longevity rely to some significant degree on peoples’ happiness, and that happiness is strongly linked to their involvement in the life of a culture. Researchers in Health, IHBI, IT, CIF, BEE, and Education are actively researching and innovating in this important research domain.
Sub domains of Creativity, health, and happiness are:
Community art and health: Projects such as HITnet, SavetoDisc, and the community coaching project are all concerned with delivering arts-led health benefits to remote, rural, and otherwise disadvantaged communities. The role of creative practice in delivering community health benefits is an important and developing area. Researchers from Health, IHBI, CIF, ACID, CCI, and Education are working to identify the links between creative practice and community health.
Creative practice and personal wellbeing: There is much anecdotal and qualitative research linking creative practice to personal wellbeing, both physical and mental. Causal links are, however, elusive. This sub-domain involves researchers from Health, CIF, and Education who are working to develop empirical links between creative practice and wellbeing.
Health informatics: In its narrowest sense, health informatics is the link between information, communication, medical professionals, and their patients. Even in this very strict sense, the role of creativity and understanding in any efficient health informatics is apparent. Taken more broadly, and being inclusive of the entire range of benefits that new communication networks offer, health informatics includes all the facets of creative practice: from telemicroscopy and telepathology to remote counselling, to the use of drama for health interventions, the opportunities for creativity and innovation are enormous. CIF, Health, IT, and Business house researchers whose work in this important area is recognised nationally and internationally.
Therapeutic media: From online counselling, to diversionary pain therapies, to resilience building for disadvantaged children, QUT researchers are at the forefront of developments in therapeutic media. This important sub-domain involves researchers from Education, CIF, Health, Business, and IT.
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