What is creative research? [and why it matters]
Insights from the Postdoc Takeover Week, 27 - 31 March
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Gianturco Junior Research Fellow in Music and Philosophy at the University of Oxford, Toby Young, shareshis tips on how young academics can stand out from the crowd.
In a harder job market than ever, young academics need to stand out to avoid being branded as boring. We’ve all heard the buzzword of creativity, but how can it help to enhance our research? Here are three suggestions:
- Get away from your desk
Traditional models of the creative process are basically the same as the research process – you start with an idea, you work through it, and you package it up for dissemination. However there’s one crucial difference, which in creative theory is called the incubation period. This bit of time in the early stages of the research process where you leave your desk and explore something creative, artistic or fun.
This is crucial for giving your brain time to develop your ideas, whilst also subconsciously tapping into the artistic elements of the new experience or task to help the ideas combine and reform in interesting and unusual ways.
Think this sounds a bit new-agey? Take a leaf out of NASA physicist Robert Lang’s book for example, as he uses his passion for origami to inspire his engineering work [and vice-versa] and see how meaningful this stage of the research process can be.
- Take a tip from storytelling
Fundamentally, all writing is creative, but with tight deadlines and pressure to publish quantity over quality, it’s all too easy to forget the potential for communication and expression that good writing can hold.
The easiest way to rekindle this is undoubtedly to read, both inside and outside academia. The tips and tricks you can pick up from novels about tone of language, pacing, and narrative are invaluable to explaining your research clearly, concisely and colourfully.
Have fun with the written word again! Imagine every article or chapter is a short story and you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll notice the difference.
- Look beyond the written word
We’re so used to disseminating our work by the usual channels of journal articles, chapters and books, etc. But is a 6,000 word piece of writing really the best way to express your ideas? Might your work have more impact if it was sung? Or painted? Or danced?
One example of a work which challenges conventional forms of dissemination is Nick Sousanis’ stunning doctoral thesis Unflattening written entirely in the form of a comic book, and the first visual monograph ever to be published by Harvard University Press.
Be brave! Sometimes non-conventional forms can handle just as meaningful and complex academic discourse as the written word, whilst also helping to inspire and engage a wider audience to your work.
Toby Young is the Gianturco Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford. He has given numerous public talks and lectures on creativity, philosophy and music, including a TEDx talk, a series of three radio programmes on ‘Artistic Knowledge’ for Resonance FM, and an upcoming lecture on beauty and taste for Gresham College. He is also Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Creative Research. More information can be found on his website. Follow Tobyon Twitter @theothertoby.
The Creative Self in Context: Experience Sampling and the Ecology of Everyday Creativity
Paul J. Silvia, ... Alexander P. Christensen, in The Creative Self, 2017
Architecture Students’ Flow Experience During Studio Work
Creativity research has a long interest in flow states, which have complex links to feelings of inspiration and creative motivation [Csikszentmihalyi,1990]. The original writings on flow emphasize that it is a state that is closely tied to environments, and early experience sampling work emerged from the study of flow [Csikszentmihalyi,1975]. Since then, however, much of the work on flow has taken a static, cross-sectional view, emphasizing individual differences in proneness to flow. In an illuminating study, Fullagar and Kelloway [2009] examined variability in the experience of flow in a sample of 40 architecture students. They were sampled in an architecture student’s natural habitat: the studio. During the course of a semester, the students were randomly signaled during independent studio time to complete questionnaires about their flow experience and emotions while working on their projects. The 40 students provided 1000 responses, an illustration of the massive amount of data that even a small sample can provide.
The intraclass correlation [ICC] is a simple but revealing descriptive statistic in experience sampling studies. Because an outcome is measured repeatedly, the scores vary between people [some people tend to give higher flow ratings overall] and within people [a given person will give higher ratings at some times and lower ratings at others]. In this case, the ICC for flow is the proportion of variance in momentary flow experience that is at the between-person level [variation between the participants] versus the within-person level [variation across time points]. The ICC for flow was 0.26, so 74% of the variance in flow states during studio time was due to things that varied across studio days. Stated differently, 26% of the variance was associated with differences between people—contextual variation had a much larger influence. Flow thus behaved much more like state concept than a trait concept. This finding nicely demonstrates the wide variability within people that is revealed by intensive assessment [Fleeson,2004]. The essentially situational character of flow during architecture studio work raises interesting questions about the within-person factors that cause variability in flow states from one point to the next.
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URL://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128097908000157
Good Research Paper Topics You Can Really Use, With Examples and Ideas
Author:
Jule Romans
Updated date:
Feb 15, 2022
Jule Romans is the author of "Take Advice from Shakespeare" and other books. She has over 30 years of experience in the field of education.
Creative Research Techniques
Table of Contents
- Creative Research Method Definition
- Creative Research and Scientific Research Techniques
- Creative Research
- Language Editing Services by Elsevier Author Services:
Surprisingly or not, scientists are beginning to see the benefits of creative research techniques, especially in the framework of social sciences, due to a more ethical attitude in decision-making. After all, creativity and the study and advancement of science, more often than not, go hand in hand.