Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2012

This article explores the metaphor of ‘rigour’ and challenges its suitability for encouraging research ‘excellence’ within universities. By way of illustration, the author proposes a non-linear writing method that, when supported by good tutelage, renders plagiarism virtually impossible. The system grew out of the Design Futures, Masters in Art (M.A.), at Goldsmiths, University of London, which help designers to write more usefully, and to enable them to re-purpose their writing. This tetrahedral writing structure was designed to subvert imposed rigour by fostering a more dynamic, collective, ethical and entrepreneurial approach.

This article is written about a series of photographs taken by the artist/writer Bernard Walsh, called Bernard Walsh’s World Series. The photographs are intended to form part of an exhibition that will travel to cities around the world, including those cities where the photographs were originally taken; Seoul, Tokyo, Istanbul, Lisbon, Rome, Berlin, Kaunas and Los Angeles. This article explores issues raised by the selection of images and the notion of a world series becoming the specific context for this exhibition.

The idea of the practitioner as researcher is everywhere. So is the idea of reflective practice. These ideas … are now so hackneyed and commodified that they have almost come to mean all things to all people. […] A spectator approach to action research is widely practised in education and corporate settings, especially by those who are positioned as the providers and supporters of practitioners’ research. Self-styled elites preside over others doing their action research, and make judgements using normative criteria about what progress has been made and how it should be judged. (McNiff, 2002a, 6)

The notion of ‘auto-ethnography’ makes explicit a commitment to a self-reflexive way of knowing and straddles a wide range of cultural (and increasingly) scientific disciplines and interests as well as encompassing a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. In practical terms, a journal, diary, field notes, blog is a means by which one records a ‘feel’ for the practice-based work whether through individually situated work or in collaboration with others. This article muses and reflects on what this process might mean and what its impact could be on the future of practice-based work.

The Phi Books have used the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration by using narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. This has lead to the production of books and interactive material produced by the authors and the participants, which are both fictional and imaginative while also being methodologically reflective. We would like to present the development of the Phi Books Project, showing its different stages, from the initial formulation of algorithmic fictions to technologically mediated and embodied systems for collaboration.

A given for art writing today is the necessity of contextualization. This assumption is put to the test when the singularity of a work of art is privileged over its specificity. If the latter infers a context-directed situation in which a cultural object, event or situation is determined by the conditions of its appearance in a particular context, and in which it is invariably subject to certain predominant, context-specific models of interpretation, the former denotes a model whereby a cultural object, event or situation creates its own conditions of reception and establishes its own interpretative frameworks. Art writing that works with a model of singularity does not deny the importance of context, but downplays its influence by privileging the agency of the work of art. This becomes problematic for art criticism when the context appears to play more of a determining role than usual. Such a situation is raised whenever contemporary art enters the church, revealing certain refusals and strategies of avoidance within the secular art press.

Much of the research on dyslexia and writing explores dyslexia as a deficit. When it is through the historically famous or in comparison to non-dyslexic people, the researcher starts with an idea of what dyslexia is and seeks to identify it; for example, by evidence of orthographic aberration in their writing. The purpose of this study was to draw on critical theory from outside the dyslexia literature which rejects the principle that the relation between author and text is simple and transparent. This is with a view to understand both the context in which the work was written, but also acknowledges the reader’s role in interpretation, or the ‘relation of address’. Moving away from the assumption that the dyslexic must ‘overcome’ dyslexia to write, the research draws on autobiographical writing by contemporary dyslexic writers. I argue that these reveal how mistakes and imprecision are connected with a love for language and the imagination. While traditionally dyslexia has been depicted from the viewpoint of non-dyslexic people as a ‘suffering’, as in – one is thought to ‘suffer from dyslexia’ – these representations of dyslexia suggest suffering is not simply ‘there’, as something one ‘has’. Dyslexic writing therefore provides insight, not into the pathology of the author, but what the binary of inclusion/exclusion means to them.

Short forms of communication are increasingly dominating writing (and reading) practices. From advertising slogans and narrative summaries to different forms of mirco-blogging and micro-pitching, this article examines how the current social and cultural positionality of the writer has acted to condense the event of writing, the processes of writing, and the final state of the written work when complete. It then examines how the designer and the artist (situated as writer and reader) might respond to these changes in terms of creative practice.

Writing and Research in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design

Writing Pad, Sheffield Hallam University