Luke Jaaniste

Bio: Luke Jaaniste is an academic researcher from Queensland University of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Creative brief & Creative industries. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 15 publications receiving 167 citations.

Placing the creative sector within innovation: The full gamut

Abstract: This paper examines the place of the creative sector - the arts, design, media and communications - within the framework of contemporary innovation. The historical focus on science-and-technology by innovation policy makers has spurred many within the creative sector to argue how and why it also contributes to innovation. Drawing on a wide range of English-speaking research and policy documents, the full gamut of places for the creative sector in innovation is surveyed. The paper ends by scoping out the conceptual and empirical research that is required if ideas about innovation in the creative sector are to take up a mature position within innovation studies and related policy.

A connective model for the practice-led research exegesis: An analysis of content and structure

Abstract: Since the formal recognition of practice-led research in the 1990s, many higher research degree candidates in art, design and media have submitted creative works along with an accompanying written document or ‘exegesis’ for examination. Various models for the exegesis have been proposed in university guidelines and academic texts during the past decade, and students and supervisors have experimented with its contents and structure. With a substantial number of exegeses submitted and archived, it has now become possible to move beyond proposition to empirical analysis. In this article we present the findings of a content analysis of a large, local sample of submitted exegeses. We identify the emergence of a persistent pattern in the types of content included as well as overall structure. Besides an introduction and conclusion, this pattern includes three main parts, which can be summarized as situating concepts (conceptual definitions and theories); precedents of practice (traditions and exemplars in the field); and researcher’s creative practice (the creative process, the artifacts produced and their value as research). We argue that this model combines earlier approaches to the exegesis, which oscillated between academic objectivity, by providing a contextual framework for the practice, and personal reflexivity, by providing commentary on the creative practice. But this model is more than simply a hybrid: it provides a dual orientation, which allows the researcher to both situate their creative practice within a trajectory of research and do justice to its personally invested poetics. By performing the important function of connecting the practice and creative work to a wider emergent field, the model helps to support claims for a research contribution to the field. We call it a connective model of exegesis.

Arts and creative industries: a historical overview and an Australian conversation

Abstract: Australia should seek new and liberating ways to bring together the arts, popular culture and the creative industries, according to Arts and creative industries. The report, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and prepared by Professor Justin O’Connor of the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, looks at ways in which the policy relationship between these often polarised sectors of arts and creative industries might be re-thought and approached more productively. The report is in two parts, commencing with An Australian conversation, in which Professor O’Connor, with Stuart Cunningham and Luke Jaaniste, document a series of in depth interviews with 18 leading practitioners across the creative industries. They discuss their perceptions of the similarities, differences and connections between the arts and creative industries. The interviews frequently returned to the fundamental question of what was meant by ‘art’ and ‘creative industries’. The second, larger part of Arts and creative industries, addresses this question through an extensive review of the discussions of art and its relation to society and culture over the last few centuries. A historical overview highlights the importance that art has had in developing our comprehension of the modern world. It also examines the enthusiasm for the creative industries over the last 15 years or so and the impact this has had on creative policy-making. Arts and creative industries suggests there is no dividing line between publicly-funded arts, popular culture and the blossoming businesses of the creative sector – and national policy should reflect this. This study was commissioned by the Australia Council as part of a long-running and productive relationship between the council and the ARC Centre of Excellence on Creative Industries and Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology.

Content, structure and orientations of the practice-led exegesis

Abstract: The emergent field of practice-led research is a unique research paradigm that situates creative practice as both a driver and outcome of the research process. The exegesis that accompanies the creative practice in higher research degrees remains open to experimentation and discussion around what content should be included, how it should be structured, and its orientations. This paper contributes to this discussion by reporting on a content analysis of a large, local sample of exegeses. We have observed a broad pattern in contents and structure within this sample. Besides the introduction and conclusion, it has three main parts: situating concepts (conceptual definitions and theories), practical contexts (precedents in related practices), and new creations (the creative process, the artifacts produced and their value as research). This model appears to combine earlier approaches to the exegesis, which oscillated between academic objectivity in providing a context for the practice and personal reflection or commentary upon the creative practice. We argue that this hybrid or connective model assumes both orientations and so allows the researcher to effectively frame the practice as a research contribution to a wider field while doing justice to its invested poetics.

The effective and the evocative : reflecting on practice-led research approaches in art and design

Abstract: Early in the practice-led research debate, Steven Scrivener (2000, 2002) identified some general differences in the approach of artists and designers undertaking postgraduate research. His distinctions centered on the role of the artefact in problem-based research (associated with design) and creative-production research (associated with artistic practice). Nonetheless, in broader discussions on practice-led research, 'art and design' often continues to be conflated within a single term. In particular, marked differences between art and design methodologies, theoretical framing, research goals and research claims have been underestimated. This paper revisits Scrivener's work and establishes further distinctions between art and design research. It is informed by our own experiences of postgraduate supervision and research methods training, and an empirical study of over sixty postgraduate, practice-led projects completed at the Creative Industries Faculty of QUT between 2002 and 2008. Our reflections have led us to propose that artists and designers work with differing research goals (the evocative and the effective, respectively), which are played out in the questions asked, the creative process, the role of the artefact and the way new knowledge is evidenced. Of course, research projects will have their own idiosyncrasies but, we argue, marking out the poles at each end of the spectrum of art and design provides useful insights for postgraduate candidates, supervisors and methodologists alike.

Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts

Abstract: Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts Graeme Sullivan (2005). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 265 pages. ISBN 1-4129-0536-2Reviewed by Charles GaroianThe Pennsylvania State UniversityFor over four decades, art education scholars have been advocating for the visual arts within the context of K-12 education by arguing their cognitive and affective significance as a discipline-specific area of inquiry and across school curricula. Beginning with the establishment of the professional field of art education in the mid-1960s to the development of Discipline-Based Art Education, to Visual Culture studies in art education, and most recently, the growing literature on Art-Based Research, the field has reinvented itself in order to clarify its positioning and to gain agency and credibility within the larger context of educational research and practice in the U.S. and internationally. Depending on the political climate surrounding schooling, these efforts at bringing the visual arts to the center of curricular and pedagogical concerns have, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears.While there is little disagreement about the importance of visual arts education among the populace, when push comes to shove within the political economy of schooling, art is the first area of content to be questioned, then reduced, if not eliminated, from the curriculum. As post-Sputnik education and now No Child Left Behind has shown us, the visual arts are the first to suffer when politics enters the picture of what constitutes basic education in the U.S. If the larger role that the visual arts can play in the education of children is going to be taken seriously, then it is arguments like those found in Graeme Sullivan's recent book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Ans (2005), that can ensure a broader appreciation and understanding of how the visual arts constitute significant research and contribute in significant ways to children's creative and intellectual development.Given its research-on-art-as-research focus, Sullivan's book makes a significant contribution to the literature in the field of art education. His arguments place art-based research in the center of educational practice as they clearly establish the visual arts as a significant form of creative and intellectual inquiry. While creativity has long been touted as the major contribution of the visual arts to new knowledge, it has not been central to a pragmatic understanding of art's intellectual value in knowledge acquisition, as Sullivan clearly demonstrates.While in the past, research methodologies were borrowed from the hard sciences and social sciences to study and argue for the curricular and pedagogical relevance of art making in classrooms, Sullivan has mined existing methodologies and compared them with the ways in which the visual arts are constituted as research. What is unique about his approach is that he does not rely solely on external research methodologies to validate the importance of visual arts practice for creative and intellectual development.Instead, he provides an in-depth perspective on the inherent value of visual arts practice as research and the robust possibilities that it offers when interconnected with wider research systems and methodologies that are constituted by the other disciplines.In Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sullivan begins with "Part 1: Contexts for Visual Arts Research," in which he establishes the conceptual, historical, and educational foundations of visual arts research, arguing that if it is to have any impact at all, it must be grounded in visual arts strategies, challenge existing paradigms of institutionalized knowledge, and adapted to other systems of research, theory, and practice. In "Part 2: Theorizing Visual Arts Practice," he develops and establishes the visual knowing of the artist-as-theorist, and the idea that complex systems of inquiry in art practice are robust and boundary-breaking in their methodologies, and proposes that their cognitive and transformative processes enable new insights, criticalities, and understandings to occur. …

Knowledge transfer activities in social sciences and humanities: Explaining the interactions of research groups with non-academic agents

Abstract: The aim of this research is to achieve a better understanding of the processes underlying knowledge transfer (KT) in social sciences and humanities (SSH). The paper addresses: first, the extent of SSH research groups’ engagement in KT and the formal KT activities used to interact with non-academic communities; and second, how the characteristics of research groups may influence engagement in various types of KT. The empirical analysis is at research group level using data derived from a questionnaire of SSH research groups belonging to the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). We find that KT activities are based on relational rather than commercial activities. The most frequent relational activities in which SSH research groups engage are consultancy and contract research. We find also that the characteristics of research groups (e.g. size and multidisciplinarity) and individuals (e.g. academic status and star scientist) are associated with involvement in KT activities and that a deliberate focus on the societal impacts and relevance of the research conducted is strongly related to active engagement of research groups in all the modes of KT considered in this study. From a managerial perspective, our findings suggest that measures promoting a focus on the societal impact of research could enhance research groups’ engagement in KT activities.

Are ‘STEM from Mars and SSH from Venus’?: Challenging disciplinary stereotypes of research’s social value

Abstract: There is a reasonably settled consensus within the innovation community that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research is more ‘useful’ to societies than other types of research, notably social sciences and humanities (SSH) research. Our paper questions this assumption, and seeks to empirically test whether STEM researchers’ practices make their research more useful than that of SSH researchers. A critical reading of the discussion around SSH research supports developing a taxonomy of differences. This is tested using a database of 1,583 researchers from the Spanish Council for Scientific Research. Results do not support the view that SSH research is less useful than STEM research, even if differences are found in the nature of both transfer practices and their research users. The assumption that STEM research is more useful than SSH research needs revision if research policy is to properly focus on research which is useful for society.

Developments in measuring the “creative” workforce

Abstract: This article outlines the contribution the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation has made to the project to improve statistical parameters for defining the “creative” workforce This is one approach which addresses the imprecision of official statistics in grasping the emergent nature of the creative industries The article discusses the policy implications of the differences between emphasizing industry and occupation or workforce It provides qualitative case studies that provide further perspectives on quantitative analysis of the creative workforce It also outlines debates about the implications for the cultural disciplines of an evidence-based account of creative labour The “creative trident” methodology is summarized: it is the total of creative occupations within the core creative industries (specialists), plus the creative occupations employed in other industries (embedded) plus the business and support occupations employed in creative industries who are often responsib

What is so Special about Media Innovations? A Characterization of the Field

Abstract: Based on existing research in media economics, media management as well as media history this paper analyzes media innovation’s characteristics. These media specific attributes help distinguishing media innovation from other types of innovation and justify the necessity to establish a distinct field of research on media innovation. As a result, eight attributes that refer to media innovation products and processes were deduced. They characterize media innovations as multidimensional and risky products and highlight the importance of approaching media innovation development as interactive, long term processes that go beyond the control of single media organizations. Concluding, several implications with respect towards studying media innovation from an interdisciplinary perspective were derived.