21

ReseaRCh TRaining in

The CReaTiVe aRTs and

design

Darren Newbury

Introduction

since the 1990s considerable work has gone into developing resources and programmes
to support arts and design-based doctoral students, who are now an established, if still
relatively small, feature of the international academic landscape. To be provocative,
i might argue that whilst the epistemological debate around artistic research has
developed its own dynamic, the more significant work has taken place at the coalface,
dealing with the needs of students as they attempt to shape projects which answer the
twin demands of academic rigour and significance to the field. however, rather than
recount the early history of this ‘emerging’ field, i want to take the opportunity provided
by this chapter to try and discern a sense of what good practice in research training
looks like and to consider some of the challenges we face as we look to the future.
This is not to argue that history is not important; of course the particular historical
development of arts and design education has contributed significantly to the contexts
within which the discussion of arts- based research has come into being. But others in
this volume have had the opportunity to tackle this topic more fully and in this chapter
i want to place my emphasis on the present and the future.^1
The chapter is organized into four main sections. First, i want to start by setting out
a number of assumptions on which the discussion is based. There have been long, and
often heated, debates about the nature of research in the creative arts and design, and
its relationship to other fields in which doctoral study has a much longer history. it is
not my intention here to dwell on these debates, but it is important for readers to know
the position from which i am writing, because the conclusions i reach are grounded
in specific ideas about what constitutes research in general and doctoral research in
particular.
second, i want to consider what it means to be a trained researcher in our field.
after all, if a doctorate is a training in research, then those of us who organize such
programmes should be able to specify what it means to offer training for doctoral
students in the creative arts and design, and articulate the outcomes of such training.