researCh training in the Creative arts and designWriting and the PhDi am going to be provocative and argue that we will know that creative arts and
design research has reached maturity when, instead of trying to hide from the writing
problem, it turns around and faces it directly, indeed perhaps even embraces the rich
methodological questions that it represents. For a period, pointless arguments about
numbers of words seemed to dominate debate. although we are now beyond that, or
at least i hope so, we may still have the legacy to deal with. i recently had a discussion
with a supervisor who felt that the earlier redrawing of their regulations regarding
word length, supposedly to suit practice- based phds, now left them with a format that
was constraining rather than enabling. and note here, words do not seem to be the
problem, merely committing them to paper. i have not yet heard of any proposal to
waive the requirement for the viva for practice- led phds, or to reduce by half the
number of words spoken. The idea seems slightly perverse, but then to me so does the
idea that practice- led phds necessarily need half as many words; some do, and some
do not.
To argue that art and design has a special problem with writing and therefore should
be granted some sort of exemption from the struggle to articulate its methods and
findings is unhelpful. Very explicitly for the past twenty years and with less fanfare no
doubt much longer, anthropologists have struggled with similar issues; we may have
something to learn from them. Rather than try and find arguments to avoid the issue,
which often depend on simplistically opposing writing to practice, and hence creating a
straw man out of the former, i believe we need a more sustained and constructive focus
on the forms of writing (and indeed other forms of documentation) appropriate to the
phd in art and design. it is not a question of deciding between writing and practice, but
rather asking how the practice of writing can be brought into a productive relationship
with visual arts practice. i think this question justifies some empirical research. There
is now a substantial body of completed doctorates where students have grappled, more
or less successfully no doubt, with precisely this problem.^14 Finding a mode of discourse
and a voice appropriate to the task is not straightforward: i recall one of my phd
students referring to writing in relation to his art practice as a special kind of suffering.
in my experience, phd students in fine art often seem on the one hand to turn to the
discourse of art criticism, in effect to become their own art critic; or on the other to
look to forms of social or (worse) market research, and account for practice in terms
of what others have to say about it. neither approach seems satisfactory to me. an
exploration of more descriptive and reflective forms of writing, which i believe is of
central methodological importance to the development of doctoral research, remains
a task to be undertaken.^15
i do not have the space here to develop this argument fully, but i think it might be
helpful to suggest a framework which allows for some differentiation in the way writing
is considered as part of doctoral research. Rather than think of writing in the singular,
i am arguing we should consider, and introduce to students, at least three different
kinds of writing that they may need to engage in as part of doctoral study: writing
as methodology; writing as reflection; writing as output. The last of these – writing
as output – tends to be the one which we are generally speaking of when we talk of
writing for research: the written thesis, journal articles and so on. This form remains