Frameworks for engaging creative practice in bureaucratised project environments

This project examines procurement of creative services in a bureaucratic setting and proposes alternative procedures that better negotiate the tensions between creative and bureaucratised ways of working. The outcome is a project procurement strategy called 'Creative Practice Enabled Procurement' and a prototype industry toolkit 'It's Not Shopping! A Guide to Purchasing Innovation and Creativity'. The research is of benefit to managers and creative practitioners, especially those working in interpretive settings. The goal is to propagate better forms of creative procurement across government and private sectors by providing an evidence-based case for improved, practical alternatives.

Skill development for innovative procurement environments in construction

The construction industry should be a priority to all governments because it impacts economically and socially on all citizens. Sector turnover in industrialised economies typically averages 8-12% of GDP. Further, construction is critical to economic growth. Recent Australian studies estimate that a 10% gain in efficiency in construction translates to a 2.5% increase in GDP Inefficiencies in the Australian construction industry have been identified by a number of recent studies modelling the building process. They have identified potential savings in time of between 25% and 40% by reducing non-value added steps in the process. A culture of reform is now emerging in the industry – one in which alternate forms of project delivery are being trialed. Government and industry have identified Alliance Contracting as a means to increase efficiency in the construction industry as part of a new innovative procurement environment. Alliance contracting requires parties to form relationships and work cooperatively to provide a more complete service. This is a significant cultural change for the construction industry, with its well-known adversarial record in traditional contracting. Alliance contracts offer enormous potential benefits, but the Australian construction industry needs to develop new skills to effectively participate in the new relationship environment. This paper describes a collaborative project identifying skill needs for clients and construction professionals to more effectively participate in an increasingly sophisticated international procurement environment. The aim of identifying these skill needs is to assist industry, government, and skill developers to prepare the Australian construction workforce for the future. The collaborating Australian team has been fortunate to secure the Australian National Museum in Canberra as its live case study. The Acton Peninsula Development is the first major building development in the world awarded on the basis of a joint alliance contract.

Creative industries as a globally contestable policy field

The development of the creative industries “proposition” has caused a great deal of controversy. Even as it has been examined and adopted in several, quite diverse, jurisdictions as a policy language seeking to respond to both creative production and consumption in new economic conditions, it is subject to at times withering critique from within academic media, cultural and communication studies. It is held to promote a simplistic narrative of the merging of culture and economics and represents incoherent policy; the data sources are suspect and underdeveloped; there is a utopianization of “creative” labor; and a benign globalist narrative of the adoption of the idea. This article looks at some of these critiques of creative industries idea and argues against them.

Co-creative media : theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture

This paper considers the question, ‘what is co-creative media, and why is it a useful idea in social media research’? The term ‘co-creative media’ is now used by Creative Industries researchers at QUT to describe their digital storytelling practices. Digital storytelling is a set of collaborative digital media production techniques that have been used to facilitate social participation in numerous Australian and international contexts. Digital storytelling has been adapted by Creative Industries researchers at QUT as a platform for researching the potential of vernacular creativity in a variety of contexts, including social inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged groups; inclusion in public histories of narratives that might be overlooked; and articulation of voices that otherwise remain silent in the formulation of social and economic development strategies. The adaption of digital storytelling to different contexts has been shaped by the reflexive, recursive, and pragmatic requirements of action research. Amongst other things, this activity draws attention to the agency of researchers in facilitating these kinds of participatory media processes and outcomes. This discussion serves to problematise concepts of participatory media by introducing the term ‘co-creative media’ and differentiating these from other social media production practices.

Creative design and the generative evolutionary paradigm

Design as seen from the designer's perspective is a series of amazing imaginative jumps or creative leaps. But design as seen by the design historian is a smooth progression or evolution of ideas that they seem self-evident and inevitable after the event. But the next step is anything but obvious for the artist/creator/inventor/designer stuck at that point just before the creative leap. They know where they have come from and have a general sense of where they are going, but often do not have a precise target or goal. This is why it is misleading to talk of design as a problem-solving activity - it is better defined as a problem-finding activity. This has been very frustrating for those trying to assist the design process with computer-based, problem-solving techniques. By the time the problem has been defined, it has been solved. Indeed the solution is often the very definition of the problem. Design must be creative-or it is mere imitation. But since this crucial creative leap seem inevitable after the event, the question must arise, can we find some way of searching the space ahead? Of course there are serious problems of knowing what we are looking for and the vastness of the search space. It may be better to discard altogether the term "searching" in the context of the design process: Conceptual analogies such as search, search spaces and fitness landscapes aim to elucidate the design process. However, the vastness of the multidimensional spaces involved make these analogies misguided and they thereby actually result in further confounding the issue. The term search becomes a misnomer since it has connotations that imply that it is possible to find what you are looking for. In such vast spaces the term search must be discarded. Thus, any attempt at searching for the highest peak in the fitness landscape as an optimal solution is also meaningless. Futhermore, even the very existence of a fitness landscape is fallacious. Although alternatives in the same region of the vast space can be compared to one another, distant alternatives will stem from radically different roots and will therefore not be comparable in any straightforward manner (Janssen 2000). Nevertheless we still have this tantalizing possibility that if a creative idea seems inevitable after the event, then somehow might the process be rserved? This may be as improbable as attempting to reverse time. A more helpful analogy is from nature, where it is generally assumed that the process of evolution is not long-term goal directed or teleological. Dennett points out a common minsunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing human beings. Evolution can have produced humankind by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. If we were to wind the tape of life back and run this algorithm again, the likelihood of "us" being created again is infinitesimally small (Gould 1989; Dennett 1995). But nevertheless Mother Nature has proved a remarkably successful, resourceful, and imaginative inventor generating a constant flow of incredible new design ideas to fire our imagination. Hence the current interest in the potential of the evolutionary paradigm in design. These evolutionary methods are frequently based on techniques such as the application of evolutionary algorithms that are usually thought of as search algorithms. It is necessary to abandon such connections with searching and see the evolutionary algorithm as a direct analogy with the evolutionary processes of nature. The process of natural selection can generate a wealth of alternative experiements, and the better ones survive. There is no one solution, there is no optimal solution, but there is continuous experiment. Nature is profligate with her prototyping and ruthless in her elimination of less successful experiments. Most importantly, nature has all the time in the world. As designers we cannot afford prototyping and ruthless experiment, nor can we operate on the time scale of the natural design process. Instead we can use the computer to compress space and time and to perform virtual prototyping and evaluation before committing ourselves to actual prototypes. This is the hypothesis underlying the evolutionary paradigm in design (1992, 1995).

From the consciousness industry to the creative industries : consumer-created content, social network markets, & the growth of knowledge

In studies of media industries, too much attention has been paid to providers and firms, too little to consumers and markets. But with user-created content, the question first posed more than a generation ago by the uses & gratifications method and taken up by semiotics and the active audience tradition (‘what do audiences do with media?’), has resurfaced with renewed force. What’s new is that where this question (of what the media industries and audiences did with each other) used to be individualist and functionalist, now, with the advent of social networks using Web 2.0 affordances, it can be re-posed at the level of systems and populations as well.

Creative Industries come to China (MATE)

This paper introduces the special issue “China: Internationalizing the Creative Industries”, describing the Australian Research Council funded “MATE” project which provides the conceptual background for the questions the issue explores. The MATE project began with the expectation that as China evolves from its status as a developing country with an emphasis on primary industries and manufacturing, to a mature, market-driven economy benefiting from high levels of international investment, it will become more actively engaged with the global “knowledge economy” and “information society”. In this context, developments in the “creative industries”, which are playing such an important role in developed economies, might reasonably be expected in China. Although China continues to be characterised by strong central-policy settings, as the domestic consumer market matures there is greater scope for consumer-led creative business development. The “MATE” project aimed to capture some of these changes as they began to gain momentum across a range of services: Media, Advertising, Tourism and Education. This special issue continues this theme with papers that explore the theoretical challenges, economic questions and implications, and practical instantiations of creative industries growth in China. All papers contained in this special issue have been peer-reviewed.

Creative urban regions : harnessing urban technologies to support knowledge city initiatives

In the rapidly growing knowledge economy, the talent and creativity of those around us will be increasingly decisive in shaping economic opportunity. Creativity can be described as the ability to produce new and original ideas and things. In other words, it is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain or transforms an existing domain into a new one. From an economic perspective, creativity can be considered as the generation of new ideas that is the major source of innovation and new economic activities. As urban regions have become the localities of key knowledge precincts and knowledge clusters across the globe, the link between a range of new technologies and the development of ‘creative urban regions’ (CURs) has come to the fore. In this sense, creativity has become a buzz concept in knowledge-economy research and policy circles. It has spawned ‘creative milieus,’ ‘creative industries,’ ‘creative cities,’ ‘creative class,’ and ‘creative capital.’ Hence, creativity has become a key concept on the agenda of city managers, development agents, and planners as they search for new forms of urban and economic development. CURs provide vast opportunities for knowledge production and spillover, which lead to the formation of knowledge cities. Urban information and communication technology (ICT) developments support the transformation of cities into knowledge cities. This book, which is a companion volume to Knowledge-Based Urban Development: Planning and Applications in the Information Era (also published by IGI Global) focuses on some of these developments. The Forward and Afterword are written by senior respected academic researchers Robert Stimson of the University of Queensland, Australia, and Zorica Nedovic-Budic of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The book is divided into four sections, each one dealing with selected aspects of information and communication technologies and creative urban regions.

Co-creative expertise : Auran Games and Fury - a case study

This article discusses the ways in which the relations among professional and non-professional participants in co-creative relations are being reconfigured as part of the shift from a closed industrial paradigm of expertise toward open and distributed expertise networks. This article draws on ethnographic consultancy research undertaken throughout 2007 with Auran Games, a Brisbane, Australia based games developer, to explore the co-creative relationships between professional developers and gamers. This research followed and informed Auran’s online community management and social networking strategies for Fury (http://unleashthefury.com), a massively multiplayer online game released in October 2007. This paper argues that these co-creative forms of expertise involve co-ordinating expertises through social-network markets.