Kids in design : designing creative schools with children

There is a consensus that children should be involved in the planning and design process of their schools, and attempts have been made throughout the world. This paper introduces a ‘Kids in Design’ project, through which primary school children worked with university architecture students to design a school playground. The aim of the project was to encourage the full potential of children’s creativity and generate creative school design outcomes. From October to December 2011, the ‘Kids in Design’ project was conducted in Roslyn Road Primary School (Geelong, Australia). Through eight weeks of workshops, children in Year 5 & 6 worked with architecture students from Deakin University (Geelong, Australia) to design a school playground. Assessing the design outcomes of this project, assertions are made that creative design outcomes have been achieved. Deakin University is currently working with another primary school to replicate the ‘Kids in Design’ project in 2012.

Fictional inquiry : an alternative process to inspire creativity in children's co-design projects

Children's creativity is a valuable resource for architectural design, and attempts have been made throughout the world to involve children in the design process of their environments. Previous children's co-design projects often followed a problem solving process, however, this process has limitations in stimulating children's creativity. Research has found that children's creativity is different to adult's creativity: Instead of creative problem solving skills, children's creativity is most evident in their imagination and originality of thinking. Addressing this issue, an alternative process in children's co-design projects was experimented: Fictional Inquiry. In this paper, two case studies are used to illustrate how the fictional inquiry process is applied in children's co-design projects.* These two projects were both joint educational projects between Deakin University and schools in Geelong and Melbourne. Through several weeks' of workshops, children and university architecture students worked in small groups to develop architectural design solutions. It was observed that creative design outcomes have been achieved in these two projects, which suggested that Fictional Inquiry was an effective process to inspire children's creativity. Applying the Fictional Inquiry process, Deakin University is currently working with another school in the Geelong Region, with the aim of achieving creative architectural design outcomes.

From score to work? Making a group, improvising a dance

A questioning of the authorial role in dance-making through the creation of an improvised group dance.

'Kids in design': designing creative schools with children

There is a consensus that children should be involved in the planning and design process of their schools, and attempts have been made throughout the world. This paper introduces a 'Kids in Design' project, through which primary school children worked with university architecture students to design a school playground. The aim of the project was to encourage the full potential of children's creativity and generate creative school design outcomes. From October to December 2011, the 'Kids in Design' project was conducted in Roslyn Road Primary School (Geelong, Australia). Through eight weeks of workshops, children in Year 5 & 6 worked with architecture students from Deakin University (Geelong, Australia) to design a school playground. Assessing the design outcomes of this project, assertions are made that creative design outcomes have been achieved. Deakin University is currently working with another primary school to replicate the 'Kids in Design' project in 2012.

Creative architectural design with children: a collaborative design project informed by Rhodes's theory

Since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, there has been global consensus that children need to be involved in the planning and design of their environment. There exist various international initiatives that support collaborative design with children, with co-design projects conducted in different areas of the world. Evolving from the global context of co-design, this project explores creativity in relation to architectural design with children. Between October and December 2011, a team of architecture students from Deakin University worked with children from Roslyn Primary School (both institutions located in Victoria, Australia) to design a playground structure. Informed by Rhodes’s (1961) theory, creativity in this co-design project was addressed through the four dimensions of creative designers, creative context, creative process, and creative design outcomes. The findings of this study corroborate Rhodes’s theory of creativity, and suggest that it is useful to engender creative architectural design with children.

National dance forum 2015

There are ongoing tensions between academics who employ artistic practice as part of their skills set versus artists who enter the academy through a higher degree or taking up a university job opportunity. This panel will address both the pitfalls and opportunities when academic research interacts with creative practice. How one area supports and engages the other is a multifaceted and complex endeavour.

Navigating control and illusion: functional interactivity versus ‘faux-interactivity’ in transmedia dance performance

Interactivity – a networked loop in which a performer’s live data feeds a digital system – can bridge the divide between live performance and digital entities in transmedia dance performances. In the ‘entanglement scene’ of Australian Dance Theatre’s Multiverse (2014), choreographer Garry Stewart and the creative coders and animators at the Deakin Motion.Lab utilise ‘faux-interactivity’, or a perceived relationship between the dancers and digital entities that exists only from the perspective of the audience. The spectre of ‘faux-interactivity’ challenges the spontaneity in live, embodied performance art because it both integrates live performance with prerendered digital content and offers a potential structure for a shared, dispersed creative and choreographic process across numerous and shared artistic and technological platforms. This paper investigates the concept of ‘faux-interactivity’, suggesting that its use can be a catalyst for moving beyond the limitations and values of ‘real’, or functional interactive systems within a theatrical context, and positing that definitions of ‘interactivity’ might be further expanded to accommodate the shifting timelines inherent in the disparate creative processes of human performance and coding.

Louise Lightfoot and Ibetombi Devi: the second Manipuri Dance Tour of Australia, 1957

Manipur, a small state in the North-Eastern India, is traditionally regarded in the Indian classics and epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata as the home of gandharvas (the celestial dancers). Manipuri is one of the eleven dance styles of India that have incorporated various techniques mentioned in such ancient treatises as the Natya Shastra and Bharatarnava and has been placed by Sangeet Natak Akademi within ‘a common heritage’ of Indian classical dance forms (shastriya nritya): Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam, Odissi, Sattriya, Chhau, Gaudiya Nritya, and Thang Ta. In the late-1950s Louise Lightfoot, the ‘Australian mother of Kathakali,’ visited Manipur to study and research different styles of Manipuri dance. There she met Ibetombi Devi, the daughter of a Manipuri Princess; she had started dancing at the age of four and by the age of twelve, she had become the only female dancer to perform the Meitei Pung Cholom on stage––a form of dance traditionally performed by Manipuri men accompanied by the beating of the pung (drum). In 1957, at the age of 20, Ibetombi became the first Manipuri female dancer to travel to Australia. This paper addresses Ibetombi Devi’s cross-cultural dance collaboration in Australia with her impresario, Louise Lightfoot, and the impression she and her co-dancer, Ananda Shivaram, made upon audiences.

Freelancing in the creative industries

Freelancing in the Creative Industries introduces creative artists from diverse arts industry areas to key policies, creative project concepts and strategic planning central to becoming a successful freelancer in the creative industries. The purpose of the book is to encourage exploration of the relevance of theoretical background and arts policy, case study experiences and the nexus between creative entrepreneurship and arts practice. The book is intended as a useful ongoing support to the practice-led research and applied business knowledge of the early career creative artist, and is also relevant to extending creative entrepreneurship of established industry creative artists.Utilising a diverse range of case studies from theatre/performance, dance, writing, visual arts, jewellery-making, photography and film, this book explores flexible creative vision and innovation blended with a capacity to move between projects and collaborations as key characteristics of the successful artist-as-freelancer.

Pragmatic dramaturgy: the creative management of limits in performance-making processes.

This thesis proposes the lens of pragmatic dramaturgy as a way of understanding the complex interactions between process and performance that define theatre practice, and investigates the ways in which performance making practice is shaped by encounters with a range of limits that impact the creative process.

The Movement between: Dance improvisation, witnessing and participatory performance.

This was a practice-based project which extended the possibilities for dance improvisation in performance. The project engaged questions about how live performance is constituted, about what the roles of the dancer and audience might entail, and about how a community of common experience can develop through a responsive exchange between its participants.