Creative conservation and Balinese traditional landscape : scenarios for eco city concepts and culturally sensitive tourism development

Bali is internationally recognized as an island possessing a beautiful natural landscape as well as a unique culture. The natural qualities of its mountains, lakes, rivers, rice terrace fields with subak irrigation make Bali an important tourism destination. Cultural Tourism is integral in Bali’s tourism industry providing the basic capital for development1. The social condition of this society that is strongly characterized by religious beliefs, and its nature and ecology also supports this. The conservation and maintenance of this traditional landscape is often forgotten because of government agendas to implement cultural city programs aimed at encouraging tourism development. Despite this, the government is now supporting the program of ‘Bali toward Garden Island’, which aims to sustain the physical and cultural environment of the island towards conservation of its landscape. The implementation of this program includes attention to universal, societal and cultural values as unity indicators, of which the landscape planning of the Balinese characteristics and traditions cannot be separated. Landscape planning is integral in this initiative of character defining the region.

Globalisation is increasingly becoming one of the most important discussions amongst the Balinese people. It has become a national concern about the changes implicating Bali’s environment. Urbanisation, population growth, ribbon development, migration and consumption of energy are important imperatives and necessary evils for growing cities. These imperatives are creating the sprawl of building planning, development information, loss of open spaces, as well as the decline of the identity of cities. Places such as Denpasar City are struggling with increasing population at a rate of 1.94% per year that is causing increase in housing and public facilities demanded by both residents and ex-patriates. Thus land associated with the city has been lost to the rapid development of this cultural landscape.

This paper examines the Balinese traditional landscape and its role in encouraging tourism development that based on the Balinese culture and its ecology. The paper focuses on the planning of city landscape appearance characteristics and seeks to test and adopt the terms ‘creative conservation’ and ‘eco city concept’. By conserving the most important philosophy of the Balinese Tri Hita Karana Concept will better inform all aspects of city development in Bali. This study seeks to offer guidance for the legitimate use of landscape planning especially for city development in Bali.

The online identity : towards a hermeneutic phenomenological approach

In order to better understand how artists working in countercultural or ‘fringe’ creative practice use social media to create online persona I am using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to investigate the lived experience of both online and offline persona creation by tattoo artists, street artists, craftivists, and slam poets. The use of phenomenology to investigate artists’ lived experience is particularly appropriate, as ‘artists are involved in giving shape to their lived experience, the products of art are, in a sense, lived experienced transformed into transcended configurations’ (Van Manen 2006: 74). This paper will outline the methodological underpinnings of this project, using these underpinnings to explore the benefits offered by phenomenology to internet studies.

Understanding how people use online social media sites to construct personas can benefit greatly from understanding the lived experience of those who use these technologies, the decisions they make in persona construction, and the online/offline, public/private continuums. A phenomenological approach ‘seeks to revel and richly portray the nature of human phenomena and the experiences of those who live through them’ (Grace & Ajjawi 2010: 197) and offers both the researchers and the participants a way to interrogate and interpret the experience of constructing online personas. A phenomenological approach allows for ‘an intimate awareness and deep understanding’ (Saldana, Leavy & Bertvas 2011: 8) of the experience of persona construction in online and offline spaces, and could equally be used to interrogate other aspects of internet use. 

Phenomenology and the online : the importance of studying experience

 Phenomenological research into the online experience offers real value to Internet Studies and Digital Humanities scholars for three key reasons. Firstly, as an explicitly qualitative approach, it offers a way to gain insights into the experience of going online that are not identified by those who study behaviour alone. Secondly, as phenomenological studies focus on the individual rather than the collective, the resulting small sample size means that the investment required in terms of time spent with participants is minimised. Finally, the interpretation that emerges through the phenomenological research process produces categorisations that could form the basis on which larger scale, Big Data, quantitative research projects could be built.
This paper will explore the above ideas through the lens of my doctoral research, which uses hermeneutic phenomenology to investigate the experience of persona construction by artists on the fringes of the traditional art world, specifically craftivists, tattoo artists, street artists, and performance poets. By incorporating the interpretive categorisations that have come from my early discussions, I will demonstrate the strength of a phenomenological approach to investigating the experience of using the world and social media to present the self to the world.

A/r/tography and place ontology

Through lived experience, I learn how my education, life habits, changing abodes, and different career trajectories are intertwined with my identity and place. A/r/tography is a way of exploring these interconnections through reflexive practice as a visual artist, creative arts therapist, art educator, and researcher. Knowledge emerges from contemplating my artistic practice, my art education, the drawings of clients who participate in my creative art therapy sessions, and the work of students who attend my art classes, from which I contemplate early art images as shapes or figurative forms floating on the page. This paper asserts that creative art therapists are able to use the creative-artistic processes of living inquiry found in a/r/tography to make connections between identity and place.

Salote the artist

A documentary trailer based on video installation artist Salote Tawale that explores the artist as celebrity by engaging with the mythologies of the studio and celebrated artists created over the last 200 years.

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 geeks? Investigating creativity support systems for information technology students

This study investigated creativity and what factors can be conducive to a creative educational milieu. The results of this study highlighted the diverse nature of creativity, and substantiated the need for an audience specific ‘Creativity Support System’. An outcome was a model of creative needs specific for an educational setting

Why do you write? Creative writing and the reflective teacher

Whether we write creatively or academically (or both) it takes time to understand the reasons why we ‘want’ to write, and the more we write the more we fully begin to appreciate why we write and why we have to write in the first place. From the age of nine, I kept a diary and now, 31 years later, I’m still writing down thoughts, opinions, feelings and aspirations. Nearly every day, I actively participate in recording my reflections. These reflections are part of an academic writing ritual that fuels research ideas and potential narratives associated with reflective teaching practices. I have discovered that the daily practice of imagining and writing compared to academic research and writing has more similarities than differences. Other creative writers who operate in higher education as learning and teaching academics have also taken note of ‘the similarity between the processes of writing fiction, and writing learning texts, not the contrasts’ (McVey, 2008, p. 290, emphasis). More specifically, I have come to realise that strengthening one’s use of the imagination via self-confessional writing exercises is a central ingredient in order to fulfill a well-rounded learning and teaching career.