Community uses of co-creative media. Digital storytelling and Co-creative Media : The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

This report describes a dynamic ‘Co-creative Media System’ that is emerging in the social space bounded by the following institutional pillars: • major cultural institutions (including screen culture agencies, libraries, museums, galleries and public service broadcasters) • the Community Arts and Cultural Development sector (historically supported through various programs of the Australia Council for the Arts) • the community broadcasting sector • the Indigenous media sector, and • the higher education sector. It illustrates how this system activates the immense creative potential of the Australian population through the ongoing development and application of participatory storytelling methods and media.

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.

Community uses of co-creative media digital storytelling and co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

How is creative expression and communication extended among whole populations? What is the social and cultural value of this activity? What roles do formal agencies, community-based organisations and content producer networks play? Specifically, how do participatory media and arts projects and networks contribute to building this capacity in the contemporary communications environment? The latest issue of CSJ article in a special issue on “Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons” edited by Burcu Simsek.

Narrative as a tool for critical reflective practice in the creative industries

This paper explores the efficacy of narrative in reflective practice across a range of creative disciplines. As practitioners within the creative industries the authors internalise experience and re-contextualise it as stories, designs, music videos, fiction and non-fiction films and dance. They are uniquely placed to examine narrative in critical reflection through the prism of their creative practice and in so doing offer insights into reconceptualising professional practice. The authors demonstrate how engagement with and reflection on and in their stories enables wider reflection. Their purpose in reflection is not just to learn from mistakes but to develop an epistemology of practice that enables them to apply rigorous academic inquiry to articulate their tacit professional knowledge and establish new methods for dealing with uncertainty in creative practice research.

Discovering hidden structures in molecular data using a Bayesian partition model approach

Advancements in the analysis techniques have led to a rapid accumulation of biological data in databases. Such data often are in the form of sequences of observations, examples including DNA sequences and amino acid sequences of proteins. The scale and quality of the data give promises of answering various biologically relevant questions in more detail than what has been possible before. For example, one may wish to identify areas in an amino acid sequence, which are important for the function of the corresponding protein, or investigate how characteristics on the level of DNA sequence affect the adaptation of a bacterial species to its environment. Many of the interesting questions are intimately associated with the understanding of the evolutionary relationships among the items under consideration. The aim of this work is to develop novel statistical models and computational techniques to meet with the challenge of deriving meaning from the increasing amounts of data. Our main concern is on modeling the evolutionary relationships based on the observed molecular data. We operate within a Bayesian statistical framework, which allows a probabilistic quantification of the uncertainties related to a particular solution. As the basis of our modeling approach we utilize a partition model, which is used to describe the structure of data by appropriately dividing the data items into clusters of related items. Generalizations and modifications of the partition model are developed and applied to various problems. Large-scale data sets provide also a computational challenge. The models used to describe the data must be realistic enough to capture the essential features of the current modeling task but, at the same time, simple enough to make it possible to carry out the inference in practice. The partition model fulfills these two requirements. The problem-specific features can be taken into account by modifying the prior probability distributions of the model parameters. The computational efficiency stems from the ability to integrate out the parameters of the partition model analytically, which enables the use of efficient stochastic search algorithms.

The creative suburb: A study in creative reflective practice

As long as population growth continues, policies for urban consolidation closer to city centres fail, and there is land available, Australians will continue to build in new Greenfield suburbs. However, the 50-year legacy of the homogeneous one-size-fits-all approach to suburbia beyond the sticks and sometimes hours away from where one can find a job, is proving unsustainable, the commute alone a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. The ‘creative suburb’ was inspired by the possibility to create new, innovative and entrepreneurial suburbs, places which are more self-sufficient and self-contained than the ‘product’ perpetuated down under even today. The ‘creative suburb’ draws on significant primary research with suburban home-based creative industries workers, vernacular architecture, and town planning in the Toowoomba region, in the state of Queensland, Australia, as inspiration for a series of new building and urban designs available for innovators operating in new suburban greenfield situations in Queensland and possibly further a field. This paper considers the role ‘creative reflective practice’ played in the process of developing the building and urban designs presented in a book and showcased in a building as creative outputs of this practice-led and property development industry embedded inquiry.

Making it "click": collaborative perceptions of creative practice in art education /

Making it "Click": Collaborative Perceptions ofCreative Practice in Art Education examined the teaching practice of 6 art educators who conducted their work through the Niagara Falls Art Gallery's (NFAG) in-schools and Children's Museum programmes. These community resources service the elementary levels of participatory Public, Catholic and French schools in the Niagara Peninsula. The goal of this research was to find ways in which these teachers could explore their creative potential as art educators. The "click," a term introduced by participants indicating the coming together of all positive factors towards creativity, became the central theme behind this study. Research revealed that the effective creative process was not merely a singular phase, but rather a series of 4 processes: 1 , gathering knowledge; 2, intuitive and experiential; 3, the informal presentation of information in which creativity as a process was explored; and 4, formal presentation that took the analysis of information to a deeper, holistic level. To examine the ways in which experience and knowledge could be shared and brought together through a collaborative process, this study employed data collection that used literature research, interviews, focus group discussions, and personal journal entries. Follow-up discussions that assessed the effectiveness of action research, took place VA months after the initial meetings. It is hoped that this study might assist in creative educational practices, for myself as a member of the NFAG teaching team, for colleagues in the art programmes, art educators, and other teachers in the broader disciplines of education.

Design for design: support for creative practice in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) in design

This paper describes a novel methodology for observing and analysing collaborative design by using the concepts of cognitive dimensions related to concept-based misfit analysis. The study aims at gaining an insight into support for creative practice of graphical communication in collaborative design processes of designers while sketching within a shared white board and audio conferencing environment. Empirical data on design processes have been obtained from observation of groups of student designers solving an interior space-planning problem of a lounge-diner in a shared virtual environment. The results of the study provide recommendations for the design and development of interactive systems to support such collaborative design activities.

The non-verbal and the verbal: expanding awareness of practice-led research in creative writings

This paper takes up the concept of practice-led research: research (or the production and performance of knowledge) that is implicit within practice – in this case creative arts practice and more specifically, creative writing practice. Does practice-led research offer new possibilities for recognition of contributions to research by writers? This exploration of creative practice and research stretches out tendrils between creative writing and other art forms. What may the predominantly non-verbal creative arts disciplines offer creative writing in terms of exploring modes of knowledge production and performance?

The effects of task complexity and practice on dual-task interference in visuospatial working memory

Although the n-back task has been widely applied to neuroimagery investigations of working memory (WM), the role of practice effects on behavioural performance of this task has not yet been investigated. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of task complexity and familiarity on the n-back task. Seventy-seven participants (39 male, 38 female) completed a visuospatial n-back task four times, twice in two testing sessions separated by a week. Participants were required to remember either the first, second or third (n-back) most recent letter positions in a continuous sequence and to indicate whether the current item matched or did not match the remembered position. A control task, with no working memory requirements required participants to match to a predetermined stimulus position. In both testing sessions, reaction time (RT) and error rate increased with increasing WM load. An exponential slope for RTs in the first session indicated dual-task interference at the 3-back level. However, a linear slope in the second session indicated a reduction of dual-task interference. Attenuation of interference in the second session suggested a reduction in executive demands of the task with practice. This suggested that practice effects occur within the n-back ask and need to be controlled for in future neuroimagery research using the task.

Seismic performance of brick infilled RC frame structures in low and medium rise buildings in Bhutan

The construction of reinforced concrete buildings with unreinforced infill is common practice even in seismically active country such as Bhutan, which is located in high seismic region of Eastern Himalaya. All buildings constructed prior 1998 were constructed without seismic provisions while those constructed after this period adopted seismic codes of neighbouring country, India. However, the codes have limited information on the design of infilled structures besides having differences in architectural requirements which may compound the structural problems. Although the influence of infill on the reinforced concrete framed structures is known, the present seismic codes do not consider it due to the lack of sufficient information. Time history analyses were performed to study the influence of infill on the performance of concrete framed structures. Important parameters were considered and the results presented in a manner that can be used by practitioners. The results show that the influence of infill on the structural performance is significant. The structural responses such as fundamental period, roof displacement, inter-storey drift ratio, stresses in infill wall and structural member forces of beams and column generally reduce, with incorporation of infill wall. The structures designed and constructed with or without seismic provision perform in a similar manner if the infills of high strength are used.

Embedded engagements : the challenge of creative practice research to the humanities

This article explores the opportunities and challenges surrounding a viable cross-disciplinary engagement between the Humanities disciplines and the Creative Practice disciplines within the innovative context of the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. This will involve a charting of the intersection of the emerging field of creative practice-led research with various disciplines in the Humanities such as cultural studies. The potential for a reciprocal, transformative process in these creative fields will be addressed. Several examples of postgraduate students’ research will be foregrounded as case studies of the issues involved in fostering a genuine cultural critique both within and through creative practice. Some observers may argue that the research higher degree creative practitioner in effect looks outward from the symbolic material forms being created, in search of an interpretative paradigm, thereby trawling the Humanities for a theory. Several current debates within the postgraduate research arena regarding the balance between the theoretical exegesis and the creative work (e.g. performance, drama, dance, visual art, creative writing, film and screen production, music, interactive media etc) will also be critically examined.