Research and Practice
Bridging Theory and Practice: A Study of Research Methodologies in Visual Communication Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hala Georges
In the University of Sharjah's Visual Communication Department, students embark on various creative projects, in which conducting research plays an essential role in their studies. This includes informational, contextual, and visual research in addition to data collection and primary research. The research methods are largely quantitative, fitting with the field's needs. Although practice-based research (and vice versa) is a young discipline, the research and creative practice in our field are deeply entwined that the students are required to become proficient researchers to succeed as designers and achieve effective outcomes. This paper highlights two specific courses as case studies, which cover diverse social, political, and historical topics, examining the dynamics of research methods and how they direct the learning and the creative process. It explores the interaction between research and practice, demonstrating how each influence and shapes the other. This will be supported by presenting examples of students’ work, showcasing their investigative and visual research processes leading up to ideation, and followed by the design and production stages. The objective is to highlight research methodologies suitable for creative subjects, particularly visual communication, and to examine the research approaches to creativity within this field.
Instances, Features, and Agencies: Proposing Epistemic Objects to Care for Knowledge Transfer in Artistic Research Training View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helena Elias, Jorge Marques, João Castro Silva, Fernando Moletta
Artistic Research (AR) is a practice of research that considers the production of the work of art as a core element, output, and an epistemic thing that may offer knowledge transfer. This communication gives an account of the Portuguese case, offering a selection of works that might be considered as epistemic objects while highlighting their potential for transferring knowledge to subsequent generations of artistic researchers. Since the third cycle implementation in Arts Higher Education Institutions (2009), academic repositories show more than eighty Ph.D. Theses with strong art practice components. Ph.D. thesis documents include features for the understanding of the work of art and process-oriented creative practices of the research carried. These offer iterations, emerging concepts, reconfigurations, unfolded instances, and meanings, potentially allowing further explorations to future researchers. Nevertheless, AR training still lacks resources, tools, and devices to create ways to care for this knowledge transfer. In this regard, the EMERGING project, funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) 022.06772.PTDC, seeks to understand features within the written document of a thesis as epistemic objects to draw a proposal of an academic artistic research collection (arC). The research offers a possible interpretation of the epistemic objects and a framework for the identification in such context. Examples are depicted and discussed regarding their potentiality as epistemic objects for AR training, namely as resources available to supervisors, PhD researchers, and other knowledge domain peers.
