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Dear Philippe and Fil, The label “research-creation” seems in some way to focus on the forms of research identified as 1) practice based research, 2) practice led research, 3) artistic research, and 4) the outlier “practice as research” position. As Philippe notes, the venture cuts across all fields that are “project-based, or action-based, or practise-based.” It doesn’t necessarily seem to claim that these are the only these fields involving creativity. Nevertheless, I can see the problem that Fil raises. Society ascribes the properties of creativity to the arts, to architecture and design, as well as to those fields in what is sometimes labelled as the creative industries. These fields represent the qualities and properties of creativity for the societies they serve. It does not follow from this that the individuals in these fields are actually more creative than individuals in other fields. I argue for notions of creativity as a human quality that we find among the best practitioners of most professions, and that we see creativity distributed in fairly equal proportions across all fields. That involves not only engineering, but nearly any field. At a meeting of Australian deans on the subject of research, I heard one dean argue for the validity of “creative research outputs” on the basis that “art and design carry our culture.” It seems to me that all fields of human activity “carry our culture.” At least that is what the social and behavioral sciences tell us. A great deal of the contemporary debate involving design research suggests that design is somehow different to other research fields — this may be true to the degree that mathematics differs to physics, physics differs to musicology, and musicology differs to economics. But the actual practice of any field at the highest level involves creation and creativity. Nearly any domain may be creative in its practice when a creative practitioner does there work. And the vast majority of practitioners in most fields — including art, design, and architecture — engage in traditional practice that replicates the earlier work of respected practitioners in each field while adapting to and replication modest and incremental innovations. That’s true of engineers and physicists, and it is equally true of artists, musicians, and designers. What I like about the survey and the underlying project is that they are gathering empirical data on issues that have mostly been the subject of speculative and often insubstantial debate. Yours, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/ Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------