Design and creative technologies, creative and cultural industries, and artistic practices, are all characterised by the significance of material considerations in the emergent processes of experimentation, development, application and production. Research in these areas is usually practice-based or practice-led and the rapidly growing level of practice-led postgraduate research courses world-wide has led to an exciting new wave of contemporary academic interest in appropriate research approaches for this type of work.
This paper deals with current methodological imperatives in the fields of design and creative practice. This is an evolving field of academic investigation, dependent on a shared understanding and critique of the range and significance of practice-based approaches and methods that are currently being differentiated in the creative disciplines. The recently established AUT University ‘Material Thinking’ initiative is a challenge to all researchers in art and design disciplines to examine their conceptual approaches toward research and scholarship, including ways of learning, levels of engagement, integration and discovery. A focus on material thinking may open research horizons beyond the notion of practice as a derivative of theory, and contribute to good practices at postgraduate level, enhanced collaborative opportunities, and ultimately to a robust research discipline.
For this development to take place, we need to take a bold, professional position in relation to the identification, naming and articulation of the generative and working practices that underpin the work and the methodological approaches that are developed in the studio. Attention must be directed to careful comparisons and assessment of these approaches and to the discovery of relationships between these approaches and the various philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of practice-led projects.