Not Rocket Science: a roadmap for cultural R&D
Written by Hasan Bakhshi, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman
Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.
First, arts and culture are largely excluded from R&D by definitions based on its Science and Technology (S&T) origins. Second, the arts and cultural sector relies on a conception of creativity that mystifies too much of its work, preventing it from accessing valuable public resources.
Not confined to novel products or processes, arts and cultural innovation will yield altogether new ways in which arts and culture are embedded in the knowledge society and economy. So, for example, experimental development will trial new ways of engaging audiences, or explore new forms of collaboration between producers, and between them and consumers, through digital technologies.
It will investigate how arts and cultural organisations can re-imagine their relationship with private sector businesses, social enterprise and public service delivery. In short, arts and cultural R&D will expand the sources of cultural, commercial and public value.
And do please share your comments and feedback below
Dec 18, 2009
Great to see this overview of the rationale for arts organisations to engage in R&D. For a set of three case studies on organisations already engaged in this and a broader set of organisations who are acting on this aspiration to undertake R&D see http://proboscis.org.uk/500/cultural-snapshot-14/
Also see the resources at http://www.creatorproject.org – an EPSRC funded cluster of research projects into the interface between arts & research
Dec 18, 2009
Very stimulating and thought-provoking as always from this team! Like most culture-addicts I am very much in favour of developing new methodologies for supporting the case for more public spending on arts and culture, or – perhaps more realistically in current circumstances – protecting current funding levels. The paper takes us some way forward in suggesting a “roadmap” and calls for a dialogue on what should be in and out of consideration for “R&D” in arts and culture. My contribution is as follows.
My main concern is heuristic: how does one distinguish between the different categories of “knowledge” created across the sector and thus set limits to the claims being made for equivalence with S&T R&D?
I think that an R&D-type approach can certainly be applied, for example, to innovative audience-building as in the NT Live example, but not generally speaking to creative processes and artistic development. This is not a defence of “mystery”, but a matter of acknowledging the intrinsically different character of the “knowledge” that comes from the creative process, eg writing, workshop-ing and/or producing an opera, a process which I believe to be non-replicable and therefore not capable of generating “prototypes”. I believe such knowledge to be essentially different, because more subjective, from that derived from scientific experimentation constructed on Baconian principles, which does provide for replicability and the building of prototypes.
I also think that the exceptionality of “box-office risk” –: the unpredictability of the audience response – is a crucial issue and one which an “R&D”-type approach can only get to grips with subject to the severest qualification, as borne out by the history of Hollywood blockbusters.
I am therefore sceptical about the extent to which much artistic “knowledge” can be codified, other than at very high levels of abstraction.
MS
Dec 18, 2009
Interesting paper.
I note the call for arts and cultural R&D to produce outcomes that are “:explicit and capable of generalisation across the sector”:. The NT Live project is suited to such codifying of findings, arguably because it investigates the ‘:consumption’: of a creative product rather than its creation: it is surely the original creation of art and/or creative products that is more ‘:mysterious’: (and has typically eluded analysis) than a product’:s subsequent consumption or commercial exploitation. The development of a film screenplay for example is a complex creative process involving the dynamic interplay between writer, producer and sometimes director.
It would be a great challenge to put together a research initiative designed to produce explicit findings about this process.
Dec 21, 2009
Martin, Rob
I agree that the case for R&D is more straightforward in the case of consumption of, and audience-building for, art. I also agree that ‘knowledge’ that comes from the creative process is intrinsically different in character from other sources of knowledge. Where I am less convinced is that this is necessarily and in all cases non-replicable. The reason we call for a new dialogue between arts organisations, arts funders and researchers is to explore these boundaries. The OECD’s Frascati Manual spends countless pages exploring this boundary in the science & technology context – the arts deserve the same sophisticated degree of analysis. Absent this, there is a real risk that potentially important and socially valuable forms of experimental R&D are forgone because of lack of funding.
Whether something novel is also replicable depends, in the final analysis, on whether it is replicated. We must experiment! To say that all forms, and dimensions, of creative development are never replicable strikes me as an extreme position. It is the one that is taken implicitly by knowledge and innovation policymakers and explicitly in your comments. But it is a position which, I think, should be reconsidered.
While it is obvious that along a number of dimensions creative development is not replicable (Thom Yorke is, quite simply, a musical genius…), we can also think of dimensions where it is. So, for example, script development, where a number of successful scriptwriters claim to know what process works better than others (learnt the hard way)! And theatre-making where Michael Boyd and Vikki Heywood have described their ensemble model of collaboration as key to their success at the RSC. We have an industry of formal creative instruction in areas as wide-ranging as film, music and dance that are built on the idea of transferable insights. There are huge idiosyncratic risks in creative projects, it is true, but, despite the exceptionality of box office risk, we know that somebody knows something?…
All best,
Hasan
Dec 21, 2009
I really appreciate the engagement and debate. The issues involved are critical for both culture and economy. I am responding particularly to some points raised by Martin and Rob.
1. We love mystery. We are not trying to tear its lovely veil from the arts. And I believe, and most likely Hasan and Alan agree, that each of us has some mysterious, ineffable core of creativity.
2. We explicitly note in our paper that ‘Undoubtedly our understanding of human creativity and expression falls well short of understanding their sources fully, and some core of them, even in the sciences, will always remain mysterious.’
3. Because we love the arts, we only aim to increase their production and consumption. That is the aim of our economics and, if one may call it that, our ‘industrial policy’ for the arts, of which our proposals regarding R&D are such important elements.
4. We believe every human practice is a complex dialectic between relatively routine – codifiable, explicable, communicable – elements, and enigmatic ones. This goes for every-day cooking as much as it does for high science or art.
5. To put it in a different way, each science is a mix of the discipline of existing knowledge and techniques and the freedom of creativity. Creativity without the discipline will have a hard time being recognised as such. Duchamp could make art out of a potty but if it had been done by someone unschooled in the traditions which gave meaning to that act it would not have been recognised as art. To be creative with words one needs to know the language rather well. It’s the old structure-agency thing: the one does not exist without the other.
6. Our proposals for R&D, which needs to be codifiable or explicable, only seek to advance the codification of that which can be codified. We are not seeking futility.
7. What the ‘creative process’ produces is a product. It only becomes knowledge when it is codified. Knowledge is by definition that which is ascertained, shared, codified and can be passed on from one person to another.
8. In that sense we are not discussing two types of knowledge but knowledge and that which is unknown and that which may be unknowable.
9. Creativity is central to the advance of the arts as well as the sciences. A scientific discovery or invention is often the result of a hunch, an accident, or serendipity, just as the production of a work of art may be. It is this that prompts talk of scientific genius.
10. It is in the process of testing such intuitions that the ‘scientific experimentation constructed on Baconian principles, which … provide for replicability and the building of prototypes’ come in. At that point the inspiration of intuition has done its work and the perspiration of testing through ‘tried and tested’ methods comes in. This is no different from a dancer or choreographer thinking up some beautiful new movement. The movement having been thought up, the hours and hours of practice begin. They are necessary to ensure that this movement is produced, reliably, time after time, again and again, by one dancer after another. Or the painter, who achieved some wonderful effect with certain combinations of material and technique and then spends hours and hours trying to find how s/he can re-create it.
11. Thus, just as in the sciences, so in the arts, there is a lot of codified knowledge at work – whether in techniques of painting, producing certain lighting or sound effects, styles of writing, dance movements, etc. Not only can these be codified, the development of the arts depends on such codification. Musical notation greatly expanded the possibilities of producing and consuming music.
12. Not all aspects of ‘writing, workshop-ing and/or producing an opera’ are ‘non-replicable and therefore not capable of generating ‘prototypes’. Writing techniques are discussed in creative writing workshops, and producing operas has its routines – from those of singing, dancing and acting to stage-lighting, sound technology and costume designing. Cost is always a factor and therefore there is a – usually codifiable – search for better, faster, cheaper and more efficient ways of delivering all these things so that more people can enjoy them and more people can produce them. We just want them to do more of this.
There are other issues involved, in particular the critical need to widen the constituency of arts and cultural activity, but that might be the subject for another intervention.
Jan 05, 2010
Hasan (and Radhika & Alan)
I found this a stimulating and a serious intervention in the attempt to break down the notion that there are tough and established subjects that do R&D and somewhat flabby other ones that don’t and are creative in a more intuitive way. And I admire the piece for making it clear that it is people working in the arts and the creative economy who need to change the way they think and their discourses of creativity, not simply policy makers who refuse to understand them. Just a few points, then, that arise in my own mind..
The broad thrust of the argument is one with which I’m in agreement and, as I said, it is an important intervention. But you’re actually writing about a variety of kinds of research and that needs probing further. You exclude research that is limited in its goals to advocacy which seems fine, though we need to recognise that research with other goals might nonetheless be used for advocacy. But that isn’t a serious problem. More important is your implicit distinction between research (and I’m using research rather than R&D – I’ll return to this point) that is about audiences and reception; research that drives new opportunities to experience the arts and new ways of shaping that experience (your NT Live case); research that is about the societal and cultural implications of innovation, something that applies equally to all innovation; and, the one that is in many ways excluded, research that is a part of the practice that is the creative process.
It is the exclusion of the last of these that seems to me to take out of the equation the research that is parallel to basic (and often also applied) research in science and technology. I’m certainly not arguing with your inclusion of the other forms of research, and you’ve articulated a powerful argument for why those are important and need to be recognised and resourced, and their findings disseminated. While at the Arts & Humanities Research Board I was part of the process that constructed amongst academic practitioners in the arts an understanding that there was something called research that was not the same as creative activity tout court, but something that went beyond it. And that went beyond it in ways that come close to your own definition – we asked those bidding for research grants to set out, in exactly the same terms as those working in non-practice-based research in the arts and humanities, their research question, research methodology and identify who would benefit from the outcomes. The distinction between creative outputs that were the outcome of a research process and those that were the outcome of a different sort of process was a fundamental requirement for a research council in an area (the arts) where there were other funders of one form of the activity. We needed to draw lines – and worked with Arts Council England to agree where those lines should be drawn – and those lines seem to me to fit well those you set out. But you somehow preclude that research-based practice and concentrate on other areas.
I’m using the term research, you’re using the term R&D, and I’m not sure from the paper whether that is the source of the difference here. I doubt that it is, but your more precise term R&D might allow the distinction that you’re trying to draw and that I’m questioning. To be precise, that leads me to ask whether you’re not addressing a form of research that in some contexts and settings does constitute the fundamental practice of the arts.
By the way, I’m hesitant about your defence of ‘replicable’ in the face of Martin Smith’s point. And I’m not entirely sure that Radhika’s response deals entirely with it. The issue is not whether the lessons are transferable and others might see whether they could also work for them. It is that the true sense of scientific replicability is that one must be able to recreate the same experiment with the same components acting or being activated in the same way, and that that must produce the same results each time that it is done. If one cannot recreate those experiments and outcomes, then in scientific (Popperian) terms the test of replicability has not been met. I really don’t think that we should require that for R&D in the arts and culture, above all because we do not want to create identical circumstances.
Geoff
Jan 05, 2010
From my perspective, as an arts manager, what I take away from this report is the ‘call to action’ to the sector to work more collaboratively to try and find solutions to some of the challenges that we are facing through a more systematic approach to research.
Whether or not (and perhaps especially if not!) we are able to access new resources to do this as the paper suggests we should – a greater openness about what we learn from attempts to innovate would be very welcome. I understand some of the comments above about the difficulty of replicating models across different organisations (and artforms), but I think we are too quick to see ourselves as special and unique in the arts sector when in reality there is much we can learn from other artforms and other sectors.
I also welcome the recommendation that arts and cultural organisations should be encouraged to see R&D as integral to their core mission – particularly in relation to business model. Whether funders, other stakeholders, and trustees, are willing to see resources invested in this area remains to be seen – but this article makes a compelling case for why it’s essential.
Jan 07, 2010
These are excellent points, Geoff. If I could take each in turn:
First, I agree that motivation is a key factor in determining what is and what is not R&D (in fact, this is also stressed in the S&T-focused Frascati Manual). Research whose goal is advocacy, rather than learning, should not be classified as R&D. But research motivated by learning, but which is also then used for advocacy purposes, can be.
Second, you are right that we are talking about three distinct types of knowledge activity in the paper: knowledge about how the arts engage with the public; knowledge about how the arts engage with aspects of our social wellbeing (education, health etc), and knowledge about art and artmaking itself (which if I understand correctly is what you describe as ‘research that is a part of the practice that is the creative process’). All three are intimately tied in today’s society as Radhika often points out to me.
The last of the three knowledge activities – research that is a part of the practice that is the creative process – is certainly the most controversial of the three. Our argument is not that such knowledge activities are not valuable; rather, to meet the minimal criteria set out by Frascati the research needs to be made explicit (codifiable in the somewhat ugly language of innovation studies) and transferable if it is to justify public funding on the grounds that it is contributing to knowledge as R&D. If there are examples of such research by arts and cultural organisations that we missed in the paper we would certainly want to hear about them and reflect them as we revise it.
Importantly, I do think the transferability criterion we propose is intimately tied to replicability in Popper’s terms. First let me say that many artistic and creative experiments are clearly by definition unique, and it makes little sense to talk of them being replicable under identical circumstances. But knowledge that is created in these cases cannot, in our view, be recognised as R&D (even if it is, to repeat, valuable on other grounds). However our suggestion is also that some artistic and creative experiments are in fact replicable in the sense above and for too long have been ignored as R&D on the grounds that only scientific knowledge processes meet this criterion. As a result, I would argue, valuable opportunities for learning in the arts and cultural sector are forgone for lack of public recognition that they are R&D.
I accept that this argument is far from proven. The issue of what artistic and creative activity constitutes basic research (and therefore R&D) and what does not, is highly complex, and desperately under-researched. It would be one of the priorities for the dialogue we call for between arts leaders, research councils and R&D policymakers.
All best,
Hasan
Jan 13, 2010
interesting conversation…
I sense you are restricting your ‘arts and culture categories’ to public-funded arts and culture and then further restricting yourself to social outcomes. Would the analysis be different for a creative process that was not publicly-funded and for outcomes were not, at the time, seen as socially beneficial? Would film development be admitted as R&D in your terms if its sole outcome was a more successful film? Or if film people learned more about the film-making process? Or if others outside the film industry learned something (I am thinking of Nate Wittasek’s pick-up of Stephen Regelous’ Massive software developed for Lord of the Rings and now used by Ove Arup, etc)?
On the unique/replicated dichotomy: surely, all artists learn by looking at each other’s work; but no artist works to help others.
John
Jan 31, 2010
John, our R&D argument generalises to all arts and cultural organisations (though in the paper we argue that the majority of these actually produce a mixture of market and public value, that is they operate in ‘quasi-markets’). In our view the crucial feature that distinguishes R&D from other forms of knowledge process is that the knowledge is made explicit and capable of transfer. If artists choose not to open it up for transfer (say, because the outcomes of the R&D are kept private) it should not in our view be publicly funded. So, film development can be admitted as R&D even if its sole outcome is a more successful film, as long as the knowledge is made explicit and is capable of transfer. In the science and technology context there is of course a long tradition of public R&D sitting alongside business R&D. The same should apply in the cultural and creative sector.
All best
Hasan
Feb 05, 2010
The key question here concerns the status of aesthetic knowledge – what Geoff calls the practice of the creative process. The introduction of replicability, codification, transferability relates to a mode of knowledge which we might call scientific – the generalization of the particular, its subsumption under universal, abstract laws. This is precisely the kind of knowledge aesthetics rejects or distinguishes itself from. In your argument audience engagement and wider social impact might qualify for R&D funding because they are codifiable and transferable. But they are so in so far as they are not about the work of art itself. So too certain skills are codifiable and transferable – which is why we have education and training. But this is not about the production of art itself – because they are not transferable in the way stated. Which is fine – R&D for audience engagement and social impact. But as Geoff says, this is like restricting science R&D to the popularisation of science or its role in society. A recent paper in the MMM series calls R&D the investment in new art, in experiment, in risk taking – the heart of the artistic project. But by using this kind of innovation literature model you rule this out as ineligible. And so too, therefore, the whole approach to practice based projects on which much academic funding of art based projects are based. In short; what we have here is an attempt – for reasons unknown – to bring art under a knowledge rubric which is has always resisted.