The Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice

Introduction

The Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice (CRICP) is founded on a critical presence that aims to traverse the dominant disciplines of art, design and architecture while simultaneously enabling the margins of different practices to co-exist.  The Centre has artists who regularly exhibit their work in major biennales and international galleries across Asia, Americas and Europe as well as showing their work in non-gallery spaces. Similarly the Centre has designers who continue to win major international design awards, and who have a depth of experience of taking their ideas from concept through to production and patent. Subject areas come together through critical and constructive debate by exploring and defining their activity in conceptual and in practical terms within interdisciplinary contexts.

The central ethos of the Centre for Research is to enable academic staff to actively locate their professional practice interests within their teaching. A student can therefore expect to receive the highest quality of teaching, which is founded upon artists, designers, historians and critical theorists operating within international and world leading arenas.

CRICP structure  

Research Groups and Research Forums

The Centre for Research is organised as an interdisciplinary matrix that includes four overarching Research Groups. Each Research Group contains two forums to encourage discipline specific debates, each forum offers an open investigatory approach, encouraging critical debate and shared contexts, subsequently leading to new insights, dialogue and diverse aesthetic encounters. The Research Groups and Forums are purposeful in this intent, testing both new methodologies and models of disciplined practice.

Research Groups:

Sustainability and Ecology in Creative Practices 

• Design Life cycle Management Research Forum
• Architecture and Carbon Footprint Research Forum
   

Digital Media: Materiality and Performativity in Creative Practices

• Digital Media and Photography Research Forum
• Design Product and User Interface Research Forum
   

Creative Knowledge and Cultural Economies

• Culture and Criticality Research Forum
• Graphic and Marketing Research Forum
      

Constructed Environments: Space and Place

• Fashion and Textile Art Research Forum
• Sculpture and Installation Art Research Forum

The Research Groups are broadly titled to facilitate a pro-active response to both complex cultural arenas and global grand challenges. Conference, symposium and debates within the Groups focus on the nature, role and application of creative practice within changing social, industrial and educational contexts.

For the purpose of the Research Groups a creative practitioner is defined as a thinker, writer, maker, researcher and educator. Artists, designers, cultural theorists and creative practitioners have long been concerned with placing their work and practices in relation to advancing their career, arguably to continue making new work that has currency within society and the highest levels of international professional practice as well as informing teaching and academic excellence. All postgraduate students are invited to join a relevant Research Group. Across the Centre we currently have over thirty postgraduate students who continue to enjoy the benefits of working and studying alongside world leading creative practitioners.