Previous work has shown that in practice-led research (Candy, 2006; Mäkelä, 2007; Smith & Dean, 2009), the practitioner/researcher can explore research problems through his own practice and created artefacts. According to Charmaz (2006), this approach is concerned with the nature of practice in order to gain new knowledge. Thus, a practitioner’s activity in the context of academic research can generate new knowledge. Three main elements of the practice-led approach can contribute to this new knowledge: the practitioner’s expertise, creative processes, and the artefact created to be used in the research.
The primary focus of this method is to advance knowledge about practice or operational significance within that practice. Compared to other practice-related research, the results of practice-led research may be in the form of a text description, often without the inclusion of the creative outcome (Candy, 2006). Practice is an integral part of this method and falls within the general area of action research (Candy, 2006; McNiff, 1998). The body of work produced by practice-led research is not the same as practice-based research, as the latter includes aesthetic or artistic works, but rather, uses artefacts as the material for investigating new processes within the practice (Smith & Dean, 2009). The creative process and the artefact are inseparable in practice-
led research. While the artefact serves as a testing object for an assumptive theory or a method for collecting and preserving information, the making of the artefact drives the direction of the research process (Candy, 2006; Mäkelä, 2007). According to Scrivener & Chapman (2004), the understanding of creative processes during artefact creation and the artefact itself also represent a body of knowledge.
4.3.1 Practice-led Research in Other Disciplines
The practice-led research method is not new. Fields such as psychology and counselling, health care, pharmacology, nursing and education all adopted this type of research much earlier than art and design (Green, 2007; Houser & Bokovoy, 2006). Most definitions of practice-led research in these fields share similar characteristics as: “science-based inquiry that occurs in practice setting…, systematic reflection on the practice experience, and laboratory analysis – to the extent that such inquiry produces generalizable knowledge to improve the outcomes of practice or to inform policy making” (Potter, et al., 2006, p. 3).
While experimental research focuses on testing hypotheses, practice-led research focuses on how the practice operates in its real-life settings, positioning the practitioner researcher as a critical thinker (Houser & Bokovoy, 2006).
The reason we employed a practice-led approach is due to its potential to leverage creative artefacts as core research outputs (Biggs, 2007). Designers and artists show an increased ability to give form to design or artefact ideas through sketching and drawing (Goel, 1995). The goal in using the practice-led method in this research is to explore ways of creating visual analogies that are capable of supporting the incubation effect in the problem solving process, and this approach seems the most appropriate. In contrast to a practice-based method where the artwork is considered the key academic contribution, here, the practitioner’s process and created artefact helps the scientific inquiry into how visual analogies for problem solving should be constructed.
The method for generating and revising the visual analogies was iterative. It started with an initial exploration to understand the problem, and was followed by generating, creating and revising the visual analogies. The practice-led method allows the practitioner to explore different qualities or elements of the visual analogies which help uncover the “possible” variables and relationships between them that may be studied quantitatively (Kroll, Neri, & Miller, 2005). The practice of generating artefacts
provides an opportunity to manipulate such elements in different formats such as 2D, 3D, or animation.
4.3.2 Documentation
While some previous work has shown that practical knowledge and artefacts may be communicated through writing (Candy, 2006; Klein, 2010), other scholars (Goel, 1995; Mäkelä, 2007; Niedderer & Roworth-Stokes, 2007) have argued that knowledge is embodied in the artwork/artefact itself. We argue for the value of the former, and the documentation process in the practice-led research approach followed in this thesis consisted of three key activities: 1) generation of visual analogies consisting of ideation, sketching and developing complete illustrations or animations, 2) capture of and reflection on the process of generating visual analogies, 3) expert selection of the most promising analogies to be revised, refined, and tested.
4.3.2.1 Diary Method for Capturing the Generation of Visual Analogies and for Reflecting on this Generation Process
We employed diary methods for collecting data on the researcher’s/artist’s process of generating visual analogies. From the beginning of this research, I was meticulous in documenting each action in the visual analogy development process.
The first notes were related to the earliest stage of designing visual analogies, in particular, to the mental phase, conceptual planning and the intended use of mechanisms that initialise the flow of the design process. These notes were taken no later than the end of the day in which the new visual analogies were conceptualised. Reading and reflecting on these notes helped us to identify the problems and the relevant features of visual analogies, which could be manipulated and could subsequently impact on the success rate for solving these problems. Also, reading and the analogy-making process in the generation stage of visual analogies for problem solving captured in these diaries were the main drivers of the direction of this research.
These diaries are included in the materials/stimuli subsection of the method section for each experiment along with the produced sketches.
The second types of notes consisted of structured questions (Appendix 14-12) for which the researcher/artist completed a diary entry of each developed sketch of a visual
analogy. The questions were informed by the literature on creative processes. The diaries were completed with written statements on the practitioner’s first-person experience of his creative process, notes on the evaluation process, as well as ideas, feelings, or preferences for shapes or forms (e.g., Appendix 14-13).
Post hoc diary entries were used, as soon as possible after a sketch was generated (i.e., no later than an hour), in order to avoid the overshadowing effect (Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993) of completing the diary during the sketching process. Thus, this approach facilitated reflection-on-action rather than reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983). The data gathered through this diary method consisted of over 22 entries, and over 10,000 words. The analysis of this data was used to shed light on how the visual analogy concepts were generated.
For analysis of data collected using this method, we used “HyperRESEARCH” (ResearchWare, Inc., 1997-2012) software for coding the text in the notes and preparing the data for qualitative analysis; in addition, a theoretical sampling technique was used to generate categories of collected data (Charmaz, 2006). Theoretical sampling narrows down the emerging categories, and by filling out the properties of a category, the researcher can create analytic definitions and rules for that category, describe and explain it, and specify the links and relationships between other categories and subcategories.
In order to account for my own identity in the description and analysis of my reflection- on-action practice, I need to make explicit my own expertise and values through a brief self-identity audit (Tracy, 2012). I have a background in fine arts in the areas of movie stage design, painting, graphics and computer arts, and have worked as an artist painter (Luchian, 2012) for over 30 years, and as an art educator in US higher education for over 14 years.
4.3.2.2 Expert Selection of Most Promising Analogies
Once a reasonably sized pool of visual analogies was generated, an expert evaluation method was employed (described in detail in the Preselecting Analogical Concepts of the Stimuli subsection in the Materials sections for each experiment) to select the most promising visual analogies for further development and testing through experimental studies. Such a selection method was followed by a refining the selected analogies stage and a pilot study to test how the identified analogies are perceived by a small group of participants.