The Creative Reflective Practitioner explores research and practice through the eyes of people with a wholehearted commitment to creative work. It reveals what it means to be a reflective creative practitioner, whether working alone, in collaboration with others, with digital technology or doing research, and what we can learn from listening and observing closely. It gives the reader new insights into the fascinating challenge that having a reflective creative mindset can bring.
Creative reflective practice is seen through practitioner ideas and works which have informed the writing at every level, supported by research studies and historical accounts. The practitioners featured in this book represent a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary creative activities producing works in film, music, drama, dance and interactive installations. Their work is innovative, full of new ideas and exciting to experience, offering engagement and challenge for audiences and participants alike. Practitioner interviews give a direct sense of how they see creative practice from the inside. The ways in which these different situations of practice stimulate and facilitate reflection in practice and how we can learn from this are described. Variations of reflective practice are discussed that extend the original concepts proposed by Donald Schön, and a contemporary dimension is added through the role of the digital in creative reflective practice as a tool, mediator, medium and partner.
This book is relevant to people who wish to understand creativity and reflection in practice and how to learn from the practitioners themselves. This includes researchers in any discipline as well as students, arts professionals and practitioners such as artists, curators, designers, musicians, performers, producers and technologists.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Practitioner Portraits
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Reflection, Practice and the Creative Practitioner
2. Reflective Professional Practice
3. Reflective Creative Practice
Practitioner Interviews
4. Reflective Collaborative Practice
Practitioner Interviews
5. Digitally Amplified Reflective Practice
Practitioner Interviews
6. Reflection through Research
7. Learning from the Reflective Practitioner
Afterword
References
About the Author :
Dr Linda Candy lives in the Peak District of England. She was born in County Durham, England and grew up near Richmond, North Yorkshire and Adelaide, South Australia. She is a writer and researcher and is active in promoting awareness about interdisciplinary creative practice in art, technology and science. She has a BA (University of Adelaide), a Masters by Research (De Montfort University) and a PhD in Computer Science (Loughborough University). After working in academic research for many years, she now works freelance and is a co-director of ArtworksrActive (ArA) an independent consultancy in art and technology. She has written over 100 articles and edited several books about the creative process and the role of digital technology in interdisciplinary creative practice.
Review :
This book makes an important contribution to the literature of creative studies. Drawing on contemporary research in the field with particular insight into the value of recent digitally based practice, the author introduces a rigorous and illuminating analysis of the often enigmatic nature of the creative process, grounded in lively interviews with practising artists, scientists and technologists, providing a deeper understanding of the ways in which artworks, and indeed any other creative outcomes, evolve in all their complexity.
Siân Ede, author of ‘Art & Science’
Linda Candy shows us how the powerful paradigm of reflective practice can be used to understand creative thought in such diverse fields as science, engineering, art, design and music. Her interviews with distinguished practitioners provide a privileged glimpse into especially creative minds and her analysis reveals fascinatingly generic aspects of cognition. This book deserves to become a standard text in the field; there is every chance that it will.
Bryan Lawson (Emeritus Professor: Dip Arch (dist) (Oxford), Msc (dist), PhD (Aston), RIBA, Registered Architect.)
Linda Candy has created an incredible book on creativity. Her deep reflections on the nature of creativity will be of vital importance to anyone engaging with reflective creative practice. Through the voice of many significant artists and practitioners from a broad range of fields and disciplines, Candy weaves together a framework with which to understand their reflective practices, but more importantly how we, the readers, can benefit and enhance our own creativity.
Craig Vear, Professor of Digital Performance (Music), De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
