Creative Industries

My colleague Justin Brow is next; he's been involved in the development of Sticky.net.au and is a researcher in the QUT Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation (iCi). He begins with a brief introduction to the economic role of the creative industries - some 140,000 people are working directly in the CI in Australia, but the focus of CI analysis is now shifting from the production of creative outputs themselves to creative industries' input into other industries; some 160,000 people in Australia work in creative occupations within other industries. A further 150,000 people work in managerial and administrative roles related to the CI, establishing a 'creative trident' of occupations and contributing some $21billion to Australian GDP (this is set to double in the coming years).

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

No, I'm not leaving QUT - but today is the first day of the new semester, and it's the first time in five years that I'm not acting as unit coordinator for KKB018 Creative Industries, one of the Creative Industries Faculty's undergraduate core units. KKB018 was the unit that I was originally employed to develop - and as far as I know, it was the first mainstream undergraduate unit (course, subject - choose whatever terminology applies in your neck of the woods) world-wide to introduce students to the creative industries. I've now finally passed on responsibility for the unit to my esteemed colleague John Banks - with my role as conference chair for AoIR 2006 and my involvement in various major research projects it simply was no longer feasible to coordinate such a large unit as well. So, today I say goodbye, with a quiet sigh of relief after what's been a long and occasionally rocky road.

As I arrived back in Brisbane, there was good news relating to my research work waiting for me here. Some time ago, we'd put in a proposal for a Linkage grant project to the Australian Research Council - and after a considerable waiting period, Linkage outcomes were finally announced a couple of weeks ago. So, I'm happy to report that our participatory news project has finally received the go-ahead (and the $380,000 of funding over four years attached to it) from the ARC. This is a project for which I'll be a co-Chief Investigator with my QUT colleagues Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham - and our industry partners are SBS, National Forum, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. I'm particularly looking forward to working with SBS on this, who (in addition to being the Australian home of football) are also one of the most innovative and responsible broadcast organisations in Australia.

Tartu, Estonia
Well, after a brief few days visiting family in Germany we've now made it to the 100,000-strong university city of Tartu in southeastern Estonia (the country's second-largest city). I'm here for the CATaC 2006 (or Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication) conference, which will take place here over the next three days. This is actually my second time here in Estonia - ISEA2004 was in Tallinn, and the presence of such conferences is a clear sign of the keen interest of the Estonian university and government sector in embracing technological and intellectual advances. By now Estonia is one of the best-connected countries of the world, with WiFi hotspots virtually everywhere in the major centres.

Dresden
The next session is on creative commons-related issues; Mark Latonero is the first speaker. He notes that Tim Berners-Lee suggests that the whole added value of the Internet is serendipitous re-use. The creative commons represents an emerging technological and legal mechanism for this re-use, and a significant challenge to the traditional copyright industries. It is a legitimising tool for cultural technologies on the Internet. Mark adminstered a questionnaire to the winners of the recent Wired creative commons remix contest.

Throughout this week, my students in the KKB018 Creative Industries unit are exhibiting their project proposal posters. KKB018 is a core unit in the Creative Industries Faculty, and for many of them is the first unit which introduces them to the core concepts in creative industries theory and practice, which is always something of a challenge - especially considering that students in the unit come from all disciplines across the Faculty: there are dancers and journalists, writers and communication designers, actors and musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers. So, one key aspect of the unit is also to encourage interdisciplinary approaches, of course.

I developed the unit in 2001, as the first of its kind in the world, and I've run it ever since (and for the last time this semester). Developing the content structure itself was relatively straightforward: there's a good deal of core theory which quite clearly needs to be covered. What was more difficult was to come up with an effective, authentic, and interesting assessment structure that went beyond the standard (and boring) 'regurgitate theory by writing an academic essay' model. Last year, I think I finally cracked that challenge: I worked out that beyond all disciplinary knowledge, amongst the core skills our students will need to acquire is the ability to develop, propose, and critically assess project ideas. Whether pitching a story idea to an editor or producer, proposing a creative project to a funding agency, applying for funding for a research project, or presenting a new product to the company board, what they will have to do in their future careers as creative practitioners is to come up with that great idea, present it effectively, and demonstrate that it would be appropriate both for the organisation they're proposing it to, and for the local, national, and global environment within which they're operating. And if they're not developing new projects themselves, then chances are they're probably working for the organisation, assessing projects which other creative practitioners have proposed.

"I'm writing this on the plane back from Canberra," I was going to write, "where I've spent the last couple of days hobnobbing with the high and mighty." That was two weeks ago, but of course on the plane back I promptly fell asleep, not so much from hobnobbing but simply from a packed two-day programme which had started with a 5.15 a.m. flight out of Brisbane on Tuesday 28 March. So, here's a belated follow-up on my trip to the "Expanding Horizons" event which the Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences had organised...

I've been invited to take part in a two-day event in Canberra this coming week, organised by the Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) - they're inviting early-career researchers (a definition which I'm slowly starting to slide out of) to talk to politicians about their research in order to better inform members of the legislative about current research agendas and the need for policies which address these aims and build on the findings.

As part of the 'Expanding Horizons' programme, we'll have breakfast with Julie Bishop, the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, morning tea with the Lindsay Tanner, Shadow Minister for Finance, and will then pair off to meet selected parliamentarians for more private meetings - I've been selected to talk to Senator George Campbell, the Oppositiom Whip. Along the way, we'll also hear from a variety of other high-profile politicians, researchers, and other officeholders in the nexus between education, research, and politics. Should be an interesting (and exhausting) programme!