Just another piece of paper: creative research and writing

Practitioners in the fields of art and design often complain of the injustice of having to write a book about their practice in order to satisfy academic definitions of research. What is the point, the argument goes, of producing just another piece of paper? The suggestion that creative work might be converted to research by a suitable accompanying text is justly resisted. This article approaches the theory/practice binary the other way round. It outlines a research project that attempts to convert the text of a conventional academic Ph.D. thesis into a creative research output. The intention is to expose the boundaries that are constructed when creativity is counted as knowledge, and by doing this to put the notion of creativity into play.