It’s not, typically, a great start to a conversation.
“I’m going to tell you how much of a struggle it is.”
Collaboration can be critical in achieving a successful outcome. Little in this life is done truly alone. And successful collaboration can be an incredibly rewarding experience for everybody involved. The resulting work transcends anything each individual might produce in solo. On the other hand, when a working relationship is not fluid, when there is friction, a vision is not shared, it can be like pulling teeth. Talking with academics about the way in which they work with their institutions’ marketing teams, the process is often described as detached and disconnected.
“That just wasn't even on the table, collaboration.”
Dr Hossai Gul is a transdisciplinary researcher. Transdisciplinary research is not well understood, and according to Gul explaining it is super difficult. So Gul and her colleagues from UTS’ TD School set out to develop creative artifacts to express their transdisciplinary research. They needed to present a strong visual identity, both on and offline; a bold creative representation that could explain what they do and how they work with other researchers, and industry and community partners.
According to Gul, transdisciplinary research is distinct.
“A lot of people will use fancy words and jargon to make themselves look distinct when reality is that you’re kind of doing the same thing and calling it a different name… you sound almost the same as everyone else.”
Gul had hoped that TD School’s distinction could be translated creatively, “We started to synthesize, or I guess visualize our research image.”
“I asked for funding to go to a creative team that would help us put it together. The response was that no, the university has its own sort of creative team in the marketing or wherever they sit, I actually don't even know where they are, who they are, where they sit, they're going to do it instead.”
Gul had previously worked with visual designers, Creative Intelligence graduates of TD School, on the visual design and branding of her Implementation Lab. As graduates of TD School they possessed a clear understanding of transdisciplinarity and the resulting creative product was “beautiful”, according to Gul. In stark contrast, when she reviewed the first iteration of visual design from her institution’s marketing team she says “its just returned so ugly.” Gul acknowledges that she is not a creative professional herself, but states that "I know when somebody is representing my work, and it's not an accurate representation of it.” Creative content which is conceived and executed with an intimate understanding and appreciation of the subject matter, in this case transdisciplinarity, should result in work that resonates. But when detached creative professionals have taken what they think TD School and transdisciplinarity is and have processed that through the university’s brand guidelines (which can be quite restrictive, such as the need to align with brand colours and fonts etc), the compromised creative misses the mark and fails to resonate with the very researchers it is intended to represent1. And if it doesn’t resonate with the client it probably won’t with the intended audience.
It is important to clarify that Gul does not blame her institution’s marketing team. She believes that they are professionals and capable of doing good work. The problem is that, perhaps both structurally and culturally, creative research translation beyond the typical corporate paradigm just doesn’t happen. Not to generalise, or be overly critical, institutions’ marketers do not have the expertise or experience to work outside of the status quo.
Considering some of the other ways universities typically produce content with academics, such as “that whole academic sitting in the office” corporate video, according to Gul “people say yes to that, because we don’t actually have any other options.” When asked to participate in a corporate video,
“I just said straight no because I think we have to also be honest. A lot of that stuff is super boring. So it defeats the purpose of why you should do it anyway. And it's not an actual representation of me in the context of my professional work.”
She continues.
“I actually think that does me a disservice. It doesn’t actually benefit me when you go and make me look like some corporate academic cog in the system, when really what I am is completely different. And my communities love me because I’m not a quote, unquote traditional academic. And they can see more of a humanness to me and come and work with me just because I'm a human.”
This misrepresentation is a real problem. Because partnerships, whether with industry or the community, are relationship based. According to Gul, “We need industry partners to understand what we do, first, and then understand how they can work with us.” So, if creative content does not truly represent researchers and their work, and if the creative treatment does not resonate with audiences (or even researchers themselves), it is not fulfilling its purpose of engagement and it will fail to connect with valuable audiences. And, as Gul suggests, there is the potential that this type of corporate university content does a disservice. Through the corporate lens, innovative and visionary research can appear dull. The same as every other university.
To represent their work, what Gul and many other researchers want is “something more creative. And I feel like I need someone who's creative to help me come up with what that is.” What researchers like Gul want, to translate their work, engage audiences and achieve impact, is a creative collaborator in the truest sense. Somebody to work with, not against.
Gul suggests that a creative research translator should be embedded within research centres and schools, like TD School. This sentiment is echoed by other academics, and raises questions around the role of creative industries research centres in driving practice-led innovation in the way in which researchers translate their work and share it with audiences.
In light of what is often a lack of support for creative research translation, researchers are often left to do figure this stuff out themselves.
“We need to spend our time doing complex research, not having to also then be, you know, magical beings with multiple hats that know how to design visually and write creatively and do analytics.”
“For a school like us, we need our own creative, sort of, research translation person” states Gul, to "help us develop artifacts.” And she believes that through intimate and intensive collaboration, between an academic and a creative practitioner, a bond is formed and the collaborators come to “really understand each other.” Working in this way academics do not have to continuously try and explain their work to a third party, such as their institution’s central marketing and communication teams. Through an ongoing creative partnership, “That existing relationship means we know each other, we know each other’s work.” Barriers are removed.
“I think having a creative team would bring about something super unique.”
It might be argued that creative practice researchers are already there to collaborate with. This is certainly the case for Gul at TD School. However, “I can’t ask her to give me time to help me creatively visualise my work.” The issue is that employed creative practice researchers are already conducting their own research. They are not service professionals, they are independent academics with their own academic freedom. So, even though there may be occasions upon which this type of creative collaboration could occur it cannot be relied upon and should not be taken advantage of.
This means that additional human resources must be thought about: creative practitioners to work alongside researchers to collaborate on creative translation and engagement content, such as videos and podcasts. This could be in the form of new academic roles, a research fellow or lecturer whose own research focus is the exploration of creative content for engagement and impact2; an external freelancer or creative agency to be retained by the school or research centre for ongoing creative projects; or, even a whole new marketing role who acts in some sort of associate creative director capacity for their institution’s breadth of schools and research centres. Discussing these kinds of creative roles, and their relationship with academics, asking Gul about the potential for return on investment “I would guess it’s huge.”
Beyond the desire to creatively express her work, there are bigger social issues that must also be addressed:
“Because a lot of our thinking and what we do just stays with us now in papers, and in conference presentations, and I feel like the people that are reading and attending are the same.”
When it comes to getting knowledge to those who might make use of it, Gul believes that the typical approach for sharing research is ineffective. That is to say, a paper is published and the author presents their findings at a conference3. Consequently, knowledge that is generated by researchers reaches a severely limited audience. And on academic publications, Gul believes that “they’re just so boring and nobody says that they're boring.”
She clarifies:
“They’re interesting to us and they need to be done and documented, knowledge is important. But it does nothing other than that. People forget that our papers are documentation of knowledge, it's nothing else. And what you need to do for dissemination and translation is quite different. And we need to stop doing the same things that we've always done to disseminate and translate.”
So, research and knowledge creation is much more than the published paper.
For anybody concerned about where the money for creative engagement content might come from, it is worth considering the reallocation of existing engagement funds. Workshopping this idea with Gul, “I can spend $3,000 on one conference where I speak for fifteen minutes, or I can spend it on multiple creative artifacts that I can use again and again and evolve over time.” While a conference presentation comes and goes, with sustained engagement on platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram:
“You’re network building and culture building and community building… before something big happens.”
It is Gul’s concern that knowledge, when stifled by the strict requirements of academic publication, does not connect with the right audiences. It's not provided in a form which ordinary people, those outside of academia, can actually do anything with. This is not meeting the needs of academics like Gul, for their work to result in social impact.
“There’s something super wrong. And I can't understand what it is. Because we're just doing the same thing again and again, because we don't know any other way out.” Research is not effectively translated for industry or community audiences. So if the aim is to connect with these audiences it has to be in their spaces, not academia’s. “We do stuff with lots of different communities that don’t even exist on the platforms that we exist in.” The audience who you might want to engage in your research, whether prospective industry partners or community stakeholders, are not active on academic platforms and probably don’t even have access to expensive journal articles4.
So, if Gul and researchers like her are to bring their work to life and realise their full potential for research impact they will need “something more creative. And I feel like I need someone who's creative to help me come up with what that is.”
Check this out if you’re interested in making better research videos.
This is something which is often a challenge, where creative content must align with the university brand. Here’s a comms-hack, what if all of a school or research centre’s creative engagement content was produced in the form of non-traditional research outputs (NTROs)? Surely, with academic freedom, these creative artifacts could exist outside of a university’s brand guidelines. They are research outputs, first and foremost, but, as relevant content, they could still be used to promote the school or research centre.
They could also teach, for example: developing creative engagement and research impact subjects for HDRs to complete alongside other mandatory coursework.
Considering the opportunity to include budget for translation and communication in grant applications, Gul notes “usually people will use that for publication costs or conference attending. It's just usually the two same things.” An issue that arises is a lack of awareness, particularly among researchers unfamiliar with NTROs, about the potential modes of creative engagement for research and how they can be used. Since writing papers and attending conferences is so well established, an awareness raising project will be required to open the eyes and broaden the horizons of academics. But, at the same time, metrics will need to be considered so these activities can be measured and held accountable. Mind you, a question I would ask is: how is success at a conference measured? Is there any concrete way to quantify whether a conference appearence was worth it or not? This would be a good place to start.
Open access is one solution, or at least step in the right direction. But this only removes the financial barrier. It does not make academic research accessible in any other way.