Search

This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the narrowing funding base of the university. The article first introduces a history of the concept of creativity and explains how governmental agendas for creative industry and creativity in education emerged. Second, it describes a practice-based research project that grapples with the difficulties of knowledge transfer between the "creative" and "social science" academic disciplines. This raises questions about creative knowledge and reveals some ethical tensions in the performance of academic research. The research project is then positioned as a "counter-conduct," used to short-circuit the procedures implemented for the conduct of creative research in the creative, entrepreneurial university.

This paper contextualises the emergence and continuing development of the Design for Health and Wellbeing (DHW) Lab, a collaboration between a university and a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. The DHW Lab was established with the vision of creating a design space in which designers, students, patients and hospital staff could work together to identify and address contemporary healthcare issues in innovative ways. In this paper, we explain how the continuing development of the space reflects the design principles it espouses, and how this is embedding design principles and practices into a healthcare organisation. In particular, we will show how the users of the space contribute to the evolution of its physical appearance, its values and its performance as they come to identify and make sense of the challenges, possibilities and potential of the DHW Lab initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will present a design anthropological perspective on an ongoing project called 'Living Well with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)'. The project explores how people with MCI (and their families) manage and respond to changes in their memory and thinking. One of the primary aims of this project is to design an online resource that will support people to 'Live Well' within the context of possible cognitive decline. The resource was originally proposed to function as a kind of online community, where users could both share and learn about homegrown strategies for managing the cognitive changes associated with MCI in everyday life. Much of this project has been guided by the methodological approach of design anthropology, which encourages project researchers and stakeholders to critically examine underlying assumptions and conceptual frameworks, which in this case revolve around the disputed MCI category. In this paper we will provide some background to the Living Well project before highlighting a number of key insights attained from design anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]