The role of the university within cultural, economic and social systems varies for different stakeholders. For many, the desire to pass on knowledge to future generations is implicit in their motivations. There is also a driver to discover anew, to research, to innovate, to make better sense of the world around us. Both provide a site for scrutinising how knowledge and creativity interact and for seeing how the practices of different disciplines yield new knowledge. This presentation gives an account of my quest to make sense of the field I inhabit, that of the visual arts and design.

The starting point for me as a young academic responsible for an undergraduate programme was 'what do we need to know'? I saw conflicting arguments about the role of knowledge in creative practice. Following a brief summary of what creativity literature tells us about the role of knowledge, I will look at how we can use records of what we have done in the field to further understand the context for our work.

For each of the last three assessments of research activity in UK universities, a rich data set has been generated. The records of outputs submitted by individual academics give a snapshot of the interests of the community and its contributions to knowledge. Similarly, the records of PhD theses also record the thinking of the next generation. I will report on work completed and in progress on such datasets, focusing on how this material is part of the framework for research related to our practices. The disciplinary field I investigate is that of the creative arts and design. It is a field relatively new to engagement in research practice but given the emphasis on creativity, understanding it might bring innovation and creativity to questions being addressed by other fields.