Does research creation work? This was the framing question for the Data Stories research creation workshop: The use of research creation and arts based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment. Held on our Maynooth University campus on 9-10 September 2025, the workshop featured 17 paper presentations and two hands-on workshops that allowed participants to see creative methods in action. The answer to the question is not clear cut; it might work in certain situations and not in others. More likely the answer is: “Yes, it works but…” or “Yes, it works and…”. Research creation might flourish within certain parameters and structures, but flounder when proper scaffolding is missing. Ultimately, the purpose of the two-day workshop was to learn from researchers and artists engaged in research creation to theorise the types of situations, parameters and structures that allow the combination of traditional social science methods and arts-based methods to aid people in generating knowledge and insights about the world we inhabit.
Carla Maria Kayanan opened up the workshop outlining Phase 2 of the Data Stories project and lessons learned to date. She provided a summary of the literature on research creation to guide participants on existing definitions of research creation. Additionally, Carla included a list of questions submitted by the Data Stories team that served as a provocation for reflection throughout the workshop. Responses to these questions will help the Data Stories team theorise the larger, overarching question of whether or not research creation works and under what circumstances.
Who is research creation for?
- Are there certain sectors more/less amenable to research creation?
- What is the relationship between the artistic output and contribution to knowledge?
What do we make in research creation? Does it matter and who does it matter to?
What is the necessary structure for research creation?
- How do we avoid research creation from being extractive?
- How can you fit an arts practice into a research schedule with a pre-defined grant structure?
- What are the biggest institutional barriers to research creation projects and how can we tackle them?
How are the boundaries between the researcher and the artist (un)fruitful, (un)productive and (dis)enabling?
- When is a researcher and artists and an artist a researcher?
- How do we break the academic bubble and bring this kind of work and research to a broader audience?
- In what ways are ‘failure’ and ‘unknowing’ part of the process of research creation
- What would allow, or better support, early career researchers to step off the hamster wheel of paper-writing and presenting and engage more deeply into different research modalities and thinking speeds?
Session 1
Martijn de Waal kicked of session 1 with a presentation based on the work he produced with colleagues at the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation. On the question of whether research creation is research or art, Martin argues that it’s neither. Rather, it is all research, and it all produces insights; a statement that was backed up with examples from projects he worked on.
Next up was Christina Horvath, who has a decades long history of working on co-creation. Through examples of various projects across the globe, Christina argued that successful co-creation requires researchers to give up power. Equally, Christina asked us to consider if artists and creative outputs are valued for their aesthetics. This is a question that resonated throughout the workshop, particularly when considering need between the artists and the researcher: Does the artist need the researcher in the same way that the research needs the artist? Or might it be, as Christina questioned during the panel session, that researchers are the parasites in such relationships?
The final presenter for this session was Léa Donguy, who had previously presented with the Data Stories team at the AAG and was subsequently invited to elaborate on her presentation. In addition to holding down a full-time academic position, Léa is the president of a cultural cooperative within Lab’URBA and has spent over 10 years working with artists as a Geography researcher. Léa described the methodological tools she has developed over time to study the physical environment and environmental extraction.
Session 2
After a short break, Session 2 started with Meghan Taylor Holtan presenting an autoethnographic account of a mini circus arts residency in Buffalo, New York, animated by efforts to communicate questions and data around the social, economic, political and embodied dimensions of housing energy efficiency. The account demonstrated an unfolding process of inquiry around the possibilities and challenges (creative and critical, but also practical/logistical) of communicating these questions through an integration of Holtan’s background as a circus artist and instructor with more traditional quantitative methods, culminating in a juggling film installation on a net zero energy demonstration home.
Next, John Bingham-Hall presented work from Staging Ground, a creative residency as part of the research platform Theatrum Mundi. The project brought together professionals (e.g. architects, choreographers and filmmakers) with Paris residents, activists and planners to walk and ‘re-choreograph’ cultures of movement of large transport infrastructures, specifically the metro and Périphérique ring road. The project resulted in the production of works, such as film, which highlighted the human or other mundane lives of these infrastructures. Bingham-Hall reflected on how the co-production of ‘embodied’ research might shape concrete planning processes.
Giada de Coulon and Frédérique Leresche presented on a participatory film-making project in which groups struggling with precarious living conditions in Switzerland (including women, undocumented migrants, and LGBTQIA+ groups) were given cameras with which to respond to the question of what ‘home’ meant to them. As well as a mode of expression for revealing different experiences of precariousness, potentially countering conventional narratives around what constitutes (a) ‘home’, the creative methods of the project also raised ethical and political questions around representation and aesthetics.
In the subsequent discussion, participants followed up on matters of ‘translation’ and ‘representation’ raised across the presentations. There was a question posed around whether meaning is lost in the conversion of embodied, participatory work and experience into visual or other representations (such as film or photography). It was also asked whether art (and indeed academic research) ‘speaks for itself’; to what extent or at what point it requires framing or contextualisation for audiences.
The issue of funding for this kind of knowledge-production was also discussed, including how, under conditions of precarity and ever-decreasing financial support for the arts, the continuous making of work was seen as a necessary means of maintenance, facilitating opportunities for networks, further work, or for tactically accessing small pots of funding.
Session 3
Cecilie Sachs Olsen began the third session of the workshop with a presentation titled ‘Oh the Drama! Research creation as participatory theatre-based method to accommodate conflict in urban planning’. Cecilie described a process she was part of designing, alongside collaborators, called Drama Labs. These involved bringing together participants who are part of conflicts around urban planning to partake in a form of participatory theatre. Cecilie teased out how the Drama Labs assisted in making conflict productive through examining three elements of the process: estrangement, embodiment and entanglement.
Next, Oliver Dawkins presented his work supporting the Performance Corporation in their development of a theatre show about housing in Ireland titled Pretty Vacant. Oliver reflected on the process of undertaking research, bringing data into the performance space, preparing a punk song, and performing on stage. Oliver’s discussion explored the convergences and divergences that arise in the creative process and the necessity for different strands of the research development to be gathered up or set aside for the sake of the final output.
Following Oliver, Ivis Garcia discussed strategies of engaging communities in anti-displacement planning. Ivis recounted the various creative modes used to assist in engaging communities, including putting up posters, sending postcards, hanging signs on doorknobs, and youth engagement with tracing stencils on the pavement.
Finally, Mel Galley reflected on her work as part of the Data Stories team, working alongside Juliette Davret and a data intermediary company utilising speculative writing. Mel highlighted the benefits of engaging in speculative writing in a research context, including offering a space for ambiguity and playfulness, and the possibility of reflecting on what is occurring in the here and now.
Session 4
The first talk in our fourth session was given by Sarah Gelbard, who discussed a series of community-based workshops which used collage and zine making as collaborative methods for identifying better housing outcomes. Designed for vulnerable people with lived experience of housing insecurity and incarceration in Canada, the workshops were prompted by the speculative question ‘What would housing be like in a world without prisons?’. Responding to this prompt, participants were encouraged to move beyond discussion of their own personal experiences to identify more systematic forms of harm affecting them and to propose their own alternatives. An important part of this process for Sarah was recognising the need to compensate participants for their time.
Danielle Hynes and Samuel Mutter then discussed their collaborative work with Data Stories’ artists in residence Mel Galley and Augustine O’Donoghue. The talk contrasted their use of traditional social science methods with more creative projects involving different writing and communication methods, including zine-making, the use of Excel grids for story composition, posting texts through letterboxes, and the creation of data-informed doormat messages to communicate with door-knocking politicians. The talk also constructively discussed the tensions that can arise between academia, the arts, and their use of data, and the ways in which creative methods might better be employed to mediate their dependencies and improve collaboration.
In the final talk of this session, Nazanin Karimi discussed her work engaging students in processes of counter-mapping in the Netherlands to help expose, politicise and propose alternative arrangements for a range of housing challenges. In these counter-mappings participants were encouraged to engage different narrative and sensory modalities to inform hand-drawn maps which focus on fluid and dynamic aspects of urban living which are not well captured by more formal approaches to mapping. What this activity uncovered are the many informal adaptations people make to prevalent housing conditions, also intimating how those conditions might be made more favourable.
Session 5
The last session of the workshop included three presentations. Joan Somers Donnelly shared how the success of research creation depends on the level of openness and buy-in from those involved. Comparing two case studies that used arts-based activities during workshop activities, she showed how different contexts either allowed collaboration to flourish or made it much harder to achieve meaningful impact.
Conor Moloney took us into the playful yet staged public spaces of London. Using his background in architecture, he began experimenting with drawing not just as documentation but as a creative way of layering protest, play, and place into cityscape.
In Dublin’s Liberties, researcher Lidia Manzo and artists Aoife Ward and Eve Woods told the story of how their collaborative project uses satire through hotel walking tours to push back against gentrification. Their work highlights how art can question who cares for urban spaces and how communities can resist the loss of culture and identity.
Across this session, a shared theme emerged: artists bring something different yet essential to research, but their contributions are often undervalued and underfunded. Speakers stressed that artists should be part of the process from the very start, and that researchers also need time and space to engage with artistic methods in ways that feel meaningful. Research-creation, as our speakers showed, is not just about new methods, it’s about rethinking how knowledge, community, and creativity can come together to imagine better futures.
Workshops
Two workshops, one held on each day, were scheduled to allow workshop facilitators to demonstrate the use of arts-based methods in action. The first, facilitated by Agata Gunkova, Madeline Isobel Mesich and Margareta Relijić focused on imagined housing futures. Participants were asked to individually reflect and write down what it meant to integrate care into housing. Split into small groups, participants discussed what a caring housing could look like. Following the discussion, individuals were given a piece of lino and carving tools to sketch and carve a caring housing utopia. Each of the pieces that the small groups used connected like puzzle pieces to a create a whole. Participants then painted their pieces and stamped them into connected wholes on poster board. The produced outcomes were used to further the discussion on alternative housing futures.
The second workshop was facilitated by Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki based on previous research on the use of tiny homes in Austin, Texas. The research project led to a Tiny House Boardgame, which Ella and Mel introduced to the group through game play. Players navigated the board as characters, derived from Ella and Mel’s research. Each player had a fixed budget and chance cards that reflected housing experiences and/or setbacks. At the end of the game, players could ‘see’ their tiny housing reality based on the journeys they took, and the material possessions picked up along the way. The latter half of the workshop kept the theme of game play. Participants were given a short amount of time to develop a game based on housing. The game design that each table created was later shared with the group. The experience of creating a game helped participants reflect on the usefulness of games as a research tool.
At the end of the two engaging and insightful days, packed with paper presentations, workshops and shared meals, Rob Kitchin closed the workshop with an overview and summary of lessons learned and questions for further reflection and inquiry.
Presentation Slides
