What Creative Research Methods Make Possible

23rd September 2026

Research is often imagined as a serious, structured process: formulate a question, choose a methodology, collect data, analyse the findings, and present the results. 

But what happens when we make room for creativity? 

That was one of the questions I kept returning to at the International Creative Research Methods Conference (ICRMC) in Manchester. Across sessions exploring poetry, collage, participatory research, work with children and young people, activism and anti-colonial methods, there was a shared challenge to the idea that research is primarily about collecting information and turning it into findings. 

I came away wondering whether creativity can offer us something more fundamental about the way research projects are structured, how participants are involved and what goes back to the community once the project is complete. 

Creative approaches can open different doors 

One of the most interesting things about creative research is that it challenges the assumption that there is one “right” way to generate knowledge. Traditional research methods can be extremely valuable, but they can also privilege particular forms of communication and particular kinds of knowledge. A written interview transcript, a numerical dataset or a conventional report may tell us something important, but they may not capture everything that people experience, feel, imagine or know. 

A collage might allow someone to communicate experiences that are difficult to put into words. Poetry might reveal relationships between ideas that conventional analysis obscures. Walking through a place might generate insights that would never emerge in a seated interview. Performance can make embodied and emotional knowledge visible. 

This feels particularly relevant for researchers, evaluators and practitioners working directly with children and young people. We often need to make people's experiences legible: to identify outcomes, evidence change and communicate findings to funders and commissioners. However, young people don't necessarily experience their lives in outcomes and themes. Experiences can be contradictory, emotional, embodied and difficult to put into words. 

Making space for voices that are often overlooked 

A recurring theme of the conference was the relationship between creativity, participation and voice. Approaches such as this can offer participants ways to communicate that don't depend entirely on conventional verbal or written expression. 

This raises an important question: 

Who is heard when our methods determine what counts as a good answer? 

Creative methods can help shift the relationship between researcher and participant. Rather than participants simply providing “data”, they can become collaborators, makers and interpreters of knowledge. 

However, creativity doesn't automatically make research participatory or ethical.  A creative workshop can still be designed and controlled entirely by the researcher. A participant can still have little influence over how their contribution is interpreted or used. In fact, creative methods can sometimes require more ethical reflection.  

What happens when someone reveals something deeply personal through an image or performance? Who owns something created collaboratively? What happens when a participant creates something they later don't want shared? 

These are questions that are not peripheral to the work - they are central to responsible creative engagement and participation.

Going beyond data collection 

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of ICRMC was the emphasis on creative methods beyond data gathering and how creativity can influence the whole research journey. How do we formulate questions? How do we work with participants? How do we analyse material? How do we communicate findings? How do we decide what counts as evidence? A creative approach might begin long before the first interview and continue long after the final analysis. 

The conference's keynote from Alastair Roy, ‘Creativity in Collaborative Research with Children and Young People: From Metaphor, through Method(ology) and onto Meaning Making’, captured this journey.  

Sitting with uncertainty 

It’s also crucial to bear in mind that if not conducted with care, creative methods can be exclusionary. They can create ethical challenges, and they can ask a lot of participants. Creative outputs can also be difficult to interpret without imposing our own meanings onto them. 

Perhaps the point isn't that creative methods are “better,” but that different methods make different things possible.  This requires judgement, curiosity and a willingness to sit with some uncertainty. 

For me, this is something I want to keep bringing back into my own practice. Whether I'm designing research, thinking about evaluation or working alongside people to understand their experiences, I want to pay more attention to how our methods shape what people can tell us, and what we are able to hear. 

The challenge I'm taking away from the conference is not to apply a creative research lens to everything, but to be more curious about what might happen when we loosen our grip on the “right” way to ask, listen and make sense of things. 

So, the next time we design a piece of research or evaluation, perhaps we could ask not only “What evidence do we need?”, but also: 

“What ways of knowing are we currently making possible — and whose knowledge might become visible if we made a little more room for something unexpected?”