Practice-based PhD as an explorative journey through tacit knowledge

Can Tacit Knowledge be intended as both the aim and the tool for a creative practitioner/researcher’s enquiry?The paper offers some insights as emerged from the experience of the recently concluded ADAPT-r ITN programme, focusing on the compelling facets of Tacit Knowledge that inform and sustain the research methods.Tacit Knowledge can be thought as the operational knowledge embedded in practice, built, developed, tested and shaped through the reiterative action of practising. The connection between tacit and explicit knowledge works as a circular feeding mechanism and the practice-based PhD plays a critical role in such a circular process, providing the creative practitioners with the ability to surface their tacit knowledge, articulate and express it through multiple media.In this paper, we will investigate Tacit Knowledge as both a trigger to move forward the research journey and the very field of exploration of the research itself.