Meet the School of Communication and Creative Arts

Today we speak with Richie Barker: Richie is an experienced creative strategist, advertising copywriter and teaches brand communication at undergraduate and postgraduate.

What do you teach at Deakin?

Richie: My teaching area is brand communication. At an undergraduate level I teach the units ALA102 ‘Creative Brand Communication’, ALA202 ‘Copywriting and Ideation’, and ALA302 ‘Transmedia Storytelling’. I’m fortunate enough to work with undergraduate students at every year level of their degree. I also teach ALR710 ‘Marketing Communication’ at a postgraduate level.

How would you describe your creative practice?

Richie: Before becoming a full-time academic I was a creative strategist and advertising copywriter. Many copywriters are also fiction writers. They secretly (or not so secretly) have a screenplay or novel they’re working on in their own time – this was always the case with me. Being a storyteller characterises what I’m interested in as a creative and researcher of creative practice. I’m constantly reflecting on my practice by talking to talented people who get creativity in the digital era. I’m also fascinated by the shades of grey that exist between commercial and artistic creativity. These porous boundaries are particularly important as advertising evolves to become more about story-focused brand content and reflecting cultural moments than merely serving up sales pitches.

Who has been your biggest influence on your career to date?

Richie: When I first read the work of creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – an incredibly accomplished thinker and writer on creativity across fields – something crystallised in me. His work provided a framework for me to progress fledgling ideas that had been brewing away for years and allowed me to go deeper into my analysis of the working lives of creative practitioners in advertising and public relations. I find it particularly inspiring that Mihaly’s work has been embraced by people who sit outside the university environment – his writing has revealed the power and pleasure of creative thinking to a wide range of readers.

What do you consider your greatest achievement in life?

Richie: Completing my PhD on creative process in the digital media era feels like my biggest professional achievement. I started this project while still working in industry; making the transition from practitioner to research student was an enormous (but gratifying) challenge. My PhD enabled me to tackle a question I’ve always been obsessed with: where do new ideas come from? I’ve since published research from my PhD in academic journals – it feels awesome when people from across the world get in touch to say they’ve got something out of my work.

What has been your favourite Deakin experience?

Richie: I love watching students present their work to industry when responding to real-world client briefs. There’s so much adrenaline and fires in bellies. These presentations are something we try to do as much as possible in the advertising program because pitching and presenting are such massive aspects of the job. You can only really learn this by doing it. When it’s real, the real learning happens. While students can’t present every assessment to industry people, we aim to make every task as authentic as possible by having students work on projects that reflect what practitioners are doing in the real world.

How would you describe the Deakin learning experience for students?

Richie: I’d like to think that it’s surprising. In my area, I encourage students to look at the familiar in unfamiliar ways to build their creative and problem-solving abilities. I reinforce the need to question everything to find new pathways forward. It’s an incredible buzz when students reveal a passion for an area they hadn’t thought much about before. The Deakin experience is also very employability focused. We encourage students to make the connection between what they do at uni and their future lives as high-performing professionals.

What is your best advice for someone looking to enter a creative career?

Richie: Look for industry people whose work you admire and ask nicely if they will be a mentor. Often students feel that experienced practitioners won’t be interested in them, but many want to ‘pay it forward’ – part of the reason they were successful is that they found good mentors early on themselves. The insider knowledge that a mentor can provide often proves invaluable. When students meet their mentors I encourage them to be prepared. Rather than just sit there and listen, they should go in with a list of questions and be proactive about what they can take away from the experience.

What is it like teaching and studying your discipline online?

Richie:  In a word: connected. Deakin isn’t new to online learning. This experience is our university superpower. As someone who used to produce digital content for brands, it’s an area that feels very natural to me as an educator. I put a lot of time into developing content that I find interesting (with the hope that others will as well) and crafting learning experiences that build creative thinking and self-reflection. I’m also quite ‘interventionist’ with my students’ learning; I like to challenge but also to partner, to be an active participant in their learning experiences, whether it’s on-campus or online.

Dr Richie Barker is a Lecturer in Communication at Deakin .