First things first: What is REF and what is “impact”?

REF is the national assessment exercise carried out roughly every six to seven years to grade the quality of research in UK universities. The results decide a lot of the government funding universities receive. It has three main components:

1. Outputs (the research itself like articles, books, films, performances, exhibitions)
2. Environment (how good the research culture is)
3. Impact (how the research changes the world beyond academia)

“Impact” is the one that tends to make creative people sigh deeply. It’s defined as an effect on, change or benefit to society, culture, the economy, the environment, public policy…and crucially: you have to evidence it! A brilliant film that moves audiences emotionally is not “impact” unless its influence can be documented somewhere: press coverage, testimonials, behaviour change, organisational adoption, community transformation, etc.

Impact is, essentially, the REF’s demand that the world acknowledge your research and leave a trace saying: “Yes this made a difference”

Bowker & Star would have a field day with this. REF is an enormous classification system: it tells you what counts as meaningful, what kinds of evidence count and how things should be labelled so they can be recognised by evaluators. In their language, REF produces an infrastructure of visibility. If something can’t be made visible within this structure, it might as well not exist.

What makes creative-industries universities like Falmouth a bit unusual?

Creative universities like Falmouth aren’t structured around the classic, research-intensive model. They operate more like ecosystems of practice, where knowledge is produced through making, performing, designing, experimenting, collaborating with industry partners, communities, cultural organisations.

In Floridi’s terms, Falmouth sits inside a very dense part of the infosphere: the sprawling environment where all informational processes and relations live. In the infosphere, information isn’t just data: it’s everything from a clay prototype to a live performance, from a student’s portfolio to a digital animation pipeline.

But here’s the tension: creative practice is full of tacit knowledge (intuition, embodied skill, relational labour, improvisation, the “feel” of a process) and REF, by contrast, likes neat documentation. It likes things that can be archived and evidenced.

This means creative universities constantly move between two worlds:

• embodied, messy, live creative cultures
• bureaucratic systems that need stable, traceable information

The trick (and sometimes the agony) is turning the first into the second.

Now creative outputs in REF speak!

When a creative researcher produces something (a performance, an exhibition, a film, a design method, a VR environment…) the REF doesn’t take the work itself as the output. Instead, the REF receives a representation of the work, usually a 300-word statement plus some form of documentation.

In other words, the creative work becomes a data object.

This is where Bowker & Star’s ideas are gold. They show how classification systems shape reality: whatever gets documented becomes something that the system can recognise and reward. And whatever can’t be documented (ephemeral aesthetic experience, emotional resonance…) gets pushed to the margins.

A creative output, then, is a film, a performance and is also a formatted artefact designed to fit into a classification infrastructure. It becomes what Bowker & Star call a boundary object: something flexible enough for artists, academics, administrators to recognise but structured enough for the REF machine to process.

Examples of creative REF outputs include:

1. A short film (plus documentation + a statement explaining the research contribution)
2. A performance or installation (with recordings, programmes, reviews)
3. A creative writing collection (with contextual commentary)
4. A design prototype or digital game (with explanation of methodology and research insights)

The output is always double-layered: the creative work + the documentation that translates it into REF language.

So how does Floridi help us understand all this?

Floridi treats our world as one giant infosphere, where everything (from biological life to digital data to cultural artefacts) is part of an informational web. In this perspective:

• A creative output is information.
• Its documentation is information about that information.
• A REF impact case study is information about the documentation of that information.
• It’s turtles all the way down, but informational.

When we view REF through Floridi’s lens, we stop seeing it as a mere bureaucratic hurdle and start seeing it as a system for managing the circulation of research information on a national scale, and REF is basically an enormous attempt to map the UK research infosphere and sort its contents into something legible for allocation of resources.

Creative universities, however, generate all sorts of information that REF struggles to categorise because much of it isn’t designed for classification; it’s designed for experience, community, experimentation, sensory engagement.

The awkward middle: creative practice between the body and the bureaucracy

This is where things get interesting. Creative universities like Falmouth sit in a productive-painful middle zone:

• On one side: creative practice, which is fuzzy and often deliberately resistant to standardisation.
• On the other side: REF infrastructure, which demands clarity, attribution, documentation and stable categories.

When a creative academic prepares a REF submission, they are doing a kind of knowledge translation across these layers of the infosphere and they’re turning lived creative practice into something that can circulate within a national evaluation system.

And this translation isn’t neutral…it shapes what kinds of creative work are more likely to be valued and sustained.

So what’s the takeaway?

If we combine Floridi and Bowker & Star, REF stops looking like an overly complicated system and starts to look like a huge informational infrastructure with its own rules for visibility and circulation.

Creative universities don’t just produce outputs! They produce forms of information that REF must struggle to stabilise. Creative impact, then, becomes the story of how those outputs travel across the infosphere, leaving visible traces that can be captured as evidence.

And if we can understand REF as part of a wider informational ecology (rather than simply an audit exercise) it becomes easier to navigate, critique and even creatively subvert.