Following up from the GRC presentation I want to go back over the terrain of how I situate my work in relation to the research projects and my Parsons practice. Last month I wrote about how Cameron had corrected my description of my research by asserting that is was practice-led rather than project-based. At that stage I understood his point to specifically be that I had to consider all of my practice when talking about my research — that made sense. Going into the grounded theory exercise I had acknowledged that I should include much of my Parsons and Australian practice work, but I struggled with really making sense of how to prioritize all this work in relation to the more focused, discrete research projects. But after presenting my work last week this issue only seems more central to resolve.
At the review last week it became clear that Anne and Cameron were both discussing my Parsons work as if the primary contribution of my research could be mined from that practice. I hadn’t seen it like that at all! I had valued the dialogic relationship between the research projects and the everyday practice, but wouldn’t have sought to emphasize how my design practice has changed from Studio Anybody to Parsons as some kind of trajectory mediated by my research practice. Never. And it isn’t because I disagree…just that I hadn’t really seen the practice as addressing many of the concerns the research sought to engage with.
To a case in point. Anne highlighted that where the research made a significant contribution to the practice of design was in calling for a different kind of engagement by the designer. Not the designer who makes a final product but a participant in a discussion where designing becomes a part of how a designer contributes to the conversation. Making this point Anne pointed to the ephemeral, contingent, continually work-in-progress nature of the conversation artifacts. Asserting the very different expectations this kind of work places on designers and the role of ‘communication’. I agree that this is a significant, completely different way for a communication designer to act in the world - and similar to observations I had made about realizing that the Parsons diagrams were forever in negotiation, never ‘finished’. Yet, if I were to highlight this as a key finding of my research, how does it that align with my research projects that were in fact thoughtfully resolved and disseminated as finished pieces?
My sense at this point is that I need to assert not just the primacy of the visual essay in my research, but also acknowledge the ‘conversation’ diagrams from my practice. The way I see it is that the research projects directly framed and informed my capacity to redirect my practice. To this end my PhD is perhaps a practice-led program directed by a few core research projects. This is what I need to capture in the writing up. Next post.