Visualizing Design Knowing

Awhile back I mentioned Cameron getting me to do some kind of grounded theory exercise to evaluate what my projects were telling me about the contribution of my research. I have always made the claim that my research was done through some practice-led version of grounded theory…I previously stated this because I appreciated that grounded theory meant I didn’t need to begin with an hypothesis, but that I could acknowledge that the research would ‘emerge’ from the projects themselves. I also appreciated that this was a research method that spoke to my resistance of any theory-led practice. Grounded theory sees the research literature as just another relevant piece of information by which to understand what is emerging and does not privilege theory over the projects. That said, I cannot pretend to have followed a grounded theory approach completely, as I have found it valuable to iteratively work to a research question that framed my hunches. So although I wasn’t responding to a direct hypothesis, I think the cycle of making and reflecting was more similar to action research than a close, iterative audit of what I was doing throughout. Still, for my recent review I set out to gather all my projects together and code and memo what has emerged as a way of considering anew what the projects might have to say.

I went into the exercise thinking that the key issue to resolve was to identify the most important threads within the research and to assess whether the findings that emerge can really be substantiated by the projects I have already undertaken or whether I needed to do more.
My research masters was titled “Practice-led Research as an integral component of Professional Practice”, so it’s not like I am a stranger to the value of integrating one’s professional practice with their research ambitions, but still I had continued to be fixated on the perception that although I saw my research and institutional practices had informed each other, I hadn’t seen the ‘research’ itself as inclusive of the whole practice.

The second part of the grounded theory exercise includes a comprehensive, iterative process of sorting and resorting the projects until it seems like you have saturated all the possible connections and distinctions between projects. The goal being to let the key categories emerge from the work. Whereas the first phase emphasized how indirectly relevant so much of the work was, the second phase highlighted again a specific quality within the research work that distinguished it from the other exercises and projects. Not surprisingly, the research projects stood apart as more critically and directly engaged with the questions the research was exploring. To describe it from the broader perspective of the practice, it was as if the different practice contexts had provided endless situated spaces by which I could explore further, learn from or simply apply what I was only just beginning to grasp in my research-directed projects.

[As an aside, close readings of the individual projects contribution to the whole provided an interesting picture of practice-led research. Particularly in the number of different ways that projects influenced or were influenced by others. My attempt to assign ‘epiphanies’ visually highlighted how commonly they happened outside of the research projects (largely to do with the tensions and negotiations specific to a situated context). Similarly, projects that often sparked a revelation weren’t in and of themselves interesting, it was only designing and reflecting upon these projects within the context of a practice-led research project that the relevance is illuminated].