Why I forced myself to start blogging?
I’ve been doing social design (or delivering innovative concepts and strategies for a living, whatever you call it) for 10 years, before I finally felt ready to get some formal education in the field.
Feb of 2023, I became an official graduate student in Research in Design, in Monash University, on a part-time off-shore basis. The idea is to see if there’s anything worth academic scrutiny in my day job as a design and strategy consultant. And secretly, I’ve been weary of being the one who is always expected to have the answers, and miss the feeling of being a dumb novice again.
In the couple of months between getting the offer and commencing in the program, I worked on adjusting my weekly schedule to carve out time and attention for “doing research stuff”, which included reading the book Practice Based Design Research (Edited by Laurene Vaughan) .
Essentially, this book is about what it means for designers to do a PhD in Design, and how the research it requires is distinguished from the design research we already do to generate design outcomes.
The first thing that immediately caught my attention, based related work in Peter Jarvis’s publication in 1999, is the idea of the designer-practitioner-researcher.
My personal way of deconstructing this complex identity is as follows:
a designer is anyone who delivers design outcomes
a designer-practitioner is a designers seasoned enough who have his/her unique brand of practicing design
finally a designer-practitioner-researcher is able to conduct “situated research” in the field, while doing that unique practice of design, eventually “developing theory from practice”
To me, this means I’ll have to learn to grow “a third eye of the researcher”, and have it watch over my own actions and the impact they create (intentionally or unintentionally) , in the field and in realtime, and hopefully develop theory that is valuable to other students and practitioners.
Turns out three eyes creatures are pretty ubiquitous across cultures.
There are at least 6 of them in Chinese mythology.
In feeling this “third eye” (and its attached brain parts) germinating on my forehead, the powerfully sense of insecurity came to me — one about doing academic writing. Decades ago, I sort of went around this issue by choosing science, and using figures and tables as the mean “writing”. And in my work as a designer, I place more emphasis on delivering ideas with drawings more than with words.
What if I lack the gene to like a humanities/social science person? What if my brain is unable to think with words? (Some random notes from my iPad below.)
During the first online meeting with my thesis supervisor Lisa Grocott, I apologetically brought up my insecurity with academic writing, hoping for a recommendation to some intense online training or at least a heavy booklist. And Lisa, in a very chillaxed manner not unexpected from an Australian, said “well, everyone who comes into this has some version of that insecurity.” 🤷
It’s one thing to feel assured by the notion that we each got our own strain of imposter syndrome, it’s another to feel the clock ticking for me to present a coherent piece of writing worthy of the next milestone.
If I learned anything from design practice, is to be brave to present the real world with really underdeveloped versions of a imagined future. So, I thought, I just need to 1. get into the habit writing; 2. get use to people reading my writing.
And as a dirty prototype, this blog is born,
Reading and writing late into the night, it’s going to be my life now.