Memories of a Grad Student
In the year and a half this blog has been active, it’s documented the process of a designer-turned-grad student passing through the cycles of research, discovery, insight, naivety, despair, and hope so familiar to anyone pursuing specialization in advanced education. While the academic portion of this story nears an end with a thesis defense on the early September horizon, the recent experience of presenting at IASDR 2013 in Japan serves as a key point of reflection looking back on what has become of this journey.
I had the opportunity to present a paper “When Designers Don’t Know: Collective Intelligence in Participatory Design for Development”; a paper that represented the foundation and motivation for research that occurred during the course of my Master’s work. Not only did this paper result in a sweet fridge-worthy certificate, but also a chance to share the theoretical underpinning for the reason I pursued graduate studies in the first place. IASDR 2013 turned out not only to be a chance to spread my excitement and optimism for my research topic to an international audience, but also face some refreshing academic heckling.
In an experience that was admittedly a little nerve-wracking, after I polished off my talk that feels so familiar by now about many of the topics found throughout this blog in front of a crowd of academic peers, I was faced with some rather blunt feedback from an enthusiastic if not a little lowbrow fellow attendee. Quite simply, he said “It’s not going to work…” and he definitely meant it.
Not the words you’d necessarily expect to hear given the general optimism around the topics of participatory design and collective intelligence, but for those reasons an absolute breath of fresh air. While not articulated well enough to act as constructive or helpful criticism, the comment and ensuing fragmented back-and-forth (believe it or not, I also don’t think that crowds of anonymous ordinary people designing aircraft landing gear is a good idea…) proved that this is a topic with some teeth. Any topic that encourages entrenched and stubborn opinions to surface means it’s one worth caring about, better articulating, and understanding. What initially instinctively felt like an attack against my work quickly evolved into motivation to push the topic further, dig deeper, and help clarify what’s still clearly a bit of a murky discussion that’s desperate to come down from the clouds.
Throughout my research, my main goal was to do just that - aggregate leading theory, perspectives and experiences into actionable guidelines and applications to advance beyond the promise of a digital age in design towards living and practising it. While grad studies might be nearing an end, the experiences, perspectives, and knowledge I’ve managed to pick up in the process have set me up to keep the ball rolling towards a better understanding of how to harness digital collective intelligence within participatory design. Thankfully I'm not alone in this optimism, and have picked up a first contract geared towards identifying opportunities and employing these approaches with the UX design firm Macadamian.
After all, in my humble opinion, not only will these topics of research work (and already are), but a design world that embraces digital participation will not only dramatically change the way design processes are conducted, but will also fundamentally challenge designer’s roles in new emerging systems for social problem solving. So, stay tuned for all that...
And now, for some gratuitous shots of Japan.