Box080: What it is

This week is almost entirely about my PhD but not the argument of it so much as a state of play and plan. I write for you of course, but as you know I start each post and keep it open each week as I go through it because this is just as much about me journaling as anything else (which is what blogs are for, I think.) So, it’s quite a practical autobiopsy of where I’m at which may be of interest if you are struggling with a similar project as well or considering starting one of these wretched things or if you just enjoy other people’s suffering.

So if that doesn’t interest you (and why would it?) you can just close this window and do literally anything else. But if you’ve got this far so you’re in for the haul. What follows isn’t particularly organised, I’m just running through my thoughts as I run trough documents in Scrivener but I would actually love any feedback or thoughts because I’m also quite alone in this which has maybe been part of the problem.

On the state of play.

So I have three PhDs. Like, in drafts. The first one, which isn’t worth going into too much is basically ‘Here’s Everything I Think I Know and Think is Cool.’ (Revell, 2017) and runs at over 100,000 words. It’s the product of six months of splurging out everything to try and find a spine to all the things I was doing. My logic being that I must be doing something with all the things I do so, what is it? Not particularly rigorous; not making any particular argument; just lots and lots of stuff.

Round two ‘Starts To Get at Something’ (Revell, 2019). I did a proper methodology having actually done some proper thinking about how I make stuff and how I think about what I’m thinking about when I do it (see On Theory and Practice further down.) It has a theoretical underpinning (social constructivism), connects that with design and gives the impression that I had an idea of what I was doing (what is AI, why do we imagine it that way, what things make us imagine it that way?) Much smaller, much tighter much more targeted, with a loose sense of how the pieces fit together and a more tightly-focussed AOE. Felt good, then Covid.

Then we have round three which is ‘A Bunch of Great References’ (Revell, 2022) because I spent two and a half years reading lots of things based on round two which were very relevant, making renders and talking a lot. But not writing so this is like 75 words. But this. This is the one we’re going to write, my friend.

On bad habits and feeling old.

You can probably guess from the above that progress is very stop-start. This is because I am Very Fucking Busy™️. I don’t like saying that because everyone is busy and I consider business and overwork to be toxic when I’d rather see a world without work and be a gentlemen of leisure. However, despite being very well organised and good at multitasking and deadlines with no-one holding a sword to my neck on this, it’s been the one that’s slipped. So getting through it is going to require a degree of self-flagellation and rigid discipline with hard targets.

Ok, the other thing is that, whatever it’s about, this PhD is about computer graphics and AI in some way. And, you may not believe it, but there’s been a lot of significant advances since 2016. And it is still changing and all this stop-start means that we can’t cover everything so we’re not going to and we need to be clear about that because every time I read another piece about Midjourney I get a pang of guilt and I can’t live like that.

On reading, writing and thinking.

You know this: I don’t enjoy reading. If I want to learn something I watch a YouTube video or Ctrl+F my way through a wiki. To my fickle, gamified millennial brain, reading is just inefficient and boring. A lot of all this work is spending an hour reading an excruciatingly boring or pretentious paper for a snippet of an idea that maybe makes me go ‘hm’ and then forget it. Most academics can’t write, they can just sort of transcribe thesauruses in a random order; it’s dull, tedious and uninspiring and rarely takes into account the reader at all let alone the idea that you might want to thrill, excite or humour them.

I also don’t enjoy writing. I like talking. I like talking through an idea and adjusting, reassessing and rearticulating as the conversation goes on. I also like public speaking, where I can sort of walk through an idea and literally see if it works or makes sense. And again (millennial, patience-starved brain) writing is a deeply inefficient way of communicating. Caveat: I appreciate the irony of writing a blog almost every week for 10 years but I try to make this as ‘me’ as possible; certainly not academic writing in order to make the ‘eat your greens first’ logic of why I do it at least stomach-able.

There are a handful of people I know who really like research and writing (you know who you are, reader) and PhD-like things but to me, it is an lifeless, boring, arduous, archaic and thankless chore the aim of which is to make all the interesting things you like talking and thinking about conform to the formalities of institutional legitimacy.

That’s not an excuse for not doing it. I’m perfectly content to do tedious things that need to be done and understand that they need doing, but I get no thrill or excitement out of this project 95% of the time and people who do baffle me. It is very much type two fun.

On theory and practice.

Design academics love to back-and-forth on theory and practice. For not bad reasons. Design (whatever you think of it) is fundamentally about making stuff, and as you’re making stuff you’re thinking about what you’re making and so the theory/practice debate is well, how do you capture that and show it’s impact? In short. But then stretch that out for multi-year conferences.

Part of this is about legitimisation: Design is relatively new to academicisation and there’s no real mechanism established to evaluate the weight, rigour or appropriateness of a ‘thing’ when they can take so many forms. I’m very familiar with this because I spent so long in the old job trying to hammer design into academic frameworks. But the baby Jesus gave us conference papers and PhDs and so designers make their things, then write about it in papers and PhDs and academics then know whether it was good or not.

So in 2016-2019 I was very busy making things and most of those things (Augury, Finite State Fantasia, Charismatic Megapigment etc.) are things I made to think about the subject of the PhD but I still haven’t really figured out how they fit in and how to relate them. Also, as noted above (On Bad Habits and Feeling Old) the technology has shifted to become almost unrecognisable in the last few years and a lot of those projects look very dated which gives me 0.3106 anxiety about the validity of the practice to the subject of the study. Which is annoying because I was sort of banking on having done most of the practice and most of the rest of this thing about being tying everything together.

I mentioned earlier the methodology is pretty strong. It uses Frayling (no surprises) to say that making things is a way of producing knowledge backed up with Borgdorff (which is great and who has a similar framework) to sort of say that this is done serendipitously; that as we make stuff we come across new things and then have to think about those new things. It’s basically a good chunk of ‘here’s what I mean by design research’ and is pretty solid tbf but could maybe use a diagram.

What’s the plan?

First: I have everything of relevance I’ve read since 2016 in Zotero and I’ll be honest, I can’t remember a lot of it. So the weekend and mornings this week were spent crawling through it all, reviewing the highlights and trying to tag and classify with a view of getting to a literature review or map of the field that I’m looking at and importantly, an acknowledgement of what I’m not looking at. This is important because it’s easy to drift off into data ethics, or governance or whatever and so being clear to myself what’s directly relevant and what’s tangential is important.

Second: Continue cracking through reading two or three articles a day. The rate of stuff published is just insane and I need to keep staying on top of it as I’m writing not doing one of the other.

Three: Start refactoring round two into the new version. This won’t need significant change but just a careful picking through of the bits that are ok (like the methodology) and starting to piece together things like a literature review as well as iterating over the chapter I had made a good crack at before Covid. I also want to change the tone of it. I have tried to write academically you know and I don’t like it. I’m going to write like me.

Four: Abstract. I need to pin this down. I know last week I promised you that but I need the clear brief for myself what am I doing, how, why. I find this incredibly easy when teaching and helping others to pin down their thesis or even now in work pinning down project briefs but this is so close *hand in front of nose gesture* that it’s really hard to see and I need to get on it.

So those are the four targets this week. Not too tricky I don’t think.

No Short Stuff this week because well I was doing other things. Like the above. Speak next week, love you, thanks for your help.