The difference between flow and dissatisfaction in collective (visual) action

It would be nice if learning didn’t involve dissatisfaction, but in my experience at least, it usually does. If I were to qualify that, I would add that it involves dissatisfaction and being moved, both being poles (perhaps) of sense. I am making sense of visual-material methods, and their application in public sector (health and care) contexts. 

My prompt for this post is both dissatisfaction and being moved, each coming from a different place, and both useful stimuli for learning, as it happens. I start with the dissatisfaction, which is probably unfair, because it’s not dissatisfaction with the actual work on visual-material methods, but a feeling that something - however briefly - stagnated. I know I’m being unfair to myself, but hey, you have to work with what comes up. Over the last two or three years, I have been delighted to work in a range of public sector contexts to develop visual-material approaches, techniques and methods. You might have seen some of these moments:

...but I have become attuned to the exact moment when it seems like I am reproducing them. When I start to reproduce, or even face the prospect of this (which is more likely the case) my research-creation feels stale. I have an in-built alarm for reproduction, that is, churning the same stuff out. I can’t do it in teaching or research. That is not to say I am a creative genius, only that I function best when I am driven by genuine curiosity, in relationship with others and where there is a prospect of something new emerging. I got the feeling of reproduction from my contribution to a particular online meeting. Nothing big, just the sense that I was performing as expected, going through the motions, running the agenda. That started a sense of dissatisfaction. 

Anyway, moving from the unnecessary self-blame, I found some counter inspiration, as I returned to a magnificent book written by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and first published in 2014 -  Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. 

In this book, Manning and Massumi cover lots of ground, including insightful reflection on the development of the SenseLab project, initially based in Montreal, Canada. Here, I use it as a reflective provocation for my own work, not to duplicate it, but to see what patterns of diffraction might come about as I throw my own experience in its way. My aim is to destabilise any sense of routine, reproduction and predictability in my work, so that my research, writing and teaching practice can remain fresh, useful and new. Not perfect. 

So, I start with the material I have just re-read in Thought in the Act, and in particular in Part 2: Propositions. I am not (right now) interested in a review or summary, I am pragmatically crashing myself into this work, to see what resonates and catalyses. The only context you need without reading the text is to know that Manning and colleagues, based at the Society for Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal, sought to discover what a form of research-creation could look like if it was based on interactions that avoided the paradigm of ‘communication’ or ‘application’, associated with the reproduction of outputs and transmission of passive content.

What they developed, through collaborative success and failure of artists and philosophers, was a research-creation alternative to this communication/application paradigm normally associated with academic or creative ‘centres’. I simply note some of the features that hit me on this reading, starting diffractive patterns in my own practice. You will pick up some of their shorthand, but also a sense of their work, which I follow with some concluding thoughts:

* The collective wanted to explore new forms of collaborative interaction. 

* They asked: what “Initial Conditions” are necessary to enable emergence.

* They wanted their events to be just that, not delivery of pre-determined conclusions. Events as collective thinking that game rise to new thoughts through new interactions on-site. 

* The technique of research-creation replaced those of ‘communication’ or ‘application’ (as previously noted).

* Events needed to bring something new to participants’ practices on the level of “techniques of relation”, or techniques for joining their practices to another. Such techniques of relation were focused on catalysing and modulating interaction between members.  This was recognised as a domain of practice in its own right. 

* To achieve this, the diverse collective (not their term) developed “enabling constraints” which were opportunities for creative participation in their events. These constraints conditioned interactions as opposed to “framing” them. Enabling constraints “modulated” the event as it moved through its phases.

* Interestingly (as I have found), the group found that simply “letting things flow” as unconstrained interaction lacked what was termed “rigour”, “intensity” and “interest”. Conditions were needed to promote “co-generation of effects”. These included asking participants NOT to present already-completed work, and for participants to read the same philosophical texts as a primer. 

* Participants were encouraged to prepare what came to be termed “platforms of relation” elements of (intra) activity which could later be organised in relation to others, forming the structure of the workshops. Activities would focus on initial conditions, enabling constraints and “strategic incompleteness”. 

* Activity in groups resisted the traditional “reporting” task that small groups are so often asked to do. Instead of description or “reportage”, participants were encouraged to focus on sharing work in “capsule” form, retaining performative force so that they “activated” further actions, and did not passively describe progress to other participants. 

* Practically, events were carefully planned, including the experience of entering and settling in - they talked about a “hospitable estrangement” which would “disable participants’ habitual presuppositions” (p.98) without deconstructing participants attachments to role, status and so on too quickly. 

* Failure, importantly, was seen as a generative force - acting as a prompt for participants to explore the limits of what can be thought / created in particular contexts. 

* After playing with disrupting participants expected contributions (in order partly to generate something new), the group considered what could be done with incomplete ‘platforms for relation’ that were stopped, or not put into action. Thought was put into how such elements could be disseminated, and focused on the concept of the gift, and later, emissaries from groups as activity became distributed geographically. 

* The idea of having a “process seed bank” emerged later. This was less about the content of an activity, as  it was considered that an “events’ relational force cannot be reproduced. It remains, always, a singular movement” (p.115). As such, processes were things that set initial conditions, modulated interactions as events unfolded and had what was termed “velocity” and an “arc”, like Paul Klee’s lines, which could be “iteratively reactivated” to different effects. 

This is a list of what was useful to be, what connected and the material (as I say) that I ‘crashed myself’ into, to see what diffractive patterns emerged. I noticed the tension in my practice between constraint and enabling, and liked the idea of enabling constraints. I noticed that when I felt tired, stuck in a rut, or disconnected (easy enough in COVID-19 times!) from people, I ended up over-structuring, or relying on bureaucracy. I have to remain present and connected in order to keep the creative tension.  I liked the way that the SenseLab paid attention to process, and carefully built in explicit agreements and techniques to reflect philosophical principles.

My work has a different context. I span boundaries of art/philosophy and social care/health and working class communities. How did this material meet my dissatisfaction? Reading about the work of SenseLab, I felt hope, and interest in, the ability to use structure, techniques, incompleteness. I liked the idea of groups or people interacting (possibly at a distance, given our new normal), and activating or continuing what others start. I felt relieved that my contribution was not to be the expert in content (seductive, as I am familiar with the content) but to balance those initial conditions, ongoing enabling constraints and the ‘back and forth’ of becoming together within diverse and distributed communities of interest, place or experience. I saw much that resonated in my work with others, but felt prompted to write out a draft - incomplete - manifesto of sorts, that could be taken up with others and would connect to a toolbox of techniques and tools. 

Onwards.

It’s about refining through doing (card game 2.2)

A short post. This one is to reflect on the importance of refining through doing. Great tools often start, for me, with something that is a ‘hook’ - something enjoyable, pleasurable or that makes me curious. I get these ideas by being open to a diverse set of inspirations - origami, literature, art, or in this case, card or board games. The next step is important, however, and that is to refine the ideas. I need to do that with others, to give then context and put them in relationship with people. That has been (is) so true of this latest project, which I have blogged about previously. 

See the latest version (still in development) and you will see refinements that have come from context and relationship. The wonderful spin off is that I will be adapting them for both teaching and research activities online especially, and that is very rewarding. 

I will be putting this out to share and adapt, with a Creative Commons license. 

V2.1 card game to move from describing elements > storying > critical narrating

Following my previous post, here is more of the ‘work in progress’ - I have represented three ‘stages’ in the activity:

1. Each student collects or creates cards as they read, participate, look at the shared online gallery, and hear lectures. Element cards could have ‘top trump’ style descriptive boxes, so students can’t simply add a care that says ‘theory’ To their collection without being able to summarise key aspects of it (focus, assumptions, scale, historical context, intended application etc.)

1.1 Element cards can be discussed singly (‘show and tell’), or combined to talk about relations (theory<>policy, societal mood<>oppressed groups, Policy<>tools etc.)

2. Once we have enough cards (by selecting from the gallery, or creating our own) we can begin to make the story. We can think of this story board as ‘key events’. It might work well to create and narrate this story in small groups online, or in a larger group with the tutor or nominated student as the ‘dealer’!

3. Once we have an agreed story, we create a set of authors’ notes. Using the purple prompt cards at the top, we choose to say (argue?) some things. This is the narrative that could develop into an academic essay. 

Note: this is an example that could be used in one of my modules on Social Policy, or Collaboration in Children’s Services...but might work as well for ANY topic that depends on building up knowledge and perspectives from individual elements to critically reflective narrative. I also plan to use this in a proposal module on research methods, where the elements could be paradigm, methodology, methods etc. 

Comments and ideas welcome on this work in progress - you can see the graphic does not have ‘user notes’ on it yet; the left hand side has space for those!

Pages from my notebook: teaching (Online) with cards

No apologies - this is a work in progress. As I look forward to the start of a new academic year, albeit facing challenges created by COVID-19, my mind has been turning to how my teaching methods can adapt to give students the best possible environment in which to enquire and learn. I am building on experiments in various directions - see some examples, below. 

In this case, however, I am going full NERD. I love card and table top games, including variants on Role Playing Games. As I thought of things I could do with my students, and things they could do ‘at a distance’, I thought of card-based games. Card games have been used, and studied, in pedagogical literature, but all I will say is that their discussion and application can be a little specialised. I wanted to take the key features of card based gaming, and make the most of their ability to structure a process, to help me teach and help students enquire and learn. The text below is taken from my note book, and is a work in progress. See what you think. 

Objectives:

• To engage students in subjects they may feel intimidated or ambivalent about. 

• To encourage students’ participation in teaching and learning activities, especially when learning asynchronously and at a distance. 

• To help students to construct academic submissions that add complexity, reflexivity and nuance to initial ideas. 

• To incorporate sensory, aesthetic and poetic elements in traditionally ‘stale’ social science topics.

This teaching idea builds on work that I have done in higher education and social research. Previous examples include a Childhood and Early Years Studies booklet providing visual scenes with reflective questions as ‘ways in’ to so-called ‘difficult topics’, a School Space tool which helped looked after young people talk about how to feel safe through selecting statements, and a dice activity that generated critically reflective questions for Children’s Services professionals. All three (and many more) share some common features: 

• All activities are easy to ‘start’ with a prompt question or simply a response to artefacts in front of people. 

• All these activities, in different ways, materialise thinking (i.e. they made thinking visible through artefacts and images).

• The activities are, in different ways, practical, exploratory and sensory - that is they incorporate heuristic / playful elements.

• They involve selection (e.g. of elements of an image, of artefacts) and choice.

• They make the process of constructing meaning explicit, and structure it, so participants can reflect or narrate.

• They make enquiry a shared activity, as artefacts become shared objects of reflection and action. 

I want to continue to take these ideas and combine their most effective elements (as I see it). Ideally, I am designing a flexible framework for learning that can be adapted. To help me do this, I am thinking of two different courses I will be teaching in the second semester of academic year 2020/21 (January-May 2021), one being a third year (UK level 6) undergraduate course on Leadership and Collaboration in Children’s Services, and the other a second year (UK level 5) undergraduate course which supports students to develop a research proposal. These are useful courses to design this activity for, as I have found that students perceive (and face) challenges linked to circumstances such as:

• The subjects are new to students, prompting a range of emotions or placing students in a range of ‘positions’ relative to the subject that are not conducive to participation and learning. These include: feeling intimidated, feeling ambivalent or disconnected, or confused by the amount of content. 

• Studying modules whilst doing ‘other things’ - an enhanced sense of distraction linked to anxiety, semester two workload, part time work or care responsibilities or, currently dramatic changes to the teaching and learning environment linked to COVID-19.

It is with these two challenges in mind, as well as wanting to build on previous developments I now think of this particular idea. I have been interested in how educators can adapt game mechanisms to teaching and learning activities, partly because many types of games address the sorts of features I have listed previously (e.g. thinking is made visible, there are shared objects of attention, selection and personalisation is often a feature). I also am thinking very much of students who may feel isolated and ambivalent about my third year module, and want to support their engagement and confidence in it as much as possible. 

The idea in development

In summary:

• Students select, personalise and construct cards that are raw materials, inspiring a ‘story’. The cards, then, are the ‘actors’ or ‘elements’ (human and non-human) in a developing scenario.

• Different categories of ‘element cards’ will include people, policy, actions and  places. Using these cards helps students think about the situated and applied nature of the ideas and issues they want to focus on. They also support active relating of theory and practice elements. 

• Each card will have descriptive categories that need completing (think of Top Trumps, or role playing games involving cards) - so students do not simply have a card saying the name of a theory (for example) but they should add characteristics in prompted fields. So, for a particular theory card, fields might be things like; historical context, focus, key claim, questions asked. For a professional actor card, fields might include; focus, priorities, knowledge, approach...and so on. 

• The cards are created / collected week by week as the course progresses. This can be a collective effort if I can create a shared library of such cards on my e-learning platform (BlackBoard Ultra). So as students learn (independently, or via taught sessions) about what ‘things’ feature in the topic, they can build their set. 

• At the start of the module, students are presented with a ‘starter set’ of cards to illustrate each category.

• The growing collection of cards will not automatically configure into a story, so students are presented with a storyboard tool which provides a place to layout their cards (“who or what is important”) and a (several?) basic plot structures, as well as a template that would allow them to create their own.

• This modular structure (individual cards, a scenario of multiple categories, then a storyboard / plot structure) allows students to (literally) collect and build up their understanding, and to fit this together in increasingly complex ways, i.e: 1) individual cards, 2) multiple (and increasingly complex) combinations of cards, 3) plot or scenario structures, THEN 4) authors’ narration. 

• Stage 4 is the point at which students begin to shape up their academic argument, as narrative cards (added last) describe, explain, justify, theorise, argue, defend and so on. These provide the authors’ voice and critical argument. 

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Affirming the visual-material: taking (theoretical) stock, finding an argument that works

Progress. This post was NOT written at 2.30am. It’s a rehearsal for a series of papers-in-development, about “the visual” and social research, and it builds on the crisis-induced stocktake that was my previous post. This post gets down to the job of constructing a workable theoretical framing, by considering what visual-material methods are, and how I can affirm their substantial position (my) social research (and why I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the label “methods” as a result).

Note: I use the term “visual-material” methods instead of simply visual methods because I am talking about images and things, drawing and materials, ‘artefacts’ that have substance.

1. Much work with “visual methods” is (both intentionally and unintentionally) decorative, instrumental or focused exclusively on novelty. People often ‘like’ visual methods because they are ‘nice’ or make things more interesting. If we mean harmless, pleasant, decorative, then nice is not good. The next step up is to take a more instrumental view, along the lines of ‘visual methods are good for eliciting qualitative data’. I have a little more time for this view, but my PROBLEM is the relegation of methods as a tool, something that gets the “real” work done, i.e. the “data collected”. We might say that we don’t really take a positivist view of data, that we know methods are not invisible, but do we/I practice what we/I preach?

2. Visual-material methods are not neutral. I say that visual-material methods are active, generative materials, not window dressing, or a style for some other substance. I say that they have an interesting, multi-dimensional status - they can “be” several things at the same time and can connect diverse things in new ways (e.g. including, but also beyond logical-rational relationships). I still like (existential) phenomenologists (e.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, or  Jean-Luc Marion’s) ideas that the arts (including painting) are something to be ‘encountered’ in an active sense, are work with us to cause is to see (ourselves) through strangeness, analogy, metaphor and so on. However, I’m not sure the existential argument goes far enough. Encounters, yes, hermeneutics also, but I’m not sure the visual-material as mimesis of something else, towards something else is much more than method, even if - granted - it’s a much more acceptable, active method.

3. We need an affirmative and substantial view of visual-material “methods”. What’s the alternative to decoration, or even space for encounter? My line of thinking is as follows. If visual-material methods are to be “more than method”, this requires - ultimately - to challenge the subject-object relationship between method and data. We might accept that methods ‘influence’ the data in a social constructionist sense, but I’m wondering if that’s not much of an (epistemological) shift. Instead, what if we challenged the artificial separation of methods-methodology-theory-data that we are keen to segregate in our desire for ‘rigour’ and so on? What if we took seriously that each ‘contact’ with the data changed the data? What if data only becomes accessible to us in and through our means of seeing?

4. The time has come for methods ‘like’ the visual-material. I suspect I will have to refine this argument, but this grand statement is my way of saying that the characteristics of advanced capitalism produce some messy effects. Human life is entangled with technologies and their metrics and global issues such as climate change and stateless people are issues that cross boundaries. These things (and more) drive complex, contradictory scenarios in which people become new, fractured, hybrid  subjects, and specific groups experience marginalisation, and inequality. In the face of complexity, ambiguity, multi-speed and multi-scale issues all at play together, leaving traditional research methods appearing ill-equipped. I’m going to suggest that visual-material methods represent a type of method that have the potential to speak to this situation. Given my last blog post about my theoretical nomadism and the journey I have been on to find a home for my research practice, I therefore am ‘trying out’ PostHumanism as a conceptual frame to argue this.

5. PostHumanism is an ideal ground for the future of visual-material methods. I admit, I have resisted reading much about PostHumanism, as I assumed it was a pendulum swing against the human, and given that all my work is about relationships, I didn’t have time for (what I saw as) theoretical pretentiousness and first world / middle class anxieties which might be hard to apply in working class communities. I’m shifting my position now. Without giving a lengthy summary of PostHumanism here (which I’m not qualified to write, being new to the game) I will point out a few simplified features, as I understand them, which make it an ideal ground for (my) visual-material methods:

• Restricting our ‘unit of analysis’ to the individual human, community or society is a flawed decision. Human activity is not “solely” human. ‘Human’ identity, activity and agency is intimately connected to, and co-constituted by much that is not ‘human’: computers, algorithms, objects, spaces, cartographic lines and more.
• ‘Human’ projects are more-than-human projects: global warming, income inequality, what and how we eat, mental health...the list goes on. Unfamiliar as it may seem, a key to moving towards connected solutions is to refine the relatedness of the world through a complex, diverse, but single immanent-material system. This is not simple monism; a single, unified, homogeneous unit, but a messy entanglements and patterns of people and (many) things. 
• We see things less as individual ‘units’ (as markets require) than lines, processes, collectives, patterns: things that emerge and become. ‘Becoming’ replaces the individual human as an ethical and productive unit of enquiry. We could say: relationships, not things. 
• Affect is something shared, passed through, transmitted, and the opposite to individual autonomy. Once we take affect seriously, we can take up Braidotti’s (2019) call for “an intensive form of trans-disciplinarity and boundary-crossing among a range of discourses” (p.28), or, I say, a concern with following lines into all the places they go. [For more on this, see my previous post on Deleuze, diagrams, mapping, stacking and folding.]
• The consequence of all these points can be heightened anxiety, but more importantly, can be a desire to affirm that which is different, affective and relational (Braidotti, 2019: 11, 34) through a desire to act; an ethical praxis. Humans and their relationships are not lost, but enhanced, viewed with a concern for diversity, relatedness and ethics, rather than commodification and exploitation.

6. If we take these points seriously, the purpose, status and substance of methods must be revised to be relevant. I focus on the connected, the in-between, the processes of becoming, and start with some of Braidotti’s (2019) calls for action, responding to her call for “conceptual creativity” (p.34) and to develop a material (practical) “plane of encounter for multiple differentiated positions” (p.38). I note some principles in a move towards an affirmative view of the visual-material:

• Visual-material methods are not some neutral ‘other’ relegated to the role of novel decoration, illustration or even way of elicitation. They materialise the flow and connection of forces that connect as we engage. 
• They come loaded with potential, and offer to re-imagine, rather than represent. They are part of the act of relating: a generative, productive act, affirming the human-with.
• Visual-material methods achieve this by making strange and turning the traditional subject, and by (re)animating situations, (think of ethnographic study or performance, rather than a still life study). 
• They can fore-ground that which is excluded, marginalised, edited out and prohibited under homogenous and oppressive regimes of power. 
• Visual-material methods therefore become active in the research site, acting back on situations and co-producing ‘data’. Their persistence allows for different sorts of encounters, work-with, and new forms to emerge. They can be challenging and insistent. 
• Their ambiguity allows for exploration and holding of tensions, contradictions, negative spaces and give form to what is traditionally not described in research. 

The down side to theoretical nomadism (towards a way of talking about visual methods and practice)

Disclaimer: I wrote this at 2.30am, because these thoughts were in my head. I am in a process of re-writing, so read at your peril! - You may find this helpful if you struggle to articulate your theoretical points of reference. 

I need to find a way forward with an article that is convincing and do-able. An article with a long history of crashing and re-booting. 

I can see the need to pull together some coherent thinking, given that the article has been developed over a long time and incrementally, for different audiences. 

On one hand. I can see an opportunity here - I potentially have a few articles on the timeline which would benefit from a similar foundation. ...and I don’t have a solid theoretical foundation for the thing that I have found myself wanting to write about. 

This ‘thing’ - the common thread through lots of my work - is to do with the agency of the visual-material in practices. In this case, it’s the process of Sensemaking. I want to talk about perspective change, reflection / reflexivity, the ‘doing’ of things and finding ways to connect and collaborate (both in terms of people/systems, but also the development of narratives). 

I think part of my challenge has come about because I have been eclectic in my choice of inspirations for thinking about practice and visual-material methods. My PhD gave me a hermeneutic perspective (initially via Paul Ricoeur), and that connected me to a thread of literature about phenomenology, mimesis self and narrative. This connected me to existential material from Heidegger and Gadamer, where I connected to reference points around the life-world, being-in-the-world (Dasein), things being to hand, encounters, shared horizons and the like. 

I have traveled nomadically and heuristically, not paying much attention to the logic or implications of the epistemological ‘jumps’ I have made in moving from one body of literature to another. This was demonstrated again through further theoretical ‘turns’ I have made whilst looking for material on how people get things done, how we engage with the world, and the role of the visual. 

Next came forms of (or cousins of) practice theorisation - attractive because it gave me a framework within which to integrate different sorts of things. On reflection, this has been such an interest to me because I want to settle on a perspective that is satisfying both theoretically and practically. It has to be useful, but must make sense ontologically and epistemologically. In (versions of) practice theory, I can think about patterns of things that come together at certain places and times. Familiar patterns that can be improvised, but which are altered as the elements are altered. 

At the same time - writing this helps me see why I get so confused! - I have found really interesting motifs and images in post structural work, initially of Deleuze. I could not have jumped around more if I had tried. As an artist, the ability to move beyond and between traditional boundaries has felt useful; I don’t define myself as a scholar or expert of “a discipline”, but someone who wants to put ideas to work pragmatically. So - a focus on flows, becomings, emergence, diagrams, maps, rhizomes and lines of flight has been another way to connect “things” in situations. 

This sort of heuristic and nomadic development of ideas over the last ten years or so has given me the ability to have LOTS of different conversations, to change perspective, to ask questions. What it has also done is thoroughly confuse my academic writing. I now see that if I had landed on one idea and mined that in a persistent, rigorous and thorough way, I would be publishing more articles (a better “publishing machine”).

Am I putting too much pressure on myself - of course - BUT at this point, facing the need to have a more coherent and developed paradigm to write within, I can take the opportunity to settle on a framework (not the only, but one at least) that I can shore up. 

I return to the topic(s) that I keep coming back to - shared activity, meaning-making and the visual-material - in the context of wellbeing, professional practice and children’s services. Or, to put it in a shorter way, visual methods and collaborative practices. 

If I expect to summarise a synthesis of all the theoretical perspectives above, that isn’t possible. I didn’t connect with them because they had logical connections, but because I was looking for people who talked about experience, change, activity in the world and aesthetics. I have written something recently Silvia Gherardi’s relational-materialism. This was satisfying for me because it was a form of practice theory that was about materiality and affect. It’s getting me closer to a territory I feel I could create something more robust about. I struggle with the tension of needing to develop ‘ rigour’ and wanting to journey and connect things nomadically. I hate snobbish implications from reviewers who pick up the amateurish aspects of my thinking. I would hate to be an “expert” but I want to journey with questions. However, to publish, I’ve got to make sense. I can’t publish questions or present drawings alone!

My next step, for an article I am doing a complete re-write of (familiar theme), is to connect Sensemaking, professional stories and visual-material methods through a new materialist / posthuman frame that focuses on affect and inter-action. I want to find a way of talking about acting with others AND the visual-material. I don’t want to create an intellectual project, I just want a way of saying “See! This is what I’m talking about! These things!” In a way that won’t get blown out of the water for being inconsistent, lacking rigour and so on. 

Next steps: Gherardi, Braidotti and a relational-material ‘place’ in which I can talk acting together and the agency of the visual within that. 

This is why I got up at 2.30am to write this, and may regret that.

The “Post and Return” method - an example of making meaning, together, with things.

How can a fold out object help people think and talk?

Isn’t it great when you get to use ideas that have been in your head for a while? Over the last year, I’ve populated my Pinterest Board with images of origami, folding and card structures for no other reason than I find them fascinating: but those images have found their moment. Over the last year, I’ve done LOTS of work with images and objects to help people think and talk; and of course, the Global COVID-19 Pandemic has forced us all to think about how we talk and think ‘at a distance’. So, back to paper, literally.

As my sketches in this post attempt to show, I returned to why ‘things’ are so important in thinking. I was inspired by the idea of receiving something (the philosopher Paul Ricoeur talked about gift giving in fascinating terms, for example), something that showed care and could be personalised. I thought about the sort of research partnerships I wanted to develop, in this case with parents of young children, and I knew that any research ‘at a distance’ would have to reflect ideas of care, nurture, crafting and personalisation.

Senses and Interactions are important

Over thirty years of work with children, young people and professionals (I know!), one of the simplest, but most useful insights I have developed is that looking at things and handling things REALLY helps us talk and think individually, and together.

We use a wide range of experiences to “think” about things. Before we are born, we “make sense” of the world through our senses and interactions, and as we get older, we still rely on our senses and interactions to problem solve, work out what is going on, and decide what things mean to us and others. This can be quite a tricky task - no wonder we need all the information we can get!

Before we have a well crafted story to tell about “what’s going on” we wade through LOTS of environmental information. We have to sift through so much information, but our brains and bodies are really quite good at this (sometimes in different ways). We find ways of making sense of the world and (inter) acting with it - some people have called them schemas. If think of how you make sense of things you will probably recognise your own patterns (or schemas) of sense making. Before you have the slick explanation and plan for action, you will have do all sorts of things almost without “thinking” in the traditional conscious sense - things like gazing, moving, mark-making, handling, sorting and grouping, right through to things that ‘look’ more like conscious thought, like annotating or note taking.

Imagine receiving something. I can imagine for most of us, there might be some curiosity - especially if the ‘thing’ didn’t look like a marketing circular, or a bill. I wanted to build on that as part of a wider, multi-channel research methodology, but the “Send and Return” method developed as a part of that.

Look at the graphic below: here’s some quick notes on what a crafted object (in this case, a fold out interactive visual) could do, and why.

There is something about the act and experience of giving and receiving that is fascinating. We all experience this at times of celebration; there are so many interesting and pleasurable moments in both giving and receiving. What if we utilised this in research, even research at a distance? The ‘back and forth’ of pen pal letters (if you are under a certain age, you won’t appreciate that) builds a sense of intimacy that a tick box or cold call could create. Together with other methods, I wondered if I could build up a shared story or picture with my research partners, being experts in their own experience and family life. You can see some early thinking I’ve had below for a current project, below.

HOW we ask questions matters. Authors like James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium explain this in constructivist terms - that is, the “data” we look for is not “collected” but is constructed in the process of interactions. What we ask, how we ask it, who we are, where we are all matter, as they co-construct the data. So, I began to develop the “Post and Return” method as a a conversation. This conversation begins with me showing something, incomplete, but inviting. Research partners are invited to show me what the topic looks like for them. See my early note on this, below.

Asking research partners to “show me” something of their lived experience needs more than a blank page. As much as I’d like to get a fold out origami through the post, it won’t become a meaningful conversation if I don’t have anything to say, or any way for people to express themselves. The detail is critical - both what and how much. There has to be a connection between what I want to appreciate and what research partners want to tell me. Gadamer’s concept of the shared horizon of experience is a useful reference here. The thing I ask must connect to a recognisable aspect of lived experience, and also must invite a response. I want people to interact, from the moment of unfolding the origami right through to sending a completed one back through the post. This is also about thinking carefully about what I am asking participants to do - not too simplistic, but not to complex.

For me, my emerging “Post and Return” method is derived from a core set of principles, the same ones I draw on to run whole system events, create graphic narratives or to teach at University. I see it as one making of the principles, and it will be shaped with those I use it with, as we make meaning together.


[NB. I’ve been on a great journey since my last blog post ONE YEAR ago, but no apologies, as I’ve been busy doing the work. I’ve had the pleasure of working with academic colleagues and professional partners in Health, Social Care and Education to develop and ‘test drive’ a range of methods. You can follow me on Twitter (@ianrobsons) to find out things as they happen.]