On the day I last posted to the blog – 28th July 2023 – I began work on a 10,000 word research article in response to peer-reviewed acceptance of my abstract submitted back in April for a very important conference of relevance and interest. The deadline for submission is the end of the month, but as “luck” would have it, I am giving a 20 minute talk on another – different – abstract accepted in the student track of a conference in Switzerland on the day of the deadline.
“What is to be done?” must acknowledge the force of writing, its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productive matrix which defines the ‘social’ and makes it available as an objective of and for, action. (Bhabha, Homi K.)
Less than 48 hours ago, I put my metaphorical pen down and sent the paper off to be read by a couple of people intimately familiar with my work. I’ll pick it up for a final edit this weekend, no more revisions and template it for submission. The journey of development of ideas, concepts, thinking, and worldview in these two short weeks has been transformative; and so I find myself here to reflect upon this, using the blog as I always do, for pondering my thoughts out loud. Keep in mind I have another 40,000 words to go.
This journey began just over 3 years ago, right after the global pandemic of Covid-19 was universally acknowledged and governments around the world imposed restrictions and measures to contain disease. Its a journey of relationship in a time of social isolation, intermediated by technology, across boundaries of distance, disease and demographics. I have far fewer teeth since then, a side effect of the vaccine combination and its impact on congenital chronic periodontitis, incurable but manageable until the novel technologies for battling infection decided to take full spectrum action. Do not ask me to smile widely. I would shame myself. Replacement and recovery is another long journey I must undertake when the time is right.
What moved me to write today was the realization that these ten thousand words were the culmination of a deliberate journey which I began on this blog in March 2021, and that made it worth noting on here with the dates and times stamped for my own posterity. In these past two or so week, if I found myself struggling during the writing, it was more to do with crafting a research paper that I hope will provide one of the pillars for my dissertation thesis, a compilation one. Thus I spent time working and reworking the arguments with the caveat that I might create another version of this argument for a different body of discourse. What I didn’t struggle with was the writing itself, neither the flow of writing nor the academese I am expected to use. In fact, I surprised myself by picking up the flavour of the writing used by the scholars in this particular discourse within a week or so of prior reading in order to situate my work. I am challenged in this by my disciplinary crossing field of study.
That I can write academically crafted arguments at all is the result of the time and I effort I invested on this blog to practice and learn exactly that. And, once I had “unlearned the past to create the future” (Prahalad, 2009 speech published in the Times of India) I found myself writing at the pace I have long been accustomed to for my commissioned projects. Once, of course, the analysis and synthesis of the mixed methods data that I had immersed myself in for their problems and challenges was complete. That part of the process was always the most difficult one for me, and one which I always felt the pressure of time. Clients, unlike the academy, cannot offer you more than a handful of weeks, at the most, to digest and process what might be datasets equivalent to dissertation studies in their own right.
I am metaphorically flexing my fingers as they type the music of my keyboard, ready for the next paper and two – they are both formed empirically speaking and simply require crafting. After a long long time of silence from the perspective of peer-reviewed publications, I am actually at the point where the gestation period is over and the words flow. If I had pursued the direction I paused in August last year, I do not believe that the quality of my work would be wholly reflective of its own inherent capacity – both in terms of the richness embedded in the datasets I used for this first 10,000 words – and in the shaping of the final dissertation. That is still plastic but not as elastic as it used to be. On the other hand it has never felt as right to me as it does today that the direction I am now taking and the path I’m on is wholly and substantially correct. This would not have happened without the creative explorations over the past year with my non-profit and the two master’s thesis completed successfully under its aegis. New worlds have been born.
But they could only be born when one has finally clambered up to the shoulders of giants. At which moment of time last year in August my world began to change, I do not know. The blog feels sparse when one attempts recollected reflection. On the other hand, one can already see the earliest seeds of the strands of thinking which have woven themselves together over the 12 months gone by since then. I do not know where and how these twists and turns would have taken me without the pandemic’s arrival in my second semester of study. I do know however that even before I had applied for doctoral study I expected a) to be transformed by the process, in my thinking and worldview at the very least, and b) that I would only know where I was going after 2 to 3 years had passed. That is, my own experience as a practicing design professional had intuitively made me aware of the time it takes for clarity to come to fruition. The hypothesis that lead me tend to be based on a synthesis of observations of patterns in a complex system; informed intuition developed over the decades of professional practice; and the sheer experience of numerous cross-disciplinary knowledge production commissions and their outcome development process.
My doctoral study has followed the generic design process, best described by Damien Newman’s squiggle drawn in response to a blogpost of mine back in August 2006 when I first began exploring the interstitial spaces between design, engineering, and business.
