So what?
When you first start a PhD and you’re figuring out your question, you have to think about who this is going to impact and why. In the early days of my research, the issue of ‘why research this subject’ was framed quite bluntly:
So what?
I think about this question all the time. It haunts me. I think it particularly haunts me because of my place as a practitioner-researcher - purposefully put in that order. I am a designer, or an artist, or whatever you want to call what I do - a maker - first; researcher second. One of the things I wrestle with is not just ‘so what’ of the specific research question, but the ‘so what’ of the research at all. I seem, at the moment anyway, to spend a lot of time thinking about how the research is going to be viewed - or more specifically, how it’s going to benefit other practitioners - people like me.
What kind of academically acceptable framework would I, as a practitioner, look at and think “ah yeah I’m going to apply that to my work”? I don’t know. When I think of taxonomies of play, or models for reflection, I see theory and data put into something that doesn’t really demonstrate to me its actual practicable nature. It’s mostly interesting, and useful for research, but how much use is it to a creative practitioner? Would I see a Conceptual Framework for Playfulness in animation and think - yes! That’s it! Or is it more likely I would look at it and not really take any of that information in?
Part of the issue is about what the information looks like. Looking at a framework designed in Microsoft Word feels like every other model or framework designed for academia - gray, and, whilst the content might be of value, kind of boring; or, worse, incomprehensible. This is how I felt when looking at Nguyen et al’s Reflective Model from my last post - I know I would find this useful, but this diagram makes this hard to connect with. Similar to Scott Eberle’s un-animated model for play, which doesn’t feel particularly playful at all.
Does it need to, though? These models are not meant to manifest the feelings or experiences they are researching. They are designed to visually describe and represent them. But Eberle and Nguyen et al.’s models both feel like they’re made for academics, not for practitioners actually looking to embed their work in practice. I think what I’m talking about here is - how do you make the ideas relatable? And not only that, but practicable?
Maybe that’s my main concern with my own research right now - that the ideas and the research I’m doing, that I see huge potential value in, they’re just not relatable in their current form. Finding Play, I suppose, was partly an attempt to deal with that. In that animated short, the character stops looking for play elsewhere and instead finds their own playfulness in themselves; that notion is a key element of my research. but Finding Play felt relatively indirect - it demonstrated one practicable element of playfulness, but in a broad sense, through metaphor, and not directly to creative practitioners.
And that’s the point about ‘So what?’. It’s not just about why practitioners should care; it’s about how to make them care. In the first instance, ‘so what?’ refers to the initial question for the research: there is no literature than demonstrates the value of plork in animation practice and pedagogy. So what? So, animators are missing out on the potential to engage more creatively and joyfully with our work. But beyond that, there’s another level to the question. You’ve done all this research, uncovered some useful thinking, demonstrated how creative practitioners could benefit. So what? In my mind, unless you present that information in a way that is actually engaging and practicable, the research is just…research. Which is fine, if that’s what the goal is - just to get the PhD. But that feels decidedly limiting to me. It turns out, I really do care about this.
I sometimes wrestle with the belief that PhD is a qualification, and Research is the much grander, more exciting bit of it. There are things I need to do for the PhD that I wouldn’t naturally do otherwise. I get that. I also get that regardless of how I put across the information, there’s a strong chance that people straight up won’t care. I don’t have the wisdom of Corita Kent, the flair for visual storytelling of Lynda Barry or the illustrative abilities of FormPlay. But maybe that’s kind of the point. I’m not any number of academic researchers either. This research is mine to figure out how I disseminate. Is it graphs, taxonomies, models - or something else?