#multipleworlds

I may have gotten a little distracted making these of Lore....First one is of her when she’s younger, probably her early teens 14 or so. I’m saying the second one is lore in her later teens possibly 17. And this is only the beginning XDDDD I will post some writing soon....(I’m having too much fun with this right now)

I was the ‘Practical Role’ (Actively does things to generate new understanding) within my group. Our group decided to use ‘boxing gloves’ as our subject matter of choice as we wanted to take a simple object and build more complex ideas/find new knowledge behind it. I am so relieved to have this project finished, as I felt like it created a lot more stress into my life than It should have. First of all, I was so stuck in methods I could use to implement my role within our group. Second of all, I have been struggling for a while now to truly understand the concepts behind different approaches of thinking (e.g. qualitative, quantitative etc) including Bono’s six thinking hats. 

I think this project really helped me question things from a new perspective and look at things from a practical point of view. Because I am much more of a quantitative thinker, I was extremely challenged to try and complete this assignment as I kept trying to go back to my usual state of thinking, instead of embracing the practical role. For this assignment however, I did truly go ‘back to basics’ and thought about things from a practical standpoint. For example: How are boxing gloves used? What do I already know about boxing gloves? What do people tend to think about boxing gloves? So many questions came to mind because I had no prior knowledge about boxing gloves. It was difficult re-searching the boxing gloves themselves because many occasions ‘boxing’ the sport would come up and confuse the original subject of our assignment. 

I really liked that we had quite a lot of freedom within our roles to be creative in trying to gain new understanding: it was so nice to have structured roles pre-assigned to us as it forced people to go outside of their comfort zones and explore knowledge in a completely different realm of cognitive thinking. The most ironic part of this assignment was that I was the ‘practical’, which meant I could not use my usual tactics of research/analysis, but had to actually actively seek out something new about boxing gloves. I had seriously underestimated the power of practical thinking, as most people tend to shrug it off as the less intelligible method of doing things. However, the most fundamental thing I realised was that the quality of new knowledge is much higher and precise when sourced from doing practical tasks. Also, practical method helped me remember things much clearer, for a longer period of time as it does not involve just thinking, but hand eye coordination, motor skills, time and physical EFFORT. For example, when I compared watching Youtube videos of people using boxing gloves so effortlessly- It was MUCH easier said than done as I had trouble even fitting the glove onto my hand, let alone punch someone else with it. I never realised how much expertise, skill and dedication goes into a simple move with the boxing glove: e.g. hooks, jabs uppercuts etc. Noone takes into account the weight of the glove, the gross sweaty sensation and rubbery smell. 

Throughout the process of this project, I was very confused as to what we needed to do but I was really interested in the limitations that we had. By just getting into it and working on what we can, we came up with some pretty interesting conclusions and got a good kick out of role-playing.

With the role of the analytical, I struggled to understand what was needed from me and how I was to approach the project as a whole. I spent quite a bit of time worrying about the project because I didn’t like the feeling of not knowing. I wanted a linear approach to creating an outcome because that’s what I’ve been used to. Though, through talking with a number of people, I got into the vibe of just going with the flow. I think it was key that I got other people’s and view on the matter, as it definitely made me rethink my view on the project. In saying that, I came to the conclusion that the analytical is what I make it out to be because of how Clinton and James has worked before. They’ve always wondered about what things really are and what it means to be a certain thing. In the end, it’s about your point of view and what you choose to believe in. So for me, I chose the analytical to be the one that concludes all the opposing points from the other roles and decides on what we take out of the project.

Being analytical is one thing, not being anything else is another matter. With what I chose the analytical to be, it felt like I couldn’t do anything until everyone else had contributed something to the table. Though it was a relief not having to look at the deeper meaning on human instincts or the statistics behind it, it felt quite restricting to be filling in one specific role. In the end, I felt like I couldn’t stay within it solely but I tried my best to make it my most apparent role. It lead to me realise the complexity of how we think in a daily basis, comparing different points of views and weighing them in with different scales to ultimately decide on what we’ll do and who we are.

19/10/15

Being assigned as Team 7′s theoretical thinker was not a particularly alien task for me, as my natural focus in most projects is developing a conceptual framework informed by research into contextually related works. Essentially, I’m a person who’s strong on thinking about things and forming ideas. For the sake of stepping out of my usual modus operandi I would have liked to take on a practical doing-based role, but nevertheless taking on the exclusively theoretical “hat” in a multidisciplinary project such as this has opened my eyes to its position in relation to other disciplines and the problems and issues presented within these spheres. 

I did however attempt to make the process of forming theoretical knowledge around the subject of “small talk” a literal alien task. By developing the research persona of an extraterrestrial (“Cthuga”) with no working practical knowledge of human social constructs, I believe I was able to stay true to my assigned methodology of forming knowledge based solely on ideas and principle as opposed to practice. My approach was to develop Cthuga’s purely theoretical knowledge of small talk in the form of structured logical assumptions based on a range of available resources, much as if I were to form purely theoretical knowledge of, say, how nuclear fission works by studying related informative material. This brought to my consideration an interesting parallel between the opposing methodologies of theory vs. practical and the “explicit vs. tacit knowledge” dichotomy we were introduced to earlier in the semester. 

During my research process I came to identify a crossdisciplinary - that is, viewing one discipline from the perspective of another - framework within my methodology. For instance, when I perused the English dictionary to gain knowledge about the nature of “small talk” I was essentially looking at the discipline of sociology from the perspective of the discipline of linguistics. When I studied the writings of Malinowski to understand why people engaged in small talk, I was looking at psychology from the perspective of anthropology. This gave me a new awareness of how disciplinary frameworks are present in all established structures of knowledge. 

I also came to identify key issues presented within the theoretical research approach. Firstly, since theory leans on principles gleaned from other sources of knowledge, there is a need to make sure these sources are reputable in order to legitimize the assumptions formed. A skewed theoretical interpretation based on an Urban Dictionary definition illustrates this. Secondly, theoretical conclusions, while educated, are still mere assumptions; though practical methodology appears in opposition it is merely the flip side of the same coin, and the two must be used in conjunction to constitute holistic “true” learning. (Cthuga might find some of his theoretical assumptions proved otherwise if he did some small talking himself.) Thus neither position is marginalised. 

Our final outcome was a card game defining and illustrating the various facets of small talk. My contribution was the structure and order of the cards (Opener, Question, Response), based on the theoretical conclusion that small talk is formulaic. As a whole, was knowledge legitimized? I’m not sure. Within our group we determined that our approach was multidisciplinary - that is, different disciplines working together, drawing on their own disciplinary knowledge - however there seemed to be a degree of overlap between the way each of us undertook our roles. Though in the end we did integrate the knowledge each of us had developed, much of it was of a similar vein. I think it would have made for a more interesting and provocative outcome had we run into more conflict and tension (as our lecturers are so clearly fond of) during the creative process.

Finally, the “multiple worlds” project (#multipleworlds) has concluded following our presentation in class today. For this project, we continued our search for the known within the context of our team made up of Chris Liu, Drake Farmer, Julian de Villers, Nick Jennings and myself. We each played one of five methodological roles. I was assigned the role of “Analytical person”, where from my understanding was to question any flaws, logically criticize, and finally summarize our chosen topic. After some research and discussion, we decided on “Quantum Superposition” a single disciplinary knowledge as our topic that we try to legitimize. From day one, I found it extremely challenging to just stick to my roles as analytical person and not marginalize my disciplinary position. From what I learnt in the previous “integrative practice” project, I understood the purpose of this project was not about succeeding or failing to find a way to legitimize our chosen topic without marginalizing my disciplinary position, but to explore and understand this multi-disciplinary way of thinking.

Even though, I generally don’t enjoy studying any aspect of physics and its boring theories, I did like learning about this (new to me) unique aspect of physics, one that questions everything we thought we knew. Even though, it was very difficult not to wonder off away my analytical role, I try my best to just see our topic from the analytical perspective. While trying to examine our topic, I realised how deep and complicated this topic was. Sometimes, I couldn’t fully understand articles the first time around, so I had to read them multiple times and visualising them to help make sense.

Finally, the “multiple worlds” project (#multipleworlds) has concluded following our presentation in class today. For this project, we continued our search for the known within the context of our team made up of Chris Liu, Drake Farmer, Julian de Villers, Nick Jennings and myself. We each played one of five methodological roles. I was assigned the role of “Analytical person”, where from my understanding was to question any flaws, logically criticize, and finally summarize our chosen topic. After some research and discussion, we decided on “Quantum Superposition” a single disciplinary knowledge as our topic that we try to legitimize. From day one, I found it extremely challenging to just stick to my roles as analytical person and not marginalize my disciplinary position. From what I learnt in the previous “integrative practice” project, I understood the purpose of this project was not about succeeding or failing to find a way to legitimize our chosen topic without marginalizing my disciplinary position, but to explore and understand this multi-disciplinary way of thinking.

Even though, I generally don’t enjoy studying any aspect of physics and its boring theories, I did like learning about this (new to me) unique aspect of physics, one that questions everything we thought we knew. Even though, it was very difficult not to wonder off away my analytical role, I try my best to just see our topic from the analytical perspective. While trying to examine our topic, I realised how deep and complicated this topic was. Sometimes, I couldn’t fully understand articles the first time around, so I had to read them multiple times and visualising them to help make sense.

Being a strong analytical thinker naturally, I found that I had to re-approach my disciplinary role, funnily enough, analytically.  I had to re-think what my thinking was. How do I actually analyse things? How does that inform my outcomes? How does it inform me in a group? The most challenging part of this project for me has been trying to suppress my thinking from other disciplinary approaches. What I did find as a result, was that I was able to better understand my different team members’ thinking, and analyse their contribution to the final outcome objectively.  This also made me question where creative thinking fit in to my role as well as other roles. Is creative thinking limited to only certain disciplinary roles or does it only fit in to certain creatively stereotyped roles like theory or qualitative? I found that in working together, we all had to work creatively at some points to piece together our final outcome. We had to imagine and work with our ideas together creatively.  As analytical, I also found I was questioning knowledge a lot. I was careful not to discount ideas from certain team members based on my subjective view and tried to question what made me prefer certain ideas over others. It made me consider a point I learnt from the interrogation project; what is it exactly that leads us in making decisions during a process? I found I tended to calculate what felt the most familiar and successful subconsciously when deciding a way to approach the project, before actually considering what informed my decisions. In this project, I tried to consider what was informing my decisions for the group before deciding on anything, and trying to represent the contributions either equally in the decision I made going forward, or to understand what made one decision stronger than the other, regardless of the disciplinary approach.  So how has producing this final outcome influenced my thinking for the future? I think from this project, I’ve gained a better understanding of how multi/inter/intra/cross disciplinary thinking fits in to the world of “COLAB”. As creative technology students, and eventually practitioners, we should have awareness of our disciplinary approaches and utilise them for our own benefits. When James questioned us about whether we were able to stay within our own disciplinary stereotypes throughout the project today, I realised maybe finding that sweet spot within my own multi-disciplinary approach is the key to thinking as a practitioner. I’m considering that maybe the tension and conflict between everyone Clint was encouraging in our group was because in the conflict of our ideas and approaches we tend to find the most interesting outcomes. The things that are truly creative and unique. If I can find a way to create this conflict and tension within myself by understanding the different disciplinary approaches at play in my head or when working in a group, it could be the key to the creative process for me.