Research-Creation Framework
My procrastination over the last few months has been incredibly productive! In avoiding all the things I "should" be doing, I've managed to develop four publications for Matter vs. Spirit, despite the project still being very loosely defined and completely unfunded. Making things has been a good coping mechanism through a pretty rough winter (there's probably some deep insight here... this form of coping/procrastination seems to come up a lot in my thinking/feeling/doing). A particular moment stands out, a feeling of calm as I was cutting and folding the first zine alone in the studio while listening to A$AP in the evening. Despite the simple format of the zine, the first folds took some dedicated time and focus, but I quickly got into a flow state and I finished 25 copies in about an hour. That calm is a rare feeling for me.
As the individual publications move through production towards publication, I'll detail my thinking, design, and process for them here as well as creating more "formal" entries for documentation. In the last few days though, I've taken a bit of time to reflect on my overall progress, and sketched out a framework for my research process (Research through Design formally). This can be applied to the individual publications as well as the project of the micro-press as a whole, and is probably generalizable to a lot of RtD projects. I was pretty happy to get it down on paper, so here it is:
- Existential Angst/Questions
- Framing/Contextualisation
- Concept/Ideation
- Material Inputs (Text-Image)
- Design/Experimentation
- Production/Materials // Financial considerations
- Material Outputs (Documentation)
- Distribution/Publics
- Feedback/Analysis
- Existential Angst/New Questions
Of course things don't progress as linearly as outlined here, there's a lot more generative recursivity, but I think it covers most of the processes in a useful way, addressing my most pertinent research concerns. I've also been inspired by my colleagues' Method for Design Materialization in game design research and think it can be adapted to this framework. Documentation will be key, so this post is my attempt to get better at it!