Databases
A short post this week.
Since my annual review a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working on a couple of things. Firstly, I’ve been building a plan for the research project as a whole - as in, the whole of the PhD. All of it. Everything I’ll need get done to submit the PhD. And, of course, instead of just writing everything out in a word document, I built a database - in fact, a series of databases - that allowed me to search, tag, cross-reference and sort all of the things that need doing between now and then.
This got me thinking. Was this playful?
As ever, there’s not an easy answer to that question. However, I can’t argue that I didn’t approach it in a playful way. It felt at times like a chore, of course - but for the most part, I was challenging myself to creatively find a way of demonstrating lots of complicated ideas and information in a relatively digestible format. Thinking about the PLEX framework [Fig.1], I experienced Challenge, Discovery, Exploration. I experienced Subversion, in the sense that my supervisors had asked for a word document but I chose a different format; I experienced Submission by feeling very much like I was being part of the much larger structure that is the institution, and having to follow - or challenge - the PhD submission pathway.
Fig. 1 - Korhonen et al’s PLEX framework
The PLEX framework (which, and I know I’ve said this before, deserves more research on its own - it’s on my list for next week!) was developed as a “basis for design-related activities i.e. to devleop design tools and for concept developement” (Lucero et al. 2013, p223). I have my concerns about trying to describe specifically every playful experience - sometimes you just played, just because, and nothing more needs to be said about it - but in this circumstance it proves useful. In this way, it demonstrates not necessarily that the activity I was undertaking was play - it definitely wasn’t - but that I engaged in a way that demonstrated playful behaviours; I was being playful, at least in some capacities, while I was doing it. I produced a ‘work’ that I was proud of; that was, in ways I hadn’t expected, creative.
This demonstrates the value of plork outside of the arts. My curiosity - “I wonder if I can do it this way” - led me to an innovative, engaging and productive way of listing and disseminating a complex set of information. How different is this from artistic practice? I think if you described it to students, they would think it worlds apart from making art. Which it is, obviously; whilst there’s an art to making databases, I wasn’t making this database as art. I was just trying to make my own life easier. But the plorkful principle is still the same: approaching something with curiosity, with desire, with - as Bruce Mau would put it - optimism. But with a specific aim in mind, and with a specific set of rules: it’s got to include everything about the PhD, it’s got to be on Notion, and so on. I want to stress again that at least in my mind, this was not a playful activity - it was necessary, and I was primarily doing it because I had been told to by my supervisors. But I found a way to make it work for me. Plork presents an opportunity to actually reframe some of our thinking about playfulness and work activities, not so much gamifying them as approaching them with a playful attitude. And through that methodology, interesting things happen.
References
LUCERO, A., HOLOPAINEN, J., OLLILA, E., SUOMELA, R. & KARAPANOS, E. 2013. The Playful Experiences (PLEX) Framework as a Guide for Expert Evaluation. DPPI 2013. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.