Pleasureable beginnings
Two weeks, two blog posts. So far, so productive.
Last week I wrote about finishing, and when a piece of work is finished. Having finished my most recent piece of research practice UPUP - or at least, having left it in the hands of my collaboator and sound designer Rahul - I have spent the last 10 days or so attempting to write up and reflect on the film-making process. I say attempting as I have repeatedly let myself get distracted by interesting journal articles and research papers - relevant ones, but distracting ones nonetheless. One thing that has come up multiple times in the research now is the concept of playful attitudes or behaviours, rather than play itself. Play facilitates the kind of joyful, explorative, creative mode I want to engage with, and “theories of play help explain people’s behaviors and feelings while they work” (Starbuck and Wesbter 1991, p72). Although they put it much more mechanically than what I am interested in, Starbuck and Webster acknowledge that “by encouraging them to find new methods or soluations, play actually improves the work of highly skilled experts” (ibid). But instead of analysts or consultants, or - as they use in one example - ‘key-punchers’ gamifying their work by racing each other, I’m trying to improve my own artistic and creative practice by inviting play more. And, as play is an intangible thing, a mode, the key here is encouraging not so much my methods to change, but my attitude.
Educator and writer John Dewey felt that “Playfulness is a more important consideration than play” when he wrote his seminal How We Think (1910, p162). Playing, argued Dewey, is merely a manifestation of the attitude that precedes it, the attitude that makes or allows someone to play. It is playfulness and curiosity that encourages us to be creative, see-sawing between exploring and playing, understanding and imagining (Costello 2007). Playfulness then must become a central facet of my own research. But how do you start being playful? Where do you begin?
Interactive artist Brigid Costello developed what she refers to as a Pleasure Framework, a (non-exhaustive) framework of 13 ‘types’ of pleasure, created specifically to develop “practical strategies for stimulating play” (Costello 2007 p1). Costello understood that play and exploration make for engaging, pleasurable work, and posited that designing work with her framework in mind would increase engagement from her participants through the pleasure dervied from her work. Essentially, Costello designed - and successfully tested - a framework to encourage playful engagement. Whilst Costello writes that her framework could be used at every stage of the design process, one thing she higlights is the potential for the framework to be used at the outset of a project - to be considering the possible types of pleasure a participant will derive from the project at its very inception.
The early considerations of any project are ones I have long thought hold the key to some of this playful attitude. Understanding why we’re making something and who we’re making it for it nothing else make the project easier to finish; as I mentioned last week, completition dispositions are potentially easier achieved when you feel like you’ve answered your own questions. The same applies to Costello’s framework and the prospect of using it not only as a consideration for an audience, but as part of the film-making process as well: how will I be engaging with this project? What do I want to feel when making the project? And what (system/process/tool etc.) can I design to facilitate that?
When joining the research programme at the University of Edinburgh we were asked a series of questions:
- What are the three main reasons you chose to pursue postgraduate research?
- What excites you most about your research?
- What are you most unsure of?
- What worries you most about your degree?
- Do you know anyone who has done postgraduate research? What was their experience? What can you learn from it? If not, can you find someone?
I found this exercise challenging, engaging, exciting. It forced me to think about why I was here, why I was undertaking such a big investment (financially, emotionally…) and, perhaps most importantly, what excited me about what I was planning on doing. After all, if you don’t get remotely excited about a personally-driven project, why do it at all? Then, some would argue, it is just work - or, as Dewey might put it, drudgery.
And that’s no fun at all.
References
COSTELLO, B. 2007. A Pleasure Framework. Leonardo, 40, 370-371.
DEWEY, J. 1910. How we think, Boston,, D.C. Heath & Co.
STARBUCK, W. H. & WEBSTER, J. 1991. When is Play Productive? . Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 1, 71-90.