InWorlding: narrative and self in creative practice

This research unravels the ways in which personhood, informed by cultural and aesthetic sensibilities, directs and determines how design is mediated and realized. By proposing and revealing the framework of an individual practice it offers a template for design to recognise and include the self, as a critical function of practice.

The arc of this research begins with a recognition of the significance of a set of destabilising emotional conditions. A diffusion of uncertainty, anxiety, unease, and longing, experienced and felt in the doing of design became the portal through which the research found its pathway. This process in its essential subjectivity, allows me, as a practitioner to exercise an individual right to authentic experience (Spivak, 2014). The method in turn, abstracts both my individual practice and its particular elements into an intellectual proposition, that offers a meaningful model for individual agency in design. 

The experience of flux, revealed, or felt, as an emotional state, points to implicit conflict in the negotiation of competing values and epistemies. The research suggests that these polarities within the individual are a consequence of being situated between dualities or multiplicities of material, cultural, and aesthetic paradigms. While the boundaries of what these might be not clear-cut or definitive, the categorisation assists a triangulation of entities and provides a space within which this flux is metaphorically situated. Within this construct, practice is then viewed through the ambiguities thrown up by the variances implicit in each of these three areas-resulting in a perpetual condition of alterity, within the exercising of practice.

On unpacking this, the provenances of cultural biases, intuited and absorbed histories, and internalized mythologies, are slowly revealed and recognised. This allows an acceptance of the complexity of the condition, and in that, a celebration of these enduring ambiguities. Instead then, of seeking ways to achieve stasis, the research finds meaning and value in the negotiation between dualities or polarities of conditions, and offers a way to celebrate and intensify these alteric conditions by enriching and expanding the spaces within which they operate.

The approach to this inquiry is phenomenological. The abstraction is realized through a reflexive enquiry, whilst its authentication is attempted through an interrogation of meanings, implications and understandings. Drawing on artefacts and design projects across three decades, exercised in New Delhi, India, Melbourne, Australia and Vancouver, Canada, the research concludes with a propositional model for constructing a narrative of practice.

This research reveals the salience and roots of tacit knowledge within the individual. The iterative exploratory approach disciplined by the reflexive act offers a template for deepening an understanding of the self in relation to practice.

The emergent concept of InWorlding, contributes to the discourse on design practice, especially within the domain of design in the pluriverse. It suggests that knowledge is in constant flux between dominant and hidden narratives, and expresses itself alternately between the tacit and the explicit ways of knowing in practice. As a contribution to method, the six designerly ways of InWorlding, contribute to ways in which this knowledge may be explicated to address and enrich a richer prospect of practice.