I wish I could be one of those obsessively single-minded people who can see a clear topic and decide that that’s the Everest to climb. I wish, I wish.
The problem of loving to connect the dots is the inability to stop connecting, to stop peeling back the onion, to see a field of onions and more dots to connect. The problem is that there’s no ‘one onion’, and deciding to narrow down to one topic is devastatingly hard when you deal at a systems level. In discussing all I’ve studied previous to graduate school, it’s apparently that interdisciplinarity and a lack of commitment to one discipline, method or approach has been one of the few constants intellectually:
- university: philosophy, but also Ethics Society and Law, so many kinds of philosophies and ethics. See also the need to add psychoanalytic thought to the mix, a program that allowed me to take sociology, English, computer science and many other departments
- post-university: certificates in Web design and information design – and even with those, everything from the production of code to the analysis of design (business analysis, usability, etc.)
- professionally: a field (UX design) where specialization is possible – people do focus on mobile, interaction design, or design research, but an agreement that generalist positions
What would make it a successful thesis is feeling like I’ve achieved something ideally in a topic I’m passionate about. At this point, I’ve narrowed my possible topics down to one – with two closely related in the same area (civic engagement), one less related, although also touching on disconnection, empowerment, stigma and the collective. I also know that if another topic came along – even something like ubiquitous computing – I could easily be persuaded to switch paths. I look to evaluate the thesis on two aspects as part of the degree – if it s a social thesis of a problem, situation or condition that exists. It must also be a design thesis – something using design as an approach to address the social. Finally, what does making a transdisciplinary design thesis mean – where does looking past disciplines, boundaries, methods and inventing new innovations in any of these mean for a project that is 9 months long?
What are my concerns? So many. No order, but all of them vying for panic in my thinking these days:
- That I won’t have anything original to say. I can add several dissertations here.
- That I won’t be able to focus narrowly enough on a topic. (Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis drummed that into me).
- That I can’t seem to unravel the ‘systems’ and ‘problems’ to fix. This is especially true with anything civic tech related – it’s a growing and very active field, and deciding on one aspect to focus on is daunting. Even ‘civic engagement’ is a wide area, which perhaps led me to wonder if it is doable for a 2 year masters.
- That my design work won’t be good. I worry about the analysis part, but that worries me less – for all my disjointed thinking, I can pull something together and get the run away horses in my mind to cooperate enough. The making and method is fascinating of what to choose and explore, but I worry that I can’t get the ‘material’ and ‘analysis’ to really reflect each other. I feel more confident in the ‘thinking through making’ part, but the difficulty is everything is up for grabs – so if I wanted to incorporate project, policy, language, dance, food, I can and am encouraged to. It’s a blessing, but also daunting to have that flexibility.
- That some of the thesis is worth exploring, but a MFA thesis may not be the place to do it. So much of what interested me about civic tech is the ‘Wild West’ nature of it – that so much of it is organically springing up, and from the field of UX and HCI, we have frameworks, methods and bodies of knowledge to evaluate them. The question of building a framework for a design thesis, however, seems questionable, and perhaps something more for a fellowship as far as my potential thesis projects go.
- That too much of my topic is tied to the election and my fears about it. Am I tackling politics and civic engagement because I’m terrified of what can happen in the election? Should I be motivated to do a thesis because of this?
- That I am connecting the wrong dots – that these topics I’m interested in, like participatory cultures (the sharing economy, DIY etc.) have little to shed light on civic tech or a thesis on mental health.
Doing some free writing to help alleviate the writer’s block like in this block post has helped, but I’m more worried than relieved. I hope that worry can vanish – at some point.
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