Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2012

This paper initially articulates Derrida’s attempt to overcome the distantiation of writing from the thing written about - which, he addresses in his essay-poem ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ (‘What is poetry?’). Thereafter, using the hérisson (hedgehog/porcupine) of this essay-poem as touchstone, the paper goes on to describe the nature and role of the ‘context essay’ which is written as part of final projects on both UG and PG degrees in Goldsmiths Design Department. The context essay challenges the borders between different types of writing and design practice, and is an essential part of the design process of the students’ final projects. The last part of the paper sketches the different ideational stratagems that may be used in the content and in the form of the context essay; stratagems that inter-ventilate different theories (accounts), different practices (acts), inter-splice theories and practices and, of course, also utilise the technicity of writing itself (applied grammatology) to open up the possibilities of design practice.

Standardized writing and reading practices in academia are well established. The academic book, article, dissertation and the report are all familiar in terms of both form and content. But due to the various forms of standardization it is often hard to challenge the Mandarin diseases of ‘group’ thought and instruction that Universities breed in imposing their own strict writing and reading protocols and forms of pedagogy. (Alongside these things sit all the evaluative forms and kinds of assessment machinery that go with the practice of trying to count and measure everything that academics or students produce.) So if we need to consider new ways to design writing and reading we should think more about the way in which we actually live with text, both virtually and actually. In order to present new semantic challenges for new writers and readers, then, we need might need to look at the ways that other practitioners from different fields and disciplines use and create (and curate) writing and reading – where ‘con’ (with) combines with ‘textere’ (weave/text) so that the text is woven with new meanings. In what follows, then, I will consider how a poetics of textual practice may start to encourage students to engage with richer, and more carefully designed, forms of meaning. More specifically, I wish to draw on various tasks that can be set to encourage student designers to put more meaning into their writing by making challenges to form. The production of writing and reading can be considered as integral to the research and ideational processes of design work. And so how graphic design can engender, unfold and fuse with other creative practices such as poetry may be important in enabling new textual rhythms, harmonies and melodies to develop in the subject of design.

This collaborative article explores some commonalities to be found in narrative methods used by Caribbeanist, Joan Anim-Addo and sociologist, Yasmin Gunaratnam. Recognizing how narrative and stories are socially inflected and relational, our work with diasporic stories approaches narrative as an unstable and evolving event that poses its own ethical provocations. We discuss the limits of our respective methods – oral history and biographical narrative interviews – through an exploration of ‘secrets and lies’ in the telling and relaying of stories. We consider, centrally, the relations between facts and fictions in diasporic stories, highlighting two central conundrums that we have encountered in our research: (i) what is experienced and lived but cannot be said/told; (ii) what is told but not necessarily lived. Creolization theory and notions of cultural hybridity serve to frame the conversation that we engage.

Using an adapted narrative enquiry approach, the purpose of the research is to present a model of criticality based on R. Barnett’s argument that criticality should ‘create epistemological and ontological disturbance in the minds and in the being of students’, which Barnett argues is a prerequisite to critical being, or in I. Rogoff’s terms, a ‘critical embodiment’. Inevitably, such a conceptualization involves a reformation of the student’s subject position including their sense of identity and it is clear that despite the ‘messy’ data provided by these unstructured narrative interviews with two international fine art students, there is evidence for Barnett’s and Rogoff’s positions. Indeed, identity is central to the practice of both participants who articulate their sense of othering in Foucauldian terms, operating at a very cognitive level within a western regime of truth.

An intermedia approach to writing is proposed in which the writing processes are seen as forms of inscription of media enabling the writer to learn from and adapt techniques from, for example, music and graphic art. Collaboration is proposed as a productive way of extending and expanding the writer’s skills. The centrality of writing as a means of instruction is questioned to propose the potential meaningfulness of even the asemic collocation.

This article stems from a brief about narrative and technology assigned during my M.A. Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project that developed from the brief was a group project, so when I say ‘we’ I mean my group: Blair Francy, Marion Lean and Jullian Lee. Our goal was to find new ways of telling narratives. These ways should carry in them the ability to create a better experience of story: engaging, revolving and natural. This article suggests new design concepts for the transportation system derived from a combination of creative writing methods, technology development processes, acting techniques (bodystorming) and design methodology.

Can designers re-design the paradigm that threatens human survival? Probably not, if they only apply the specialist skills of their training. Design evolved to make factory-made products and services more amenable to paying customers. However, if we are to meet the environmental and economic challenges facing us, it needs to be more comprehensive, integrated, self-reflexive and transdisciplinary. Our ‘metadesign’ approach seeks new synergies by combining existing resources. However, many new synergies are ‘unthinkable’ from within the ‘language’ of the current paradigm. In addressing this challenge we used a number of methods to reveal hidden synergies, including non-verbal, pre-verbal and interpersonal forms of knowing. We used simple mathematics to map all of the relations among all of the participants in the team, in order to make the data more shareable.

Writing in Creative Practice: Practicing Theory in Art & Design Education. A one-day workshop, led by Will Hoon and Alke Groppel-Wegener, at Northampton University, The Higher Education Academy, 17 December 2012