I'm on spring break (woowoo! Padre island! ... too old) and reflecting on quarter 2.
In the qualitative research class, I found value in reading various texts on research and synthesis approaches. As we got into the Timmermans reading, things became more practical, and I appreciate that; the texts were instructional rather than only theoretical. I'm thinking of my understanding of teaching approaches; I've always students to learn methods and techniques before theory. I am Said Student, and so this was valuable. I typically introduce theory only briefly on the way to method, and we've been sort of overwhelmed with theory; particularly, introspective theory of ethnographers talking about ethnographers. That has not been valuable.
I enjoyed doing field work in a museum. I've never done "pure" ethnographic work in 26 years of research, and I found it cathartic, interesting, and much less complex than I imagined. Of course, I picked field sites and a topic that were easily accessible, and it's helpful that museums let you sit on the floor and write and draw, so it's probably mostly nerfed. But that's fine for learning.
This was the first time I tried formal grounded theory coding, and I find it partially useful but mostly troubling. The usefulness is in its forced rigor. Looking at every single quote, in great detail, and thinking about what is really going on, Is The Point of interpretation and synthesis of data. I have an established working style that already assumes this, and it took me an awful long time to see the real value in how methodical and time-consuming that can be. This is a comparable level of rigor, just different.
But, as I understand it - and it's entirely possible and highly likely that I don't, given how new this is for me - I think the focus on simple descriptive nouns is a real miss. It is absolutely grounded; it's hard to argue with how close a name is to an observation (at least in a practical sense). But it abstracts away so much immediately. I want to become ungrounded, at least slightly, so I don't lose the feel of what is happening, the vibe, the sense. Maybe this is too much of a throwback to being okay with "the introduction of innovation risk" that I'm used to, but if I'm going to ultimately arrive at theory, I need those leaps. Some of the texts we read literally equate theory development to abductive reasoning, and the nature of abductive reasoning is an associative leap. Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination talks about magic and imagination; theory emerges from these sort of leaps, and ultimately, from creativity (and other things: critical thinking, knowing about the world, humor).
Grounded theory with gerunds is closer to what I'm comfortable with, because it least it focuses on actions or ways of being, not just "things". But it's still the same idea; by being grounded (the point), it just tails out the interpretation.
The class time itself, however, was not valuable; I don't know how anything can get done in an hour and twenty minutes, particularly when there needs to be time to talk about projects (it's a studio in that regard). In retrospect, I should have asked each professor for an independent study, although I don't think they would have had time.
The Research in HCI class was a big miss for me. It was a class that was almost entirely focused on how to publish at CHI. We looked at the history of the various subcommittees and the acceptance statistics, discussed the importance of CHI for securing a job and then getting tenure, examined the call for papers from each subcommittee, and so-on: it was an advertisement for a conference. That speaks to a pretty troubling reality: CHI is a conference but has become a de-facto gatekeeper for academic job security, and this has positioned ACM as the real puppet master of academia. CHI is enormous, to a SXSW level of enormousness. I'm giving a talk that's 12 minutes long; other-way around, attendees are attending talks that are 12 minutes long for five days. It's a speed funnel. It's gross.
In terms of the class, it's unnecessarily scoped. Students need to understand the mechanics of their profession, but there is more to the professional than publishing a paper at a single conference (and if there isn't, then the whole thing is busted).
There was value in forcing us to read an assortment of papers from CHI in fields I wouldn't typically investigate, which is useful, but these were then taught to the class by the class, which is not useful. This seems like a common approach in grad school. I don't know if it has a goal, like helping students learn to become instructors or some sort of "peer to peer learning" pedagogy, but it outright doesn't work for me, and I think it doesn't work for many other students either.
Seminar was a bit of a miss for me too. The speakers were not great, and while their work largely is impressive, a seminar talk should be about providing some sort of value on top of the work as it is presented in a paper. It can be energizing and inspirational; it can be filled with additional content; it can be an entirely different set of material; it can be engagement with the audience... but many of the talks were simply summaries of or verbatims from published papers.
On the other hand.... I was very productive; and, I felt like I grew a ton in my understanding of theory.
During this quarter,
- I had my CHI paper Hiring for Creativity in a World of UX Design Systems accepted [waahhh wahhh, re: above...]
- I continued to focus my research space of inquiry, which is giving me a lot of clarity about the next year
- I developed my reading list for comps
- I worked through and finished the faculty research study, submitted it to Design Studies, and had it R&R...
- I had User Experience Bootcamps: A Case Study In The Limits of Scaling Practice-based Design Education accepted and published in the International Journal of Technology and Design Education
- I had my student study approved, and now I'm conducting research with design students.
Next quarter is going to be to continue the student study, and work on comps: read and write.