User:FLEM/Thesis drafts

1. Introduction: research interest, the objective of research

I am interested in notebooks as a means of creativity, a space for thinking and reasoning, a personal world inside this messy world we live in. I like the idea of getting lost in our own space, how writing and doodling and drawing become part of our living. And, I wonder, can this personal world be the same for everyone, can it be standardised? My theory is that everyone, in different situations, has different needs while using a notebook and that the efficiency - in the sense of: how much we use it, how useful it becomes for us, how we feel free and comfortable with it - can change by using different structures. Following from this, I wondered: "Why are we all using a device with the same structure? And what impact does it have on our learning, thinking and living, as well as on the imaginary of self? And how creating our personal tools would help users to understand better themselves and their needs?".

Therefore, I decided to organise a series of Collaborative Explorative Sessions (C.E.S.): experiences of discovery, moments where to play with this object, all together, and explore, experiment and discover the possibilities of notebooks, also as part of a research about ourselves and our participation in the world. I would like participants to explore their inner self and discover what they need from a notebook, and then, if they are up for it, to find out how accessible it can be for everyone to create or edit their own, based on what they're actually looking for.

I have always been fascinated by book making, since the first time I built a book with my hands. The course taught the students how to make three different bindings throughout the year, and our job was to produce the content to build the structure around. I mainly used photographs, as that was part of my visual practice already. But what excited me the most was when the book holding this material has to be produced. Choosing the paper, printing the images, folding, binding and gluing gave me a feeling I never experienced before.

After that, I kept making books and worked on a project called Trashbooksatelier, and specifically on a series called Sketch(totrash)books, no waste editable sketchbooks, consisting of books made of waste. These sketchbooks were meant for artists to paint on the cover and make every single book unique and personal, helping the planet. I was using different papers, with different weights, different colours, everything kept inside an Amazon box’s cardboard. I realized how interesting was to create books from waste and finding ways to make it work. The creativity levels that making notebooks can touch are infinite, in my opinion, and being the creator makes it even more exciting to hold something so special in your hands.

After the first time, I have always been making notebooks for my self and I never bought one anymore. The start of this research happened in a specific moment in time: I finished the last notebook and started a plan for the next one. The idea came out from the measurements of an Italian publishing house (Iperborea) I really love the design of: 10x20 cm. The issue was that, by starting from an A4 paper, I would have been obliged to cut out a lot of paper and therefore, I decided that I didn't want to create a new notebook out of that idea without finding a solution that would not waste anything. The result has been a 10x20 cm notebook with wings and folds that created narrow columns and additional space on the side of the pages. After the notebook was ready, I started questioning my practice and I realised that this object has already a special feature in itself: it permitted the user (me) to play around with the structure and adapt it to their own needs.

I analysed all the pros and cons of this object I created and started to think about alternative solutions that would make the notebook to work specifically for me, my way of reasoning, writing, thinking. I understood how just by changing something small, I could already improve my use of the notebook. I already felt I could give more to this object and vice versa, this object was supporting me in a way that has never happened before.

Lori Emerson in the book Reading Writing Interfaces describes how in recent years design is getting every day more invisible and users are becoming less and less aware of the processes underneath the devices they use: in the same way as with digital interfaces, humans think less and less about what they use or what they do or why or how. We live in an era where we can decide to continuously fulfill our desires, without even understanding or asking ourselves what we really need or want. I assume that many people buy notebooks because they are attracted by the idea around the object, but then they never start or finish them because, still my assumptions, they do not really know what is their need from this object. In addition, consumerism, capitalism and new technologies "promote efficiency and productivity more than happiness and creativity" (Sanders E. B.-N. and Stappers P. J., 2014), but at the same time the desire of people towards creation and expression of self is emerging again (see social media DIY or etsy.com). Therefore, I feel that using an object that, in a way, is the emblem of productivity and that participate in consumerist practices, and trying to transform it into a self thought and subversive one is the right direction I want to give to my project.

I believe this is a personal matter and that every individual should or could find their own answers to this. How can I, through research and explorative sessions, discover more about the topic and create a generative structure that can help others to discover themselves and their needs, in their own way, in order to promote creativity and self-expression?

This thesis will be then a report of my practice: the C.E.S., informed through theoretical research and references, will produce materials that will help to develop the body of the text and support my research questions.

The Collaborative Explorative Sessions (C.E.S.) constitute the method I will be using in this research: a space in which I will present participants with different activities and exercises for the purpose of introduce them to a specific mindset, trying to break the rules of standardised shaped notebooks, as well as providing them with a skill-set on design, book making, paper choice and folding of the latter. These sessions will evolve through time, change from one another, therefore also me, as a researcher, will be learning together with the participants.

2. Context and history (general overview)

[main question: Why are we all using the same structures?]

In this chapter I will give an overview on notebooks' history and evolution, how capitalism and consumerism changed our vision of objects's use and more specifically, notebooks' use with the introduction of standardised objects (touching the explosion of already made bullet journals for example). It will conclude with what is the impact of the use of standardised objects in humans and the importance of self-expression and creativity.

Questions: How and why has the notebook been created? How did it evolved till the most common structures we use nowadays? How has the value of the process of creation modified after industrialisation / in consumerism? What is standardisation? Why do we create standardised objects? What is their impact on humans' existence and the creation of personal imaginary? What happens when we don’t use our intrinsic creativity? Why is it important to express ourselves?

2.1 Overview on notebooks' history and evolution, how capitalism and consumerism changed our vision of objects's use and more specifically, notebooks' use with the introduction of standardised objects (touching the explosion of already made bullet journals for example). How and why has the notebook been created? How did it evolved till the most common structures we use nowadays?

2.2 Why craft and making is important for humans

2.3 How can we learn through making?

Note taking history and development

Human beings began to write because of the need of illustrate their impressions on the world around them. From paintings in caves (were those early sketchbooks?), to papyrus, to clay tablets, to paper rolls, to books..

if humans have an intrinsic need to describe what they have around,

Note Taking as an Art of Transmission by Ann Blair (2004)

The author creates a note taking timeline starting with this sentence: “The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience (…) after used in articulating a thought”. I feel like this point is particularly important for my research as it talks about note taking as an individual’s experience, notes show the insights of an individual expressing freely.

The history of note taking moves from adversaria to common books and to “kinds of notes”: by field, intended audience, general purpose. It talks about collective annotating (Kant’s students) or “writing chorus” (A. H. Francke).

The author analyses the short-term use of notes and what would happen to them in the past, as well as how to conserve them for future transmission. “Forgetting is also an important aspect of remembering” (Harald Weinrich, 1996). The texts moves on with the history of notes and the impact of early modern note taking, how many scholars studied different ways of note taking and it gives new or additional definitions to the words that regard note taking like lemmata, adversaria, historic, etc..).

Why craft and making is important for humans

Saner, B. (2014) Handwriting is physical visual thinking. Visual Arts Research, 40(1), pp. 118–120.

Korn (2015) discusses craftsmanship as engagement with the actions, objects and relationships of ordinary experience, underlining how important is to care about what we do. In the sense that, if you choose to use a notebook for example, you should take care of making it yourself, to repair it yourself and feed it yourself, as you would do with a bike or your last night’s dinner. He provides definitions of the term craft, born thanks to Morris and Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement. He underlines how “The increase in sophistication has not resulted from any biological evolution of our species; instead, it illustrates the evolution of culture. “ (Korn, 2015).

The authors at some point says that “work has been stripped of its potential to provide meaning and fulfillment” (Korn, 2015) and I feel the same happened to learning: I feel like this could be changed with social and collective learning, with self-learning and a research inside our heads to understand and listen inside a bit more. “In our society people make little of what we use but consume it as presented by the media” (Dissanayake E.,1995): the consequences of consuming only already made content and objects is influential in human's existence.

Then, the author describes that his “experience has been that the effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world – whether in the arts, the kitchen, or the marketplace – is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply“ (Korn, 2015). This tells me how much and why the act of making gives the user that sense of meaning that sometimes we lack in contemporary society.

How can we learn through making?

The bookbinding workshop: making as collaborative pedagogic practice by Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (2015)

Kealy-Morris works with student engagement through collaborative teaching and learning practices. The purpose of the work is creating a learning space for art and design students to understand and develop their creative identity and self. The text touches the importance of craft and how the act of creating is an important step to learn about ourselves: it reconnects to the idea of developing a consciousness in the needs for a learning space made by participants for themselves.

The author discusses the different type of learning and knowledge, experiential, or deductive or constructive learning. This opens a new window on the topic of personalised learning and how every individual has different approaches and methods to reach some kind of knowledge. The purpose of the “Bookbinding Club” proposed in this article reconnects to the purpose of my CES (Collaborative Explorative Sessions): to offer participants experiences where to think about their learning brain and how the act of creation can participate in the act of discovery. How the act of making their own tool can help them better understand what they need from the tool.

Towards the end, Kealy-Morris describes the term ”communities of practice”: workshops based on active engagement with specific experiences that support learning through social participation (Wenger 1998). Learning is a social experience.

Crafting communities of practice: the relationship between making and learning by Miriam Gibson (2018).

This text analyses the impact of craft on learning and the development of the personhood. As the text above, it analyses the learning types, quoting different educators and philosophers, and the impact of the Art and Craft Movement as well as the Industrial Revolution. The author discusses how craft is a cultural and social expression and how collective and individual development are interconnected.

Gibson researches on the impact of industrialisation and mass production on the development of self and how the current interest in making shouldn’t be seen as anti-modern and nostalgic but instead, focussing on how, even through the use of the Internet, makers are always trying to gather, whatever the medium. Another point that I feel like touches my practice is how making and learning are subversive practices that make us able to control the narrative ourselves, undermining the dominant social operating system we live in: “through experimentation and experience, an individual edits amplifies and amends the socially prescribed world” says Korn (2013). In a way, they describe “how to change the world through craft”.

At the end, the author describes how learning is a “transformative learning process” and how developing communities of practice encourages social and cognitive transformation. A way to reconnect process and product, to make learning a moment of sharing and not only taking something from someone else’s knowledge.

The use of personalized notebook among first semester students of UITM (2016)

Describes how the use of personalised notebooks among students can improve learning process. The authors describe how “The quality of students’ satisfaction and experience depend on the effectiveness of using notebook.”. This paper is basically for educators, but it can be applied also from the point of view of the student itself: students have different learning styles and intelligence strengths that a personalised notebook could accommodate. Notebooks are the place where to insert the information and where to analyse it, helping the “brain making connections between what is experienced (learned) and what that experience (information) means to the learner” (Caine & Klimek, 2005).

The text then analyses student-entered learning approach, already present in Malaysian Education since more than 20 years. Personalised notebooks offer similar characteristics and purposes: to promote self-learning process.  

The authors conclude saying that “Creating a personalised notebook with students could improve students’ note-taking skills as well as help them to organise, review, and reflect on the information in the classroom”. This reconnects to my research as this is what I am discussing about: how personalised notebooks can improve learning. The difference is that they talk from the point of view of the educators and my approach would be even more “self-learning”: students or participants would physically and concretely create their own personalised notebooks.

3. Method introduction and preparatory sessions

The method

Collaborative Explorative Sessions (C.E.S.) is a term that I introduced into my research to explain a concept that I want to be characteristic in my work: these are not only workshops, "a usually brief intensive educational program for a relatively small group of people that focuses especially on techniques and skills in a particular field" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/, 2022); I call them sessions because they are not only focused on learning a technique, instead they are set up in a specific moment in time created in order to produce a change of mindset in the participants; they do not only learn how to make a notebook, that is considerably of minor importance for the purpose of the C.E.S., but reason on how to approach the creation of this object in a new way, that they probably did not know before entering the room. They are explorative because through this time spent together in the space there is a lot to unpack and I feel that exploration is what I want these moments to be like: we start from a certain point, without knowing what is waiting for us along the way, and through the exercises we look around, take decisions and bring our ideas and craft towards an unpredictable direction. I say unpredictable because what my words and exercises will produce in the different individuals participating to the sessions, is totally unknown to me and to them. The term collaborative wraps everything up: I am, as a researcher, part of this exploration; both me and the participants are continuously influencing each others' reactions and decisions: for example, what one says could influence the associations that another participant will make in their heads, bringing up different memories and emotions that will then trigger their thoughts, and therefore, their notebooks imaginary and following its production.

Before being able to organise the first practical session, I went through some so-called Preparatory Sessions, characterised by oral expression. During these sessions, I brought up specific questions I introduced to the participants and discussed together with them. The main aim of these sessions was to analyse the questions I came up with and discover if they do or do not trigger a reaction in the participants. I had the need to know two things: Are notebooks part of their lives? Can I use this specific object to incite a certain type of thoughts and associations to promote self-expression and creativity?

The Preparatory Sessions

M&Ms

The first session happened on the 26th September 2022. M&Ms are sessions we organise specifically for our course mates of XPUB, that certainly is an open environment for discussions on note-taking. We spent the last year experimenting together, but still I was not conscious of what type of reaction I would have received from them. At this point of the research I was already calling them "Collaborative Exploration Sessions" and my aim was to analyse, understand and improve notebook systems to create personalised methodologies and tools.

I told them only to "bring your notebooks and some thoughts and issues you might have with them". That was it. Then, I organised and printed some questions^{(see appendix .1)} for them to answer, or to use as guidelines for a conversation.

Before answering the questions, I asked them to pick a piece of paper from a selection and to use it as they wanted to during the session, to start reasoning on it and its spaciality: I already had in mind that by entering this type of discussion, feeling the touch of paper and using hands was an essential feature for my sessions to work out.

Explaining my reasons at the beginning, showing prototypes and discussing my personal experience is how I started the session. Participants then started to talk about themselves and their experience. I noticed how much what a person was saying would influence what the next person would add to the conversation: triggering personal memories and association is a concept I had to keep in mind for future sessions. Participants themselves brought up new questions and their answers made me think: in a few minutes of talking, they were already underlining the decisions they made when choosing a notebook, even only when buying one. Needs like "lines, or blank paper, or dots", structure-wise "it has to be flat, big, pocket size, hard cover, soft cover", motivations of use "to let things go, to remember them, to experience the world, to describe a single experience", creative solutions like "sticky notes for temporary thoughts, time-based notebook" emerged. It was amazing to see how everyone has their thoughts on this, how many decisions they took and maybe did not think about. At that point, I was sure that making their own notebook based on what they brought up during this session was possible. I was still unsure though on how to trigger an approach to the construction of the notebook different than a basic A5 rectangular-shaped notebook.

Leeszaal

The session took place at Leeszaal, Rotterdam West, on the 17th of October 2022. The audience was composed by an XPUB type of environment: people that work or study in a similar environment as me and my classmates. The concept of the night was that the participants would help us in shaping our raw ideas.

In the preparation for this session a lot of questions came to me. I could not think about a better way to transform the questions and the relative answers into actual results. For this session I planned to have an annotating exercise through the use of a sheet of paper and a pen of their choice to start experimenting with more interesting feelings and thoughts. Unfortunately, due to the typology of the event, my exercise did not function as planned and the session got back to its original shape.

Consequently, the general outcomes have been very similar to ones of the first session, even though I had a few new questions to propose. The good thing is that, as I keep underlining, we are all different, therefore different concepts appeared from the new participants: "using notebooks as a lens into human brains and learning types", "how to make notes with sound?", "how does the shape change the content?", "digital space is not an object, therefore is not considered as a precious space as much as a notebook", "notebooks therapy to discover strategies and solutions for ourselves", "cultural structures in notebooks", "paper is slow writing: how does it impact the way you produce text?", "notebook as memory extension".

All these conversations helped me to shape the concepts and reasons I have to work on this research and to see where and how participants would need help or a push from my side.

Individual online session with Claudia

Claudia (fictional name) is a person that studied with me in the artistic bubble. Even if we went towards different directions, the fact that she is a creative being can definitely be perceived throughout the session. This is a concept a I have to think about for the structure of my sessions: am I working with people who have a lot to do with this, or that are totally new to the environment and way of thinking?

During the sessions, Claudia presented me a selection of her notebooks, underlining what she likes, what she doesn't and what she did to overcome that set of problems she discovered on the way. Claudia makes collages to fill in spaces, Claudia makes herself personalised bullet journals and uses them as therapy, taping blank pages on the top of lined ones not to limit her thinking. Claudia asked herself what to do with the back side of a written sheet, or ripped pages, and she finds solutions.

During this session, I asked myself what my research could bring into Claudia's practice, as she was already reacting, thinking and reasoning on the way she is interacting with notebooks. Claudia still has not bound a notebook by herself, therefore I wonder if a practical session could make a difference for a person like her.

After the last two sessions, I was still unable to visualise what impact my work could have on the participants' practice of making notebooks. I thought: "we are just chatting", even if they were agreeing and reasoning with the set of problems I was bringing up. The need for a practical moment became suddenly not an option, but a mandatory action to take.

4. Case studies

Session 1

Make your own tool 1.0 is the first practical session of the series that took place on the 22nd November 2022 in the fourth floor of the PZI. The participants were students from WDKA and PZI.

Resources

What was important for me to start this session with was how to engage with people’s creativity levels, how to work with associations and how to generate personal thoughts out of my inputs.

Therefore, to start understanding the concept of generative design research I used the book "Convivial Toolbox" (Sanders E. B.-N. and Stappers P. J., 2014).

Generative research is the process of including end-users in the creation of a design object. There are many points in which the users can participates, in the pre-design, in the design phase or after it (Sanders E. B.-N. and Stappers P. J., 2014). In this research, users take part to every section of the design process as well as the practical creation of the object. It is essential that participants have the time to understand themselves and their needs through the use of "generative tools" and then to receive instructions on how to practically build their own design idea. My work as researcher and designer is to provide them with the means and the support to be able to do the work by themselves, for themselves.

This concept is important because by creating their own things, users participate in the creation of the world around them. Korn (2015) argues how the power to provide support resides in the object itself, not in its ownership, and how it becomes a memory device where the process of creation is inscribed: “objects ultimately possess meaning to the extent that they affect or confirm the stories through which a respondent constructs his identity and orders his world.“ (Korn, 2015). I wonder how much meaning objects can have if the owner creates the object by themselves, in the sense that not only the part of the discovery and acquisition of the object becomes important to the owner and has a re-connection to their life, but also their ideas and thoughts that come along during the process of creation.

Making and learning through making "provide us with the opportunity to control the narrative of our selves in a way that off the shelf consumption does not (..): it is an act of subversion." (Gibson, 2019). What we produce with our hands becomes suddenly part of the representation of the world around us, and it includes our vision and our active participation in it. In addition, Dissanayake (1995) explains how in the history of humans, we have always been embellishing and producing objects. Within the act of making, the object does not only exist in the world, but it consists in both the process of creation, that "embodies evolving ideas and beliefs" (Korn, 2015) of the creator, and the "metaphor for the care and control one wished to exercise in using it and the value one imbued it with." (Dissanayake, 1995). This can only happen when the person is concurrently the maker and the end-user of the object.

There are many approaches on what creativity is about, especially considering that not everyone believes that we can all be creative. Sanders and Stappers (2014) start the book affirming that what they wrote is based on the concept that everyone can be creative and the work of generative design tools is to bring it to the surface. "For everyday creative activities we can distinguish four levels": the most basic level of creativity is doing, that requires a minimum amount of interest. This is what happens when we use a notebook already made in the industry.

The second level is adapting. This action is made to personalise and change in a little way an object you already have. If participants come to the session with a notebook they already own, they could try to change it by making little additions to it, like a back pocket, a taped new paper, post-its to create more space and freedom.

The third level is making. This happens when we build a notebook from scratch but following predetermined patterns or rules. This action needs more time and energy.

The last level is creating. Creating is making something that doesn't exist yet. It relies on the use of raw materials and the absence of predetermined patterns.

In the C.E.S., everyone is free to decide at what level they feel like engaging with their own notebook. The purpose of these sessions is to facilitate the access to further levels of creativity and expression. The result of this session made me see how happy the participants are when something unexpected happens and something they didn’t expect appears. And it is not about the bookbinding per se, it is about how they engage with their creativity at a deeper level, connecting with their own thoughts and needs, when it becomes visible that something is shifting in their way of working and thinking.

Practical workshop

As the first practical session, my aim was to experiment with different activities to help participants to imagine the iterative process to arrive to a notebook. It was important, at this point, to transform my questions into practice.

I gave an introduction on the topic, my research, my questions and my discoveries. I then included a description of levels of creativity (Sanders E. B.-N. and Stappers P. J., 2014).

I created three exercises to work with with the participants to explore possibilities, underlining how every answer is good and everything they will do or produce will be accepted.

The first exercise was based on the four levels of knowledge that are explicit, observable, tacit and latent (Sanders E. B.-N. and Stappers P. J., 2014). The authors describe how "instead of asking people to attach valence and value to individual facts in isolation, we let them make these judgments within the context of a whole layer": as a result, I introduced the participants to three layered questions that could accompany them into the new topic ^{(see appendix 2)}.

The second exercise was based on the concept of folding: I wanted my participants to play with unexpected folds and a really useful way to do so is rotational action. They had to fold in any way they imagined the piece of paper they were holding and then pass it to the person next to them: when then they found themselves with folds they have not produce, they had to put them together, imagining where a possible binding could fit in ^{(see appendix 2)}.

The third exercise's aim was to challenge participants in writing on a sheet with an unusual shape and analyse how they felt the difference from a traditional paper ^{(see appendix 2)}.

At the end of the exercises, I did a reflection round to allow them to put into words the thoughts that these activities created in their mind.

The second part of the session was focused on making a new notebook out of the available materials in the room. It could be a basic standard notebooks, adding a small modification, doing experimental weird things, everything accepted. I brought to the session pieces of used cardboard to trigger their imagination and discuss the importance of reusing materials within this practice.

At the end of the session it was too late to still discuss so I sent over a form to fill in to gather some opinions.

Findings/outcomes

The three proposed exercises worked quite well to introduce them to a new mindset: there was the freedom to just act, without the fear of failing.

During the first exercise I understood how important it is to choose the questions really carefully, reasoning on what I want to obtain from them.

The second exercise was well organised and useful as participants put their hands in action and they perceived the different approach they had in what they were doing. This exercise worked well also because they came up with a result that they did not expect and it was really exciting.

The third exercise worked well after a modification I did on the go because they felt the difference in the way they were thinking about how they would normally approach pieces of paper when writing. Still, the questions need to be chosen more carefully because it is a good opportunity to gather opinions and thoughts.

Then in the discussion round they could explain what were their thoughts and I could notice that they were already looking at things differently, especially thanks to exercise number 2. [insert images of results]

The moment when we passed from the first section to the second was not really smooth therefore a step by step introduction to the creation of the notebook should be included at this point. It was helpful for example to ask them to start from a size or shape they would like to start from. It was really nice to see that everyone reacted in their own way and if you look at the results they produced during the session you can notice that the creation are not only making basic notebooks but participants already played with the ideas that came out through the three activities.

A more attentive look at binding methods could be done as it can be used as an ample tool to experiment with, nevertheless I enjoyed that this absence provoked an interesting result in which everyone tried their best to be independent and found experimental ways to solve their problems, while sometimes asked for help when they did not know how to do it or could not go on with what they had in mind.

I see that it is interesting to introduce participants to a theoretical concept when starting the session, as I did with the creative levels this time.

To conclude, in the next session I would like to prepare an exercise that can help in the reasoning for the type of paper and also to a new binding method.

It would be nice to organise a second session where people can focus on type of binding they can use to have a bigger overview of the possibilities, to be organised after a period of incubation where they can feel the thoughts directly applied in their living.

It was extremely nice to see them doing the exercises and get excited when they saw things happening and it is essential that they could create their own things with their hands. I really enjoyed the time together and I think that they also had a lot of fun, and this is also really important for me.

6. Appendix

Chapter 3. Method introduction and preparatory sessions

¹ M&M Inspirational questions for participants…

1.How do you take notes/draw/doodle/think? What kind of interface do you use?

2.What is kept/lost in the process of annotation?

3.Do you use lines or plain paper? pen or pencil?

4.Do you have different notebooks for different purposes? Which ones?

5.What do you do when a notebook is finished?

6.Do you think your notebook could still say something/be useful for some reason?

7.How much taking notes is involved in the process of learning for you?

8.Are there problems you might have while using your notebook? It can be limitation of the means, structure of it..etc

9.Have you ever thought about using a notebook that could fit better your needs?

10.Do you ever think like I would like to continue on this notebook but it’s finished? I would like to keep these pages also in the next notebook?