Tag: change

Openness, creativity, and reflections on my PhD process

In recent weeks, I’ve made a major shift to my PhD process. After 2.5 years of exploration, I’ve moved into a period of consolidation. In other words, I’ve started writing in a far more formal capacity, with the hope of finishing my dissertation early next year.

Following this change in approach, there has been a certain fallowness here on the blog. I have struggled to find inspiration of the kind that has come so easily until now. It has been harder to pull myself out of the PhD in order to write on tangential subjects. It is not exactly that I am lacking in ideas. It is just that all of those ideas now seem to weave in and out of my other writing, and I don’t know exactly how to parse each into their own space.

This change in my writing habit has prompted me to reflect on my creativity, and its relationship to openness. From my amateur reading of psychology papers, I know that openness to experience is one of the Big Five personality traits, and that there has been a correlation found between openness and creativity. But what I hadn’t realised is that there are interesting qualifications to that correlation. One of them, as discussed in Kaufman and Sternberg (p121) is that:

‘creative behavior was highest if very open participants were given tasks that were open and somewhat undefined. In other words, highly open people are not creative in all work environments. They are most creative when the situation and task is ambiguous and not well defined.’

People high in openness are more creative in unstructured environments. The kind of writing and thinking that takes place when in an exploratory phase of research and open to new ideas is different from that which occurs when trying to close down avenues, and stabilise an argument. The shift in my PhD working process is forcing me to push some of my ideas, to develop those that are or were only lightly sketched in my mind. There is a sense of maturation, both in my ideas, and in my self-concept of what it means to be a researcher. But there has also been a drop in my externalising of problems. I have been looking in more, and out less.

The process of the PhD has involved much more personal change than I imagined from the outset. Research necessarily involves a lot of time spent inside your own head. There are many times that it’s just you and the screen, and nothing else to distract from that reality. There have been times when I’ve noticed my thinking patterns changing; when I’ve discovered a greater capacity for focus than I’d once had, or learned to have faith in my capacity to be creative. There have been times when I have felt so entirely at sea I never imagined making it back to land. I am sure there will be many more such times between now and the end.

This blog has given me a much-needed sense of connection to the ‘outside’ many times. As I move further into this next phase of research, I am going to try to remember that, in order to keep producing and pushing myself here. In the meantime, a short note of thanks to all of you who read, who comment, who participate. It matters more than you’d likely suspect.

As my blogging diverges in this more personal direction for a moment, I’d love to know if you’ve ever taken on a project (research or otherwise) that changed you. What was it, and what did you learn in the process?

Are we engaged yet? What happens after the pledge is made?

Just about everyone I know in this sector seems to have harboured some fantasy of having his or her own museum; of doing things differently. Some want a small rebel museum (easier for experimentation); some want to take charge of a bigger space for really radical change (which brings to mind Jasper Visser’s recent post on big ships versus speedboats). I am curious as to why this is. Is it simply a question of ambition? Does everyone want to be “the guy” (instead of “the guy the guy counts on”)? I don’t quite think that’s it. Is it that the engaged sections of the sector are full of entrepreneurs-in-museum clothing who love the institution of the museum, but grate against its limitations? Is it simply because, like imagining what you’re going to be when you grow up, it gives a focus for crafting a vision of the future?

I suspect one factor is the very fact that we (and by we I mean anyone who thinks seriously on the question of the museum, and what its purpose is and how it should best fulfill that purpose) are so engaged with the problem. On some level, all engagement brings with it a promise or a pledge for further action. It is a gearing up in readiness for something further. And so when museum professionals engage so seriously in regular and ongoing rumination about the questions of what a museum should be doing, and how, and for whom, the next natural step is to want to do something with that engagement; to fulfill the pledge that was made upon immersion in the subject. To take the ideas and tentative solutions being dreamed up and discussed on blogs and in Tweets everywhere and test them out.

That’s not always possible (although pilot projects and the like can provide some opportunity for discovering whether an idea had real legs, or was merely a beautiful fiction). Acting upon the urge to make serious change can be difficult until you control a budget and a staff; until you have your own department or museum. And so people dream of having a museum of their very own and think about what they would do differently; about how they would start a museum from scratch, conceive of a kinetic museum or re-imagine museums. Some of these conversations are simply fun. Some are great intellectual forays that get the mental juices flowing in an entirely pleasurable way. But some, no doubt, come from a sense of powerless and frustration at a perceived need for change, without having the mechanisms to do anything about it.

It makes me wonder whether the same is true of museum audiences. Once they are engaged, do they too have an urge for something more? Once a museum has put time into courting a visitor and getting them engaged, does the museum then consider how to make good on its pledge for further action? I am sure that the best museums do, although I often have the impression that the discussion finishes at “engagement” rather than being about a lifelong relationship. Is there a level of frustration, then, when someone is engaged and committed if the relationship stalls? Sue Bell Yank recently farewelled MOCA’s Engagement Party, asking in the title of the post if she could “have her ring back?”, and I think her post is a useful metaphor for considering how we deal with museum audiences once they have coyly batted their eyelashes at our proposals, and said yes.

If you make an effort to engage someone, whether for a speaking engagement or a marriage, there is an expectation that accompanies the pledge. And if the  relationship doesn’t meet those expectations, there can arise a frustration that can lead to disengagement, to breaking off future involvement. And I wonder if that is a problem that confronts this sector in both professional and public circles. If a great museum professional’s commitment and ideas aren’t recognised, they will probably stop giving them. If a visitor (or user) cannot see validity in their input or ongoing relationship with the museum, they probably will stop committing to it. How can we make sure that neither of those outcomes happen? How can museums make sure that engaged staff continue to feel that their contributions are valid, even if they are not always practical? How can we help visitors feel appreciated, even if they are just lurkers in our physical and digital spaces?

Dating and courtship might be the first steps in a new relationship, but engagement isn’t the last. So often it seems that our discussions end at that point, but I’m not sure that’s where they should stop. How can we utilise the investment (whether of time, money, or emotion) that someone has made into our exhibitions, museums, programs, or their own careers, to ensure that the relationship continues to be fulfilling?

Does your (current) museum see engagement as being the goal, or just a stage in a longer relationship? And have you ever harboured your own fantasy of having a museum of your very own? If so, what would you do differently?