Graham Hutchison
an alternative way of thinking, being, communicating and doing
the inquiry
This inquiry is a diffractive reading of my lived experience: education, mental illness, design, and communication. It is an experimental exploration of an activated affirmative, ethical onto-epistemological repositioning of design and communication [pro/noun/verb] and the researcher and practitioner. To temporarily and spatially situate and locate this inquiry, the severe mental health condition of Borderline Personality Disorder [BPD] non-clinical mental health intervention gave resistance. For design practitioners, communicators and researchers, guiding active principles will open new lines of flight, new spaces, and new opportunities to be within the active frame. Further, a 'speculative middle' dis/ability intervention voice space was problematised: this virtual space is where new affirmative conversations and narratives can safely occur.
a new way of thinking, being, communicating and doing
the journey
Disciplinary boundaries were dissolved, ontologies and epistemologies were explored, lived experience, data, analysis, interpretation, and communication, questioned. It is post discipline, post qualitative, and post phenomenological, through necessity, not posturing. Design praxis is realigned 'within' an "ecology of belonging", cutting across, through, with, and of, lived experience, being, and, at its core, desire and becoming. Appreciative Inquiry Action Research provides a holding methodological 'bucket' with friendship as method and Alice in Wonderland loosely framing affirmative conversations. This creatively destructive inquiry creates a different temporality, spatiality, and fluid horizon: asking what futures are imaginable: always with space for the unknown and unknowable [thank you, Ronald Jones]. These futures will hover within a 'non-method/olgy' that will be emergent: free, fluid, amorphic, temporal, and spatial, and active.
the situatedness
Non-clinical mental dis/ability intervention [MDI] grounds and locates the research providing an active frame to explore and experiment with the actual and virtual, the plane of immanence, and machines of desire [Body without Organs], the spaces in-between where transformation is energised. The meta cartography of this inquiry follows the Spinozian monist linage and cross cuts, cuts through and folds the social sciences, cognitive science, humanities and design: Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Braidotti, and Ian Buchanan, Lloyd, Brown and Stenner, Fox and Alldred, Freire, Schon, and Richard Buchanan [philosophy of design is 'thin'].
about me
Currently, I am a part-time student at the Royal College of Art in London, undertaking a practice-based PhD. I am a 'mature' student with 30 years of international practice as an Architect, Integrated Agency Creative Director [global], and Director of multiple and Interdisciplinary Consultancy [multinational]. This inquiry is from an architect and designer of things positionality. This. positionality spans Richard Buchanan's four orders of design, entangled multicultural systems, multiple disciplines [design and otherwise], cultures and eastern and western university education. Further, and the reason for this inquiry's existence, I have been 'othered' since childhood, being therapeutically and chemically forced into a continual state of 'becoming someone other' [normative], suffering multiple epistemic injustices.
Another day, that's 384.
I must look more into the fold; I delay reading Deleuze &Guattari: it's mind-bending; it just gets painful. Time for coffee. Perhaps I will be more up for it if I get a coffee. Clinically depressed - go figure. Protect the vulnerable - lock them up. God, I am tired, only four hours of sleep. Bloody cat. I wonder if I have any muscles anymore.
Shower.
It's becoming, but it is so slow. I endlessly think, but what is thought? It’s my painkillers. I wish the postman would press someone else's bell. The sun is shining. Who knew Erin Manning was the partner to Massumi and lives in Montreal. Typical, I leave, and everyone I need is on the plateau. I enjoy Massumi's interpretation of Deleuze, but Buchanan seems to be more precise; you can feel the time he pondered. DeLanda appears to be off on his journey with the past. Mind you, Haraway is clearly out to lunch. St Pierre was good as usual but vague, with no direction beyond reading. I'm reading! It's complex what is a mis/representation and whats an interpretation. Who has stayed within the tenant who has wondered off down their path? Shoot me. I have Briadotti to locate.
I’m a groupie.
So pleased about the summer school. Exhausting, I will try to get healthy before August, build up stamina. I am the size of a house. It seems like the only way is to be out in the middle of the night. There must be more philosophical theory behind design. Am I missing it? Where is it hiding? Maybe those veggie burger things for dinner. Who was he? Where did he go? the cherry blossom will explode sitting under the trees in Ueno Koen that was forever ago. I am tired today. I need air. When was the last time I went out?
No idea.
I pulled my inquiry through itself. Obvious now its the machine of desire that creates the material. It isn't easy to release what appears to be essential so I will go on the bike today for a quick jaunt. If only I could avoid myself. I am glad I have the trauma-informed practice training. They will be front line workers that sounds a bit scary. It's active. I must check all other conferences for which I have registered. Why am I creating these assemblages for what aim, what is the desire, the intensity? Am I just bored and lonely? I need to tackle the no methodology, no method. Post, post, post will go down like a lead balloon.
Yes, a coffee maybe after my shower.
