Collaborating differently
One of my two learning objectives in my Self-Directly Learning Contract was to change the way I work with others, to make collaboration an integral to my practice rather than a tool or a strategy.
What spurred me to include this? Certainly there’s the influence of the Critical Practice group at Chelsea College (one of the places I work for) - they operate on open-organisation guidelines, and aim to consider their governance critically and explicitly. I attended their Publicamp in the summer, and I’m sure this will have some small effect on my thoughts on the project brief. Creating the Free Media tool would have placed my mind in this direction. Have I also been feeling some kind of malaise about previous group work? I very much felt the need with the Free Media tool to work on my own. I’m not sure what to make of this.
What is clear though, is that I’ve spent not inconsiderable energy on this objective, and I think it’s important I make a record of this, else I’ll fail to critically examine how I’ve been working.
Stage One - the Formation of nonGroup
At the end of our day at Chalkwell Park, we attempted to form into groups. Manali disliked how the groups were forming around thematic interests, and wanted to form a group dedicated to the process of practice, not the end point. Despite having helped to set in motion the very process she was critiquing, I decided to join her. Metin joined too; then Lisa considered leaving her current group to join ours. It then occurred to me that we could constitute ourselves as some kind of anti-group or non-group, an entity with permeable boundaries. I wonder now if at the time it came out of a desire to side-step the messy business of group politics - we wouldn’t have to make a decision about whether Lisa should switch groups and join us because we were open and thus had no choice!
But nevertheless it provided an opportunity for a different mode of collaboration. My conversation with Manali on the train home was productive, we came up with nonGroup as a backcronym - not organised normally group. My hope for the nonGroup idea was that it would form a productive paradox which would help us all defamiliarise our normal working practices - each time we hit upon a stumbling block based on a conventional way of working we could respond ‘but we’re a nonGroup, we don’t have to do it like that’. The first instance of this came swiftly - Anita and Stephen were interested in coming to our meetings despite being members of other groups. But was this ok? Of course - we were nonGroup, where could the conflict be?
A disadvantage - the permeable boundary meant that I’ve ended up working with mainly the same people again, which was something I’d hoped to avoid. However, this approach meant I’ve ended up working with Lisa - as she observed, we’re antithetical in a lot of ways we tackle things, and so it’s definitely healthy that we’re working together.
Stage Two - the inaugral meeting
Five of us met up on the following Friday evening and together we managed to substantially flesh out the conception of the nonGroup, and our starting strategies. Our plans were summed up in the email we sent out to everyone on the course:
Hi all, You may have heard a few of us talking about forming a "nonGroup" - and we wanted to let you know what we'll be doing and how we'll be working. "non" is a backcronym for "not organised normally" but nonGroup is just a simple way of making it clear that we don't want to work by the normal unwritten rules of group work. This mean we're happy for people to work with us and work with other groups at the same time, happy for people to pursue individual interests and happy for our ideas and methods to be taken up and taken further by others. Some other main points: 1. Methodology: CURIOSITY -> INTERACTION -> FEEDBACK We started with the Look -> Think -> Act methodology from action research and remoulded it into the above. We're emphasising process over product. 2. Pursuing personal curiosities We're each going to start with what interests us most - sound, social organisation, benches, piers, whatever - and experiment to find out more without a definite objective in mind. 3. Free sharing and exchange of ideas We'll document what we do and share it with the other groups, we're not just open to people developing upon our findings and methods, we positively encourage it - no permission required. We might be in touch if we discover things that we think will interest you. 4. An emerging intervention Our intervention will come together by pursuing curiosities and then feeding back to each other and to other groups. Some of us will be going to Southend on Sunday with everyone else, so we hope to see you there! And our schedule is available on the google docs - please feel free to come to any of our meetings. Best -nonGroup P.S. people working with nonGroup currently include Anita, Chen, Cliff, Lisa, Manali, Metin and Stephen, with some working with other groups at the same time.
Is there more to be said on this? Sure - we hadn’t included was our strict timetabling for one. And it’s worth remarking that, as meetings go, this one was marked by an equality of voices.
Stage Three - (in)dividual research
On Sunday, we imiants descended on Southend-on-sea once again. I’d spent the previous day reading about collaborative action research and anthropological research methods in unstructured interviewing. Both texts explicitly acknowledged the emotional stresses of research in both areas; given I’d been feeling unusually anxious, this was both useful and somewhat comforting.
My main task for the day - to make progress on my other objective, of approaching and speaking to people I didn’t know as part of my research. Easier said than done! I baulked at every instance, and so decided to occupy myself with investigating unofficial pathways in the park. I bumped into Em, who was conducting interviews for her group, and decided to assist her - far more doable. I did some of the legwork, and hopefully this will give me a boost along the way.
Anita was very interested in the sounds of the park, so I spent some of the afternoon with her running around the park, hitting things and recording sounds. I don’t know if this play is going to be of direct use, but it’s given me more of an intuitive feel for the park, its locations and its surfaces.
Stage Four - sharing and feedback
We came together at Manali’s on Monday night to share ideas - we wanted to create a menu of different concepts and options stemming from our investigations. Lisa, Stephen and Anita had been discussing ways of unifying what were doing, and came up with the idea of algorithmic mini-interventions - small projects which would change the way people move, changes that could be reduced (with loss of course) into algorithms. A number of potentials were proposed. Also discussed: feeding blue food colour to pigeons (thus producing blue bird-mess), creating a microcosm of the park in the Chalkwell Hall conservatory, and - one people were very keen on - creating some kind of ‘batman’ signal, that would project people’s names. By the end it looked like we were going to go with the final idea.
Everyone seemed very happy with the outcome of the meeting, but I walked away perturbed. It felt like we were abandoning too quickly the logic we’d started, we were taking up quite an ordinary idea and abandoning what our processes had generated, that the whole thing was too lossy. (And I wonder, is there something of a capitalistic logic playing through me, that wants to convert the excesses of energy into additional production?) If we continued down the path, the only logical option seemed to be schism, to split the group and take with me those who wanted to carry on the methodology. Would I take that option, if it came to it? I’ve never felt compelled to be logical before.
Stage Five - presentation and group convention
We explained our ideas and methodologies to the rest of the class. Our pre-class discussions had morphed the signal idea (which was looking unviable technically) into a ice cream truck sound that would lead people around the city to the park. All other ideas had been dropped, bar the mini-interventions which we were retaining as an alternative.
After class with had a group ‘convention’ - I use the term because it was the first time we’d all been together. And it was a tense affair for this, as there was a feeling that people had not been pulling their weight, that the group’s open structure had been taken advantage of. In short, we were having a crisis of governance. There was uncertainty about what nonGroup was, what it meant to be a member, how it should represent itself. This is all very abstract because I find it difficult in the semi-public space of my blog (by semi-public, I’m thinking of it as a back-alley rarely trodden but nonetheless accessible) to lay out the terms of the conflict, and I need to spend some time thinking about how to do this ethically. It was clear that good group governance took more time and resources than we actually had.
I felt given the size of the group (at that time it potentially stood at seven) that to pursue a single project like the ice-cream truck would have been unviable - finding a substantial role for everyone would be unviable. The mini-interventions seemed far more able to utilise the multiplicity of the group with minimum organisation hassle. I was against the use of a unitary idea in any case, but I was confident that my reasoning was sound - that this wasn’t a seven person project, or even a five person one.
So we ended up pursuing the mini-interventions. To keep us focussed on the process, we agreed that of the mini-interventions that had been formulated and listed, we would each develop ones which were not our original idea. I took on Stephen’s idea of simply placing a book on a bench, and seeing how it affected the movement of the person - with no idea of how it would turn out.
January 11th, 2010 at 1:17 am
[...] was both pretty exhausting and not the easiest thing to explain (a long-winded attempt can be found here) - not least because it’s unclear whether we should be assessing the entire nonGroup set of [...]