Lived Research

I had a friend in grad school whose boyfriend used to just sit on the couch and watch TV a lot. It drove my friend nuts, especially when the boyfriend defended his lethargy by calling it “research” (he was an artist who made art about pop culture). Fifteen years later, the relationship is long gone, but his career as an artist has really taken off.

In that time, I have come around to defending him. How could you write about pop culture without experiencing it? For him, of course it was research, as necessary as a dig for an archaeologist or lab time for a scientist. Yet, for artists and designers pursuing formal studies, lived research time is conspicuously absent from curricula. Sure, you can write a research paper at the library, or even go to art shows, but going out into the world and experiencing things germane to your artistic interests is always extracurricular.

So when Ayden and I decided to build the Experience Design Certificate Program outside of academia, we jumped at the chance to build lived experience into the curriculum. After all, if your medium is experience, you’d do well to attend to how you experience things. We’d never actually heard of Lived Experience as a rigorous exercise within an educational setting, but we had our own methods at Odyssey Works to use as a model.

We’ve just been through our second year of lived research. The results have been intense and eye opening, and, Ayden and I have admitted to each other, our favorite part of the program. The research begins with a question about experience design and a proposal. It then follows with a weekly schedule of events, experiments, and traditional book research with an aim to gain a full, embodied understanding of a possible answer to a question. Each project pushed our understandings along with those of the students.

texts by (from top to bottom) Thijs Beuming & Irina Kruzhilina, Jessica Schoolman, Tauba Khelifa.

Learning, here, is awfully close to just living a life of curiosity. The main difference is a sense of intention, a clear design, and a clear question. Some of our former students have told me they’re engaged in lived research again on their own. It has made me wonder at the random way in which we take in information in most of our lives. Not that there isn’t something beautiful about following your nose, as it were, but what would it mean if some of that random consumption of information were structured, and built around a line of inquiry?

Have you engaged in lived research on your own? Send a note!