Causal loop practise – on Suffering.

After the incredibly exciting orientation period, I started to re-think possibilities and practises of this project. My mind was jumping from idea to idea, in true monkey mind style. 

I have been working with Ownpower for the past two months, we were most recently working on the Skills intelligence platform.We are moving on to the learning management system tomorrow. I really think this is a system that will be a great practical component to my research, I believe that learning is something where innovation needs to help with solving some serious issues. I should focus my research on this.

I also start working at my new job next week, which will be focused on usability on e-government / e-citizen systems for the Western cape government. Since this is my main job and I will be putting a lot of my energy into this, I should focus my research on this.

I have been wanting to explore interaction design in depth, as it is what I am pursuing a career in. The idea of human and machine being able to interact, observing two polarities which are based upon one another, fascinates me. It is what I truly love and I should research what I love.

This research is also based on entrepreneurship, so I should pursue my dream startup, Diagrammatic. This is based on infographics and perception of information being easily digested. Alexander Gerner’s concept of diagrammatic thinking, was the inspiration of the startup and it was something I had been wanting to get going for a while. It resonated with me and I feel it is also something I would love to research. 

I had so many options which I feel needed to be researched. How was I going to do this ? Where do I start, what is my practise?  I started to overwhelm myself with questions and spin into an anxious heap. So, I did what everyone in an anxious heap does, I sat down at a coffee shop and had a beverage that would make me even more anxious.

Then, I noticed that this was in fact what the research was all about. It was about the practise, and how I perceive it, how I work with this, it is about the nature of being and how I understand it and how I will validate it. My research includes all of these components and how I understand it, act on it , reflect on it and practise of  all of these. This is where I attempted to wrap my head around four beautiful words; Epistemology, ontology, reflexivity and praxis.

I’m still working on it, but here’s a diagram that I created to try figure out how to try figure this all out.