David Lynch died yesterday and it reminded me of one of my central hesitations about going back to school. David talked compellingly about creative work:

‘you don’t see the whole thing at once and the way it unfolds is anyone’s guess. It’s kind of a magical thing.’

This is how I think about the intuitive creativity that drives the design process. The Academy, to put it generously, struggles with ways of working like intuition. Visual Anthropologist Dr. Amanda Ravetz writes about this tension

‘shifting my attention (from a painting practice) to social anthropology I often felt confused … by the way emotional insight was treated as untrustworthy in academia, contaminating even’

Tim Ingold takes a similar (but admittedly wingier) position about post-material economies:

‘knowledge is produced by harvesting quantities of data, and feeding it into machines that digest or process this ‘input’ and excrete the results, also known as ‘output’ at the other end. This excrement is the marketable currency of the knowledge economy.’

Obnoxiously put, but it does get close to what the University, at its worst, starts to feel like. Insights start not to seem worth much unless they can be displayed in a chart, new knowledge isn’t useful if it isn’t presented as a template that can be deployed by others.

I acknowledge it’s tricky for built environment people: our work sits at an awkward intersect between art and science where a design detail can be drawn in a way that is definitively incorrect and a resultant built form can be reasonably scored against concrete indicators of success such as litres of water filtered per hour or diversity of users visiting in a day.

But this more technocratic reading of landscapes can result in sometimes perverse research output. A recent article by landscape architects in the Journal of Environmental Psychology uses the Scientific Method to posit that the ‘solution’ to children developing informal goat tracks through school grounds is to pave over such tracks with new paths featuring:

‘meandering forms … serpentine style (that) implies movement and facilitates exploration’.

ignoring entirely the possibility that the transgression involved in the breaking and running of goat tracks might actually have something to do with the appeal.

Instead the research favour prescriptive formalistic design suggestions that ensure the goat tracks are subsumed into the designer’s prefigure scheme for how play should work. The measure of success, in the Academy at its worst, becomes less the building of beautiful places and more the accurate prognostication of all possible uses - an ambition that any real designer with any serious intuitive sympathy for the creative process would tell you can never result in beautiful, meaningful places.

David Lynch understood this:

‘(creativity) is a magical thing and you don’t want to know so much that would, you know, stop it from happening’

In doing a PhD how do I insulate my work from the risk of ‘knowing too much’? My interests do not lie on the technocratic side of the profession (despite its proven worth) but neither do I seek to choreograph or champion a way of working as a template for others: This because foundationally I believe that creative practice is intuitive, is not something that you can write a recipe for.

My main motivations are that :

  1. I want the fulfilment that comes with doing some independent work and
  2. I like the university and the people in it and I want that world to be a bigger part of my life

I’m hesitant, though, to become my own vivisectionist. My hunch is that David would say this will not result in good work.