Untangling the Personal Project
Visualizing daily movements and making stuff just because we want to
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When I was living in Chicago, I often started making visual stuff outside of my regular work. Many times, these were paintings. Sometimes, though, they fell into the graphic design realm. One of them involved mapping all of my commutes over thirty days. Because I was living downtown, everything was easily reached with my bicycle: work, groceries, cafes, parks, etc. Of course, mapping gave me some pretty good insight as to how I spend my days, and after all, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. The effort probably also foreshadowed my future academic career (eventually was part of my application for grad school): spending time on making a visual thing done just for the sake of trying it out.
Back in the present, I’ve been tipping my toes into an audiovisual project that involves exploratory image-making within a vague context (seriously, concepts include “missing” and “unseen”). It’s not client work, but it’s sort of commissioned, yet it’s more collaborative. I don’t see it as research because it emerged unexpectedly and it doesn’t quite sit well as scholarly inquiry (yet…).
What is it, then?
The term personal project comes to mind. Graphic designers likely recognize this term as the projects done outside work time. These projects have no stakeholders. There's no exchange of goods or services. It’s just the stuff you want to make and the purpose is driven by some internalized motivation.
My mapping project would probably qualify as a personal project.
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Many times in conversations, I’ve said that personal projects don’t exist, at least for design academics. But that’s not to say the concept itself isn’t valid. Here’s a rather brief untangling of what I mean by that.
*Everything* we work on inevitably informs other stuff we do. Maybe we’re making things to enhance our teaching. Or, something is nagging at us to create to give our brains a vacation during a larger, more intense project. Perhaps we’re playing around with an idea to figure out a new process or technique. Sometimes these projects take on their own lives; for an academic, that can mean having a new thing to exhibit, write about, or present.
This is how most of my scholarly research agenda took shape.
Does the term personal project resonate with you? Before this essay, I hadn’t uttered the term in over fifteen years (beyond the aforementioned rants) but the overall concept still has meaning when we converse about creative practice — scholarly or otherwise.
Maybe talking about these things can simply help us differentiate new from old, provocative from obligatory, and exploratory from established. It’s something we can chip away at in the background. Something we sort of crave in an unexplainable way. There is no pressure to finish it until, of course, the a-ha! moment arrives to share it.