There are things you put in your calendar quite a long time in advance during a research stay and that, when they finally arrive, still manage to be both exciting and slightly terrifying, all at once, as usual.
This week — Wednesday, 16 September — I was due to give a guest lecture at the University of Sydney. Was I nervous? Obviously. Teaching at a university like Sydney, with its history, its prestige and everything it represents, is one of those things that I still find pretty amazing. And when the invitation comes from someone whose work I admire — Lucila Carvalho — and means stepping into her classroom, with her students, as part of a course she has thought through and built, the responsibility feels just that little bit greater. The course was on qualitative research methods for Design students.
My problem was figuring out what I could actually bring to that space. There wasn’t much point in trying to explain design to Design students, and even less in teaching them the methods they were already working on in the course. My job, as Lucila very clearly explained to me, was to bring something from my own work as an educational researcher involved in research and development projects — including educational design — and somehow make that research tangible for the students. And for that, we used one of the examples that I think is particularly rich in terms of both design and research: the story of DALI.
DALI is one of those projects I remember with particular affection and that I feel especially proud of. We wanted to work on adults’ data literacy for more responsible citizenship, and that took us on a journey considerably more complicated than that sentence might suggest. First, we had to ask ourselves what being data literate actually meant; then build a framework; think about how those things might be learned; turn them into learning experiences and then into games; co-create, test, observe, listen to players and facilitators, change things, prepare materials so that other people could use them, translate them, and finally think about the broader conditions that could make all of this possible. In the original project presentation, that journey was neatly organised into five major outputs: a framework, a learning approach, a toolkit, an implementation framework and policy recommendations.
But I didn’t want to tell the story of DALI as a collection of outputs. I wanted to tell it through the questions that emerged along the way and, especially, the people we needed in order to try to answer them. I also wanted the presentation to be approachable, to feel like mine, and hopefully to connect with the students — even just a little. And that is where Rosalía came in.
The lecture started with Berghain. Before releasing the song, Rosalía released the score, and people began performing it without having heard the original. Then the actual song came out. Conrad Taylor made a techno remix that nobody had asked him to make, the remix began to circulate and, a few months later, it ended up becoming part of Rosalía’s own performance at the BRIT Awards.
What interested me about that story was something very simple: there is a difference between what someone puts out into the world and what happens to it afterwards. Rosalía releases a score and people interpret it. She releases a song and somebody does something else with it. That version circulates, other people appropriate it and, eventually, it comes back to the artist herself, transformed. And, with all the obvious differences, when we try to design for learning, we have a similar problem.
We can design a task, a game, materials, rules, roles. We can have quite a sophisticated idea of what we think might happen. But then people arrive. And what they do, what they understand, what they ignore, what they transform, the conversations that emerge, or what they need in order for any of it to make sense are not automatically contained in our design. And that, really, was the connection with qualitative methods.
Every time a new question emerged in DALI, we also had to ask ourselves who could help us understand it. For some things, we needed experts; for others, people interested in facilitating these kinds of experiences; for design and co-creation, we needed other perspectives; once we started playing, we needed players and facilitators; and when we broadened our view, we needed people who could help us understand conditions that went far beyond the game itself.
Not all of those people could tell us the same things, because they did not all have access to the same parts of the experience. And not all of our questions could be answered in the same way. I suppose that was the idea I wanted to leave with a class that, at first sight, is quite far removed from the ones I usually teach: before asking ourselves which method we are going to use, perhaps it is worth asking what we are trying to understand, what we cannot know by ourselves, and who we need in order to try to understand it.
And yes, I confess that it felt particularly special to be able to tell that story there. At the University of Sydney, invited by someone I admire, talking to Design students about a project I am very proud of and starting, against all odds, with Rosalía.
And on top of that, I finally got to hug a friend I’ve had for more than seven years but had never actually met in person; yesterday I also met Pippa Yeoman in person… so yes, everything feels rather nicely rounded off.
There are days during a research stay that you know you are going to keep particularly well stored away. I think this will be one of them.
Este trabajo es resultado de la estancia 22871/EE/25 financiada por la Fundación Séneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia con cargo al Programa Regional de Movilidad, Colaboración e Intercambio de Conocimiento “Jiménez de la Espada”