Exercise 11 of the Playing With Purpose series
The Exercise
Pick a topic you think you already understand, something in your field, your practice, your life, where you have an established opinion. Now research it as if you don’t.
The rules: you cannot start with your conclusion and look for evidence that supports it. You go in with a blank slate and follow the questions wherever they lead. You read things that challenge what you believe. You look for the best version of the opposing argument. You stay in the research long enough that you land somewhere you didn’t expect.
Write down what you find.
Then answer these:
The reflection questions:
- Did the research confirm what you believed, or did it complicate it?
- At what point did you feel the urge to stop because the findings were making you uncomfortable?
- What’s the difference between research that confirms your position and research that actually teaches you something?
- Have you ever had a belief that you held strongly until you went looking honestly and had to revise it?
- What would your creative work look like if every significant decision was preceded by this kind of research?
What I Learned When I Did This
I’ve been a researcher my whole life, which is something it took me a while to claim as a real identity rather than a personality quirk. I don’t settle for the first answer. I can’t. If a question is genuinely interesting to me I will follow it to somewhere most people got off the bus long ago, and I’ll do it not because I think I’ll find the answer I was hoping for but because I genuinely want to know what’s actually true. That’s a distinction I’d draw sharply: research as confirmation is not research, it’s just a more elaborate way of staying in place. Real research goes in without knowing where it’s going.
The most instructive example I can give you came from color theory, of all things. I had been teaching color for years and I understood it the way most designers understand it: intuitively, with a working knowledge of the rules, with a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. Then I decided to actually go looking, the way I go looking when I take a subject seriously, which is to read everything and follow every thread and not stop until the territory starts running out. Six months of that.
What I found at the end of it was that several things I’d been teaching with confidence were oversimplifications, a few were outright inaccurate, and one was, by the light of the research, simply wrong. Not wrong in the way that’s embarrassing and you put it in a box and move on, but wrong in a way that revealed something fascinating about why color works the way it does. The corrected version wasn’t less useful in the classroom. It was more useful, because it was based on what was actually happening rather than on the handed-down approximation. My students got better results. My own work got more precise.
I’ll tell you something honest: there was a moment in that research where I had a choice. I’d found something that contradicted a confident position I’d held and repeated and built curriculum around. I could have found a way to discount the research. I could have decided the source wasn’t reliable enough, or the finding was too narrow, or the exception didn’t affect the general rule. These are all things people do, and they’re not always dishonest, sometimes the exception really doesn’t affect the general rule. But in this case I knew, if I was being straight with myself, that the research was solid and my position was wrong.
I changed the curriculum.
The principle I try to carry into every significant research project is this: I’m not going in to prove a point. I’m going in to find out what’s true. If what’s true is what I already believed, great. If it’s not, I want to know that more than I want to be right, because being right about the wrong thing is just a more confident form of being wrong.
The exercise I’d give anyone is not a research project with a topic assigned. It’s the practice of noticing the moment in your own research when you want to stop because you’ve found something that disagrees with what you came in believing. That moment is the most important moment in any honest inquiry. What you do with it tells you more about your relationship with your own creative practice than almost anything else.
Playing With Purpose is a series of creativity exercises for people who want to understand and reclaim their creative capacity. You don’t need to be an artist. You need to be curious.
Further Reading
- Stage 3 in Design Thinking: Ideate (IxDF) — Ideation methods and creative exercises
- What Is Creativity? (IxDF) — Foundations of creative thinking
- What is Gamestorming? (IxDF) — Game-based ideation and creativity
