Monday, October 24, 2005

PhD and Lego

Whoever thought that doing a PhD would result in me playing with Lego? But it did and has made me think a little bit outside the box with regard to my research and possible approaches.

I've just come out of an extremely useful seminar, 'Authoring a PhD', which examined different ways of approaching creativity - in which Professor Dunleavy, the privider for these sessions, uses office buildings and the Gherkin as an analogy - and a facilitaive session during which we played with Lego. The toy acted as a metaphor, encouraging us to present our research interests and particular problems we may face in doing it.

One of the more challenging tasks was to write an abstract on a flipchart of our thesis in 20 minutes - the twist being that we were writing it as if we had already finished it and were presenting our findings. It showed I need to think a bit more about what I'm trying to achieve.

But strangest experience of the session was the constant backgroun music - rock, classical and other sorts. Is there something subliminal that the organisers (the Teaching and Learning Centre at the LSE) was trying to get across? If so, I think I missed it.

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