Design Thinking for Academic Writing
Starting a new piece of Academic writing can be daunting. How can you best pull together all of the disparate ideas from your reading. What is the most compelling content? How can you make it interesting for the reader? When you sit down in-front of an empty page ready to start typing, a head full of reading that doesn’t hang together it can be easy to reach for your favorite online distraction. I was recently discussing this process with my partner who has bravely gone back to Uni to study international relations. As we were talking through some ideas on how to turn the blank page into a working draft quickly I noticed some applications of human centered design research and prototyping tools to this kind of work (www.designkit.org).
It occurred that having a framework, a guide or similar might help to reduce the mystery in how to get from blank page to a working draft. The next day I scratched together the diagram below based on the human centered design double diamond and started jotting down some activities or tools and processes you might use at each stage that are adapted to academic writing.
I popped some ideas down on how this might work. Have a read and feel free to comment. Have you done something similar? Did it work or not? Why?
After our discussion, my partner had more luck with the writing coaches at Uni and I think found the below a bit bewildering and confusing, so the concept clearly needs some work! I would love to hear your opinions and start a conversation.
Understand
Gather all your reading and information, look for opportunities to increase understand outside and in compliment to the academic reading. Discussions with peers, consultation with experts, your lecturer, direct experiments, the course material are all areas to gather information. Go wide before selecting a particular approach to the essay question or topic.
Insights
Practitioners of Human centered design make time at the completion of discovery activities to gather insights. This is a process of drawing out the key information of each bit of reading discussion etc and fitting into a framework against all the other information collected. The result is way of distilling the information to the most interesting concepts and ideas gather.
This might be a process of grouping similar readings together, drawing similarity and contrast between information gathered, conceptual frameworks etc.
In some cases the conclusion of the in-sighting stage will pose a research question for your essay.
Create
In this phase the understanding and clarity from the previous two stages are used to propose in whatever way possible the response to your topic, question or the like. What key ideas will you write about? What new insight, point of view or information will you bring to the table? Which audience do you engage with, which readings do you agree with / disagree with.
I think there are two divergences from a typical academic writing in this stage that may be useful.
- Produce several ideas as quickly as possible and choose the best or mix and match components until the overall argument is optimised.
- Use methods other than long form writing to record those ideas, use models, pictures, collage, voice notes, cut and paste, sketches, dot points, post-its or whatever feels natural to convey the idea only just enough to decide if it is to be pursued further.
Try to picture how the finished product might look, what are the components, how do they fit together? How might the obvious response be remixed a bit to make it better? How can you surprise or out-perform? What is the best that could come out of this writing?
Draft
This is a more typical process, but now you have a clear idea of what it is you are writing. Use the model, sketches or whatever you created from the previous step to spark a topic sentence for each paragraph, Proceed to explain. Start with writing the introduction and conclusion first or the other-way around, whatever works for you.
Focus on getting the whole draft together first and then iterating on the finished product, re-writring, editing and tuning to improve with each revision.
Editing & Delivery
When you finish the first draft, drop the pen and take some time before going back over it and reading as if you were your audience. Re-read the whole thing and make comments and highlight sections to work on. Maybe highlight sections that are great and should be kept. Then repeat the Draft and edit stages until either you are happy with the end result or you hit the due date.
