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Recently, the idea of learning in the open has been on my mind a lot.

There have been two main drivers. First, I’ve personally felt and heard lots of other people talking about a fear to say the wrong thing in regards to Black Lives Matter, not because we didn’t believe the message or want to fight for justice and equity, but because there seemed to be so many ways we might get it wrong while we tried to learn to be better allies in the open. Second, I’ve been drawn to making more and not wanting to share it here or on social media, because I wanted to feel free again.

This blog is probably the closest I’ve gotten to truly learning in the open. I was always the kid who wouldn’t share work until it was done. But here, in part because of the fact I’ve been sharing for years, there are plenty of learnings in progress that I’ve shared in case others are on the same journey for want of a better word. 

Yet as much as I know those moments of learning and growth were important to getting me to where I am today. I very rarely reshare them, because I’ve changed since and because I wouldn’t want this blog or me by extension to be judged on what I thought 3 years ago. I’m sure I’ll probably think the same about this in 3 years too.

When you learn in the open online, there’s always a record. That record can be searched and brought up years later, for better or worse. How many times have we seen someone ‘cancelled’ because of something they tweeted years before whether they had grown since or not?

However, if we never learn in the open and we never share how slow progress can be surely it dissuades others from even starting the process. If you can only be an expert or a master of a craft or nothing, where is the recognition that no one gets there overnight, especially when it’s learning that has to be done outside of the classroom. 

So, largely for myself, I wanted to make the case for both learning in solitude and learning in the open, to try to work out which I want to do. 

The case for learning in solitude

Away from prying eyes, you can experiment free of judgement. You can go wherever your learning takes you with no responsibility or sense that it needs to conform. This freedom can be particularly liberating when it comes to creative work. Sketchbooks that include tests and scraps can inspire bigger works, without needing to be finished pieces themselves.

You are free to shape your own opinion on the subject matter, following your reading and intuition. You are in charge of your own curriculum and can draw connections between whatever insights you’ve found, without a sense of needing to fit them into convention.

When it comes to learning more important topics, if you take the time to learn on your own, to make your own progress, you may be less likely to say something out of turn that could hurt others.

The case for learning in the open

When you learn in the open, you lose some of that self-initiated freedom. But you gain the potential to be challenged and to be introduced to new ideas that you might not have found yourself. You might be directed to different subjects or course corrected by someone with lived experience.

Someone might see something in the works in progress that you share that you might not have seen on your own, whether that’s their good or their bad qualities or their harmonies with other works.

Someone might also resonate with your progress and be inspired to make their own, seeing how far you’ve come or how close you are. You might learn together. You might learn in parallel. You might lead their learning. 

Learning in the open and learning in solitude have their pros and cons. Depending on what you’re learning, how you’re learning and why, you might find one or the other works best for you.

I typically end up doing something of a hybrid between the two; I spend time getting to grips with the basics alone then share what I learned in hindsight. I think that’s where I’m likely to stay for the majority of my work.

That said, I don’t think we shouldn’t share because we are afraid to fail. There is so much value to having a space to play and learn and experiment on your own. But there is so much more to be lost from never learning in the open because we feel too fragile to accept a stumble or a critique. 

I have definitely fallen into that camp, and oftentimes still do. I was an overachiever at school and now my sense of self can be so fragile that the slightest perception of failure threatens the careful balance I’ve been working on since I was 5. That’s something I’m working on. That’s something I think we should all be working on.

We need to normalise receiving new information and changing our opinions. We need to practise taking feedback (and giving feedback) in a way that’s positive and not defensive. We need to find a way to make it okay to be a work in progress in the open again, because that’s what we all are, works in progress.

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On 25th May I ran 13.1 miles. 10 weeks before the furthest I had run in was 5km. This is the story of how and why that was possible, and what I learned along the way. 

When social distancing began in earnest, one of the first things (aside from having to cancel a trip to see my mum) that I felt grief in losing on a daily basis was my trips to Frame. I had been going to boxfit and lift 4-5 times a week and it had changed my life, and suddenly that outlet had been taken away. 

I live in a first floor flat, so jumping up and down doing online HIIT classes wasn’t an option, which meant if I wanted to work off my anxiety (and in the midst of a pandemic I had plenty) my only option was to run.

I wasn’t completely new to running, I was a pretty regular park run goer. But I was always someone who stopped to walk up the hill in my local route. 

I was skeptical about being able to really do anything. After years of being told I had no physical ability in PE and being discouraged from sport, my confidence that I can do anything exercise related remains incredibly low.

So the first big hurdle was deciding to just run. I think I watched this video of a lady who decided to run an ultramarathon with no training (she is otherwise a fitness YouTuber and former IronMan athlete) around the same time as I started running. While I obviously wasn’t running 50 miles, I was aiming for 5km, the idea that I could just decide that I could run was really powerful. That’s what I did. I managed to keep running for a whole 5km without stopping. For me, that was huge. 

I sort of rode a wave of “wow, if I can do that maybes I can do more” for weeks. The more I proved to myself that I could do, the more I believed that I could do even more.

I was running almost everyday for a good while, 5-10km every time. I was running because I was excited to be seeing progress in myself in a time when everything else was so stationary. But I was also running because I was fearful about what would happen if I stopped. Would I lose my progress? Would I gain weight? Would I become lazy? Would I lose the worth I had started to assign to myself?

It wasn’t healthy in more ways than one. While I can’t say I’ve got over all of those mental hangups, I have at least realised that rest is as important as running.

But to be fair, I did only realise that because I put so much stress on my knee that for a few days it hurt to stand. 

Once I started a more healthy running schedule, I decided I wanted to run a half marathon and that I was going to slowly build up to it, over about 5 weeks, by increasing my Sunday runs. Having a goal that felt achievable and that I shared to make myself accountable was one of the few things that was keeping me sane. It was a marker in a time when we live only in the present without enough certainty to plan for the future. 

I just built up the distance 2km at a time. Had I tried to run it in a certain time or in a certain way, I don’t think it would have been possible. I just focused on distance, a single variable. I didn’t worry about my pace, about my time, about changes to my body. I just focused on being able to take myself around those 13.1 miles and to run past the much missed sight of Kings Cross. 

As useful as that goal was, I think it also worked against me. On the day I was nervous. I’d been running for weeks, but I’d built this one run up to be something more. That was completely unnecessary. Just because I’d arbitrarily chosen that day to run a bit further, didn’t really mean anything. The progress was what was important not the marker. Just because I’d decided that day was going to be it, didn’t mean it had to be. Just like when I’d decided that I wanted to run every day and my body said no.

About three quarters of the way round, I had to realise there’s no shame in catching your breath, in walking up a steep hill if you’ve already run 11 miles (eve n if you hadn’t). The only person I was accountable to was me. There was no point hurting myself to prove something to myself. These were two and a bit hours of my life I wouldn’t get back, I may as well try to enjoy them. 

But I got round. I was proud. I was proud until someone asked what I did at the weekend then poo-pooed my time. Then I was proud again, because even if I wasn’t the quickest, if you’d told me 10 weeks earlier I could get myself round I would have laughed. 

I don’t know what my next goal will be. I think for now I’m just going to enjoy being someone who can just lace up their shoes and go, as long as I’m not nursing an injury. That’s pretty powerful. 

Running has given me some of my independence back in lockdown. I’m so grateful I’ve been able to do that for myself, that my health and my community have made it possible. 

I’m also glad I stocked my playlist full of Destiny’s Child bangers. I think that’s the real lesson here. A good playlist can get you through anything.

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Earlier this year, back when we could travel and be in rooms with other people I went to (and spoke at!) Service Design in Government Conference. I had an incredible time, and left feeling more determined and inspired than I’d felt in a long while.  There was something in the idea of taking a step back and consequence scanning what we do, to ensure the impacts of our work butterfly out positively. There was also something in hearing about the personal work, and provocations, people had felt compelled to undertake whether that was baking cake or creating environmental service standards.

I knew I wanted to commit to doing more meaningful personal work and reconnect with the manifesto I wrote for my work when I turned 26, because as much as I’d always believed in those values I hadn’t been actively living them.

Imagining Future Spaces is my first attempt at a first attempt at that.

Imagining Future Spaces was an idea I had in response to two moments. The first was a talk by the incredible Cassie Robinson where she asked “what has happened to our imaginations?” and advocated for social dreaming. The second was a series of conversations I had with friends and loved ones while we were on the brink of COVID-19 where despite seeing the effects take hold elsewhere, we couldn’t describe what impact a lockdown would have on our days let alone what a life post-pandemic might be like.

There are likely hundreds of complex and interwoven reasons why our imaginations appear to be weakening, or at least appear to be able to imagine themselves out of the status quo in anything other than a dystopian horror. 

But one thing I have always believed to be true is that you can get better at anything if you commit to practising. So I thought I’d put my skills as a researcher and illustrator (AKA I like questions and weird juxtapositions) to use and create a space to practise. 

That’s where the 52 questions that make up Imagining Future Space came from. There’s one for every day of the year or card in a deck. There are just enough to create sustained practise and or a space for play. 

Learning from the questions posed by Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone and Bator in The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness, better known as the 36 Questions that lead to love, these questions get more personal and more abstract as they go. They’re designed to be a challenge. They cover small tactile things like what’s in your pockets, to more social questions about our relationships as well as bigger questions about how we’ll stay fed and healthy. I tried to make sure I asked about a wide range of subject and kept the questions as open to a wide range of responses as I could. But they do only offer imaginary snapshots of what alternative worlds could look and feel like. In order to truly imagine and design sustainable new worlds, we need to think in systems, but that’s a challenge bigger than today.

Each question comes with a random set of three conditions (some realistic, some silly)  to challenge your imagination but also take away the fear of a blank page. The “in world where” offers some environmental, social and value based context that hopefully offers just enough of a push out of the everyday to lead people to think about alternative possibilities. 

There were moments where it felt self-indulgent to start a project like this. Who am I to create and curate a space like this? But after a while I reconciled myself with that feeling, imagining the future is work for everyone. Even if it is self-indulgent, I learned a lot making it and I think I’m going to continue to learn a lot through using it.

Whether it was writing the questions, creating 54 illustrations that were aimed to inspire fun and lateral thinking in responses, or building the site in wordpress, reviving my tiny bit of coding knowledge, putting the thing together reaffirmed to me that this is the kind of personal work I want to be making. The complexity of the project challenged me in a way I haven’t challenged myself in a while.

The first launch of the site is only a starting point though. I’ll be adding more creative thinking tools to try to make the process as supported as possible. I also want to draw on my anthropology studies at Goldsmiths and add some context to each question to show how different societies are currently creating their own alternative worlds whether that’s through how they organise themselves, their environments or their values.

Over the next year I will be trying to create my own responses to each of the questions. I’ll be challenging myself to think of what’s possible, not just what’s probable or plausible. 

I’m hoping other people join me and share their ideas for what alternative worlds might be. They might discuss, draw or describe whatever it is they’re imagining, because the more you make your ideas tangible, the easier it is to start to speculate about and imagine more complex alternatives like what new ways of life might be like. 

Imagining and creating the future needs us all to get involved.

I’d like to imagine a world where we can develop stronger imaginations together and through doing so gain confidence in our own potential and the potential for alternative worlds to exist.  

I’d like to imagine a world where perhaps we might even get to take that belief back into the present and push for positive changes to the world we’re in and shaping all of the time. 

I’d like to imagine a world where fingers crossed there will be ice cream too.

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Barbara Hepworth is one of my favourite artists of all time. I’ve visited her sculptures up and down the country and there’s always something so present and grounding about them, that they make me feel better no matter how discombobulated I might feel.

So, I thought, I’d turn to her work to give me a bit of inspiration and to ground me in these strange times. I’ve not done many artist studies since I was at school. But there was always something liberating and perspective changing about trying to get under the skin of someone else’s work. Plus, my favourite blog posts are the ones that involve a bit of research. So, I’m going to try something a bit old school with this one.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Barbara Hepworth, she’s one of Britain’s most important twentieth-century artists. Born in Wakefield in 1903, she was a pioneer of organic abstract sculpture and is often discussed alongside her contemporary Henry Moore. She’s best known for her  pierced Modernist forms which were made from alabaster, marble, bronze, wood, and aluminum and grew in scale throughout the years. Those sculptures were deeply connected to the human form but also the form of the landscapes they were made in whether that was West Yorkshire, Italy or St Ives.

There’s no one who can speak more eloquently about Barbara Hepworth’s work than the lady herself, so I’ve taken five quotes from her writings to see what I can learn about art, life and how to get the most out of them both.

Making is being

Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.

Extracts from Barbara Hepworth,  A Pictorial Autobiography, Bath, 1971

Hepworth was a leading figure in the the method of direct carving, meaning she made her pieces herself from her chosen material rather than making models for craftsmen to then turn into the final piece, as had been the norm. She spent years in Italy learning her craft and how to work with the materials. This connection between her work and her physicality, comes across as almost giddily empowering in her description. I’m always striving for that sense of being so truly in my body while making, and it’s a wonderful cry for craft and getting in touch with the power of connecting your “mind and hand and eye.”

Everything is contextual

I think sculpture grows in the open light and with the movement of the sun its aspect is always changing; and with space and the sky above, it can expand and breathe. Wood sculptures, of course, are not happy out of doors; but they have other properties more tactile and intimate which relate to an indoor life.

Extracts from Michael Shepherd, Barbara Hepworth, London, 1963

First of all, I love that Hepworth made her sculptures to be touched and I am always fighting the urge to put my hands on the wooden pieces I see in museums. Second the idea that “there’s no fixed point for a sculpture, there’s no fixed point at which you can see it, there’s no fixed point of light in which you can experience it, because it’s ever-changing,” (First retrospective in 1968) is something that changed how I interact with both sculptures and the world more generally. The conditions that align around every experience we have with an artwork are different, meaning every viewing is unique. That’s the same whether the sculpture is a Hepworth or the lamp post outside your house. The more we make our experiences vulnerable to these changes in context and environment, the more life they have and the more variation we’re able to see. 

Work with what’s around you

there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.

Extracts from ‘Barbara Hepworth – “the Sculptor carves because he must”‘, The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932, p. 332

One of the reasons Hepworth took up direct carving was so that she could work with the unique qualities of materials she was using. Their designs had to be harmonious with their substance and the making was a conversation between her desire and the material’s nature. Taking the time to understand what you’re working with, whether that’s “stones and woods”, people, or a space, should always be the first step in a craft. If you don’t know its strengths and its needs, how can you make the most of them? I think that’s also true in life more generally, you have to work with what’s around you and understand that the best “most direct way through” is dealing with a situation “according to its nature” rather than always what you thought would be best at first.

Our lives and our work aren’t separate

A woman artist, is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one’s mind.

Extracts from Barbara Hepworth,  A Pictorial Autobiography, Bath, 1971

While Hepworth “asked simply to be treated as a sculptor (never a sculptress), irrespective of sex” (Alan Bowness), it feels wrong to consider her work without the context that she was living through. Hepworth was a wife and a mother at a time when those things came with implicit and explicit expectations of domestic work. She took long breaks from making when she had to care for her children, and was only able to focus on her creative pursuits when supported by nannies or her children being old enough to care for themselves. But she saw these shifts in focus to and from her caring responsibilities just as part of a “rich life”. She was a woman getting the most out of her days. But in order to do that she had to find time, even in an unbalanced weighting, to have a little focus on each part.

Leaving space can make work fuller

The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime.

Extract from ‘Approach to Sculpture’, The Studio, London, vol. 132, no. 643, October 1946

Hepworth is best known for her pierced forms, sculptures you can look, reach and sometimes even climb through. Opening up her pieces also “open[ed] up an infinite variety of” other shapes. Whenever I look through one of her sculptures, I’m taken back to that quote and the idea that creating space within something can make it so much fuller, whether that’s leaving space for interpretation and imagination in what you create or giving yourself space in your day. I think there’s also something poetic about seeing what you create as a lens for the world. The work isn’t the thing, it’s where you get to when you’ve gone all the way through it to the other side.

Those are just five (well six) of my favourite quotes and lessons from Barbara Hepworth. The longer you spend with any piece, the more you can give it your full attention the more you can learn about and from it. I really enjoyed taking this time to focus and be led by Hepworth’s writings on her own work, it felt like a personal conversation rather than a passing glance or skipped through algorithmic recommendation of what to look at next, pausing with intention felt particularly important right now. I’d encourage anyone to do it if they can, whether you pause with your favourite artist, craft, nature or something else. 

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I’ve spent a long while trying to work out what’s appropriate to write about right now. I don’t want to be pushing productivity in a pandemic and there are already so many voices documenting their experiences, supporting remote working and offering creative outlets. It feels like there’s more to take in than ever. We’re processing the experience of living in a completely different way. We’re processing the news, constantly, wherever we look. We’re processing all of the content people are producing to help, whether that’s creative challenges or quarantine diaries.

I didn’t want to add to that. But I did want to make something.

So here’s a little story about a dog, inspired by Blair Braverman’s storytimes that are sometimes the distractions that get me through the day. Plus who doesn’t love a pup and a pep talk?