A brief (delayed) report on graduation

My graduation ceremony was held more than six months ago (I’ve been remiss in posting here!), and I found it more meaningful than I had expected. Everyone in the programme crosses the stage, and since PhD students go first, and I was the first Design PhD in alphabetical order, I was the first to cross the stage in that session. They say your name and read your thesis title, and it really feels like great acknowledgment.

The doctoral garb at Northumbria is very colorful, as the photo shows. The caps and the gowns are bright blue, the stole is bright yellow, and the hood is red and black.

I had two family members there with me, who had come all the way from the US to help me celebrate. They stayed ten days, and I had a wonderful time showing them around much of the eastern side of Great Britain, from Edinburgh to Dover. My car got quite the workout.

The penultimate step

Today I received word that my “nominated examiner” (of the two who reviewed my thesis and examined me on its content, the one whom the Northumbria Graduate School designated to review my corrections) has recommended that they award me the degree. This doesn’t mean that I have the degree already; that will have to wait until the Research Degrees Committee meet to give formal and official approval to the examiners’ recommendation. This meeting should happen in three weeks or so.

I had thought I would have to deliver the final thesis in the form of a hardbound book, but the guidance for research degree students on submitting for exam says I will have to submit a PDF. All I have to do for that is to remove the yellow highlighting that indicated my corrections, and it won’t cost me a thing except for maybe two minutes of time.

I’m almost there. Trust me, I’ll let you know as soon as you can call me Dr. Buie!

Thesis corrections submitted!

It took me a wee bit longer than I had expected, but last week I finally finished and submitted the corrections to my thesis. They went to the nominated examiner this week, and I hope to be on the agenda for next month’s Research Degrees Committee meeting. I had to restrain myself from adding stuff beyond what was required for the corrections, but I finally decided it would do no good to muddy the waters and risk having my corrections rejected because the addition was seen as a problem. I can always add it into something I write later on.

It feels like an anticlimax.

And now I have to decide what to do with myself on my non-work days.

Thesis abstract (as submitted for examination)

During the months between when I submitted the abstract for the assignment of examiners and when I completed and submitted my thesis, the abstract changed slightly. The main difference is that the thesis included a greater focus (a whole chapter, in fact) on design fiction and its possible contributions to designing for transcendent user experience. Here’s the abstract that appears in my thesis. The examiners didn’t ask for any modifications to it, so it’s extremely unlikely that it will change in any way.

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This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses designing artefact support for TXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap.

The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD programme. Analysis found that TXs proceed in three phases — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support two phases and people desire enhancements to all three. This TX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as phases in a cycle where integration may alter future contexts, and it extends the structure of TX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the phases of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experience (TUX).

The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” game workshops for enhancing transcendence, which incorporated themes from the grounded theory and aimed to elicit design ideas in an atmosphere of imagination, fun, and play. Participants sketched 69 speculative ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts, and analysis mapped them to TX phases and identified possible extensions inspired by relevant research. The great majority of ideas mapped to the phase Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as TX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods.

The final phase involved the elaboration of workshop ideas to explore the extension of design fiction for TUX. Analysis related design fiction to the TX phases and suggested features that affect design ideas’ potential for TUX design fiction. This phase ended with the proposal and analysis of three new forms of design fiction — extended imaginary abstracts, comparative imaginary abstracts, and design poetry — using workshop ideas to illustrate the forms, their construction and use, and their benefits to TUX design.

Transcendhance workshops and TUX design fictions approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on lived experience by addressing context and enabling the consideration of ineffable experience through storytelling, metaphors, and oblique imagery.

This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process and new forms of design fiction, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance transcendent experience.

Songs about self-transcendent experiences

I’ve just had the idea of collecting a list of songs that describe experiences of awe and wonder, of self-transcendence, in ordinary life, outside of a specifically religious context. This came to my mind as I listened just now to Luca Carboni’s “Alzando gli occhi al cielo” (“Raising the eyes to the sky”, see YouTube video below), which expresses amazement that mafiosi on their yachts can look at the sky and manage not to shit themselves (his words — “come fanno a non cagarsi sotto”) with awe, how they manage not to feel remorse for the harm that they do. Carboni is not describing an actual experience that someone has had, or even inventing a fictional one. He is talking about such an experience as a normal response to such a sky, and I’m inclined to think that he himself has had a self-transcendent experience in contemplating the sky.

I invite readers to post comments that describe songs that you think portray experiences of awe and wonder, experiences of self-transcendence. I’d love to know what it is about the song that leads you to see it this way.