PhD pre-seminar with Jonas Löwgren
The last few months have been dedicated to writing. It’s been a challenging journey but a good one. I never realized that writing text would trigger so strong intellectual questions and reflection. But it did and it’s hard to describe really.
So this week, on May 22nd, I had my pre-seminar review at Umeå Institute of Design. The purpose of the activity is to offer a substantial review of my thesis manuscript before finishing it up. It is not a mandatory evaluation, but it is fairly common in swedish PhD education I was told. It allows critical feedback while there is still time and possiblity to change the manuscript.
So in early May, I produced a draft version of my text, 80% ready/complete, and submitted it to my advisor and reviewer. I was very fortunate to have Jonas Löwgren, from Malmö University, as a reviewer. Jonas is a researcher I greatly respect and admire. His work on sketching/prototyping for interaction design has been very inspirational, and whenever he says something, it is so clear, articulate, almost stupefying with cleverness.
So the pre-seminar session started at 9h00 and lasted a good 3 hours, up till lunch. Jonas and others provided amazing feedback. It was immensely constructive, a lot more than I expected. Jonas was able to grasp the core aspects of my PhD project, and teared it in pieces, in a good way. Not to destroy it necessarily, but to dissect and analyze my contribution, and force me to better articulate my claims and position.
I’ll take a few days off to digest everything, and then back to writing for the final version.
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