I write this post in preparation for a seminar for MA Graphic Design and Visualisation students at Loughborough University. It’s a glimpse of what I’ve experienced while trying to work with participants for an illustration PhD research.

How did I get here?

Ah, the origin story! Before I delve into what I’d set out to do & what I’ve actually done in my PhD, I want to briefly cover where it all came from. Back when I did my MA at the Royal College of Art, under the Visual Communication department, I had set out to see how different the women of Korea’s lives are among contemporary generations – that is, from me, to my mother to my grandmother – and trace how and why our perspectives on various issues differed so much. This project accumulated as a 218-page graphic novel about our stories intermingling in the present.

Here is a link if you’d like to check it out.

There were several issues that I faced during this endeavour. Mainly, it was incredibly hard to tease the stories of her life out from my grandmother. I’ve noticed that this wasn’t only her, but many people from that generation – who have witnessed colonisation, civil war, the breaking apart of the state and the contemporary industrial boom – tend to avoid talking too deeply about their childhoods. The only things I got were tiny bits of her life and a lot of complaints about her husband, my grandfather.

It wasn’t enough that I received ethical approval from the school; signing the consent paper didn’t open doors to stories and deep feelings that I had no business extracting.

I am not happy with how the graphic novel turned out. I had ended up exercising the ‘artistic interpretation’ of how my grandmother grew up based on the tiny fragments of what she was willing to share, and I had woven it into the grand narrative that I had wanted to tell. This felt unfair and unjust; who am I to twist and elaborate stories of someone else, only for it to serve my own artistic greed?

The research question

When it came to my PhD research question, I had sworn to do it differently. I wanted to give the power of the drawing to the storytellers themselves rather than taking their stories and ‘beautifying’ them as the artist. This was my main research question:

How can participation and co-creation be used to expand the potential of applying illustration in the visual self-representation of personal identity of South Koreans?

What happened

Spoiler alert: most didn’t go according to plan

Recruits

Here, I will try to cover what I’ve done (and had to do). Firstly, the recruitment: a participatory work needs participants!

Although I said ‘South Koreans’ in the research question, I couldn’t just recruit any South Koreans. This alone opened up a whole slew of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer: what makes someone a South Korean? Is it their nationality, ethnicity, proximity to the land or the culture? What age? From where? What gender? And the questions went on and on…

In the end, I’ve put a fairly specific boundary on who I can recruit: “South Koreans, above the age of 18, who have been physically born and lived in South Korea for more than 20 years and can trace back at least three generations of lineage to have been born in Korea.”

This may not seem that narrowing. Alas, this was a step that I needed to take to define who wasn’t my participant. Research, just as design, that is for everyone is equally for no one.

On top of the definition of who can identify as ‘South Korean’ for my research, they also needed to be interested in identity between the self and the nation. My recruitment ended up utilising the Snowball Sampling technique, where participants joined through word of mouth. I just needed to find the one right person who would spread the word, and I am lucky to have found one fairly quickly.

In the end, I worked with 8 participants. This isn’t too many, but the way I interacted with them – the fact that I’ve included everyone at ALL stages of the making process – required a handful of dedicated collaborators who would be willing to go on the journey with me. We met between 6-10 times per person, each session lasting around an hour. When the e-mail exchanges are added up, I’ve spent roughly 70-80 hours with the participants.

Method

What did I do with the participants once I recruited them? Remember that my research enquiry was to let people visualise their own stories or definitions of who they are. This meant that the recruits would go through the making process with me, as outlined in the chart below:

As you can see, I didn’t want to do anything without the consent of the participant. In more academic terms, these are what happened in each session:

Interview

The first session was lovely. The participants and I met online (it was COVID time, and everyone was living in different countries), and we had an open story session about what our most endearing moments were. We had started to familiarise ourselves with each other and I believed we had begun to build a rapport. So imagine my surprise when, at the second session, the participants refused to… participate.

Sketching

That’s when I came to witness the sheer power of ‘I can’t, I’m not an artist’ mind block when it came to drawing. Six of the eight expressed deep concern, and two of them almost gave up the entire participation. Sheer panic in my head.

Thinking on my feet, I offered to ‘show’ them what I meant by drawing. I utilised the Alphabet Game I saw from a wonderful visualisation company Scriberia, where I used alphabet-like marks to make meaningful symbols. The participants finally released a sigh of relief once they ‘saw’ that they weren’t expected to make masterpieces. I released a bigger sigh of relief once the session was over, and no one had escaped.

Expansion: A/B(C/D) Test

At the end of the sketching workshop, all the participants created a drawing that suited their vision of themselves. They sent me pictures of their drawing, and I got to work!

I hypothesised that in order to ‘be on the same page’ in terms of visual metaphors, I would create a set of images that expanded on the ideas that were present in their drawings. As well, I thought that communicating what I’ve done would establish a set of common language that we could share, so we are clearer on what each other meant.

What does this all mean? In practice, I separated the elements that were present on each image (a wolf, a rainbow, a field of flowers, circular outline, etc.) and rendered each element from a more ‘realistic’ look to a more ‘abstract’ look. Then, I collated the different images in a PDF and presented them back to each participant. Here is an example of what I made:

Then, each participant could choose what level of ‘render’ best fit their vision. Some chose the same level of rendering on each element, such as all abstract, but most chose a mix of different renders.

Expansion 2: Best of Three

I made notes on what each render was preferred on each element, and reassembled the elements to their original composition. There were some nuances that wasn’t quite resolved in the new versions, so I made a second version of the A/B test to finalise the image.

This time, I made a simple UX game for the participants to choose their most preferred option. At the first stage, each participant was shown three choices of their final image. When they clicked on the most attractive option, it would take them to the next stage with two alternative details for the chosen design. The participants kept clicking on the more eye-catching version until they arrived at the final design…

…and these are some of the final images that the participants chose.

The Final Forms

Application and product-ification

We are now almost there, but not quite yet! As the last stage, we gathered back and discussed ways their new identity-bearing illustrations could be embedded into their everyday lives.

This was partially as a rebellion to the traditional sequence of product design; illustration is often considered last in the stage of product design, where it is seen as a decorative wraparound a product that’s already made. Whereas this was starting from an illustration and fitting in a product to serve its purpose. Take that, product designers!

The solutions came surprisingly simple. The answers were all in that initial story session; each participant had already expressed stories and gaps where their traditional, nationalistic identity seemed to vanish. One participant, as seen above, expressed her desire to be known as not a mother or a therapist, but a writer. Another participant shared how confident she is when wearing certain sets of earrings. Someone else said how important smell is to her, and that she always carries an aroma oil with her.

All the products were there, just beyond their stories.

And, at last, there you have it.

Reflections

Now that I’ve had some years to look back, this is what I’ve ended up facilitating:

In other words, what I’ve created was a guided process to keep everyone on the same page, including a shared story, language, vision and understanding. I could also say that I was trying to let the participants see what a designer goes through, and a new way of looking at what visualisation means.

However, issues remain. The biggest one is that the participants no longer see the final product as theirs. I aimed the final work to be theirs, and its artistic render as only an added spice that accentuates what they envisioned. Instead, somewhere down the line, I think I’ve become an artist who said, ‘Look what I’ve done, look what I can do with your story – I have made it artistic.’ The participants saw their work as the starting bed for my work because they “couldn’t have done it without your skills.” I was devastated. Have I unknowingly become an artist who exploits the stories of people to make work for themselves?

My subsequent research after my thesis work doesn’t involve me at all. I think removing my ‘hand’ on the projects, other than facilitating, is the only way so far where participants think that they have made something. Some day, I may find a better way to sketch together.

I crave a world where everyone is comfortable sketching alongside one another, where we all benefit from the power of illustrating. I can’t say that I’ve found the solution, so my journey continues.