Portfolio of Practice

My artistic interpretation of the feeling of using an archive. The drawing was used as the front cover for my project update report titled ‘No Man’s Land’.

OHD_DRW_0001 and OHD_RPT_0134

However, the direction of the project changed when I started to enter the world of archives and was confronted with the reality of preserving oral histories. I talked to multiple archivists, one of whom told me she was currently spending more time managing leaks in the ageing building’s roof than archiving. I also completed three placements which granted me access to the day-to-day of a heritage site and two archives. The heritage site was Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, England. The Hall belongs to the National Trust, Europe’s biggest conservation charity, and was also the location for my case study.⁹  I worked in the Archives at National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS) in Bangalore, India for two months,¹⁰ and the British Library for one intensive month.¹¹ Throughout my project and placements I did boring work, but work that was essential, crucial to its respective organisations, and, eventually, became the central focus of this portfolio.

I did not study ‘the archive,’ rather I studied archives, museums, and heritage sites which collect and maintain our history, and above all maintain access to history. I studied the ‘boring things.’ Star argues that the study of ‘boring things,’ in my case the maintenance of access to oral history, reveals ‘essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change’ that are the product of an archive’s structure; its standards, forms, and filing systems.¹² If we follow Star’s theory the structures which maintain access to oral histories significantly affect oral history’s reuse, as does the lack of maintenance that takes place. This makes maintenance an essential part of oral history access and reuse, and yet it receives minimal attention in the field of oral history. This focus on the boring things – the maintenance of access – led me to not explicitly design a sole solution to the problem of oral history access and reuse, and instead create this portfolio with the research I did. The portfolio exhibits a foundational understanding of maintaining access to oral histories, offers a starting point for more discussions on maintenance within oral history, and inspires a way of thinking about oral history that makes it more resilient to whatever the future might bring. 

My research practice which created this portfolio was research through design, one of the deployments of design that Christopher Frayling discussed in his seminal paper, ‘Research in Art and Design.’¹³ I used design methods to research the situation of oral history access and its maintenance, specifically adapting an action research (AR) approach. I created design artefacts which would either explore or explain the situation and used these artefacts as probes in conversations with people working inside the situation, including the staff and volunteers of my placement organisations. These conversations proved essential to uncover the invisible parts of maintenance.

One of the fundamental features of maintenance is its invisibility. Its output is invisible because it keeps a status-quo. As Stewart Brand writes in, How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built, ‘the only satisfaction they [maintenance people] can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.’¹⁴ The workers and their systems are invisible because they are removed from public view: wires and pipes are hidden above and underground,¹⁵ and the workers work outside of office hours, creating what Star and Strauss refer to as a ‘non-person.’¹⁶ Maintenance can even become invisible to those completing the maintenance tasks this is because as Star writes, the tasks do not need to be ‘reinvented each time or assembled for each task,’ therefore they become strangely passive activities which are transparent and ‘naturalised’ as part of a structure, and are simply taken-for-granted.¹⁷

By completing these placements, I was able to get a closer look at the maintenance and those who do that work, allowing me to slowly map out what is required to maintain access to oral histories and what hinders their maintenance. For my placement at Seaton Delaval Hall I designed the entire system for an on-site Research Room,¹⁸ but I also would sometimes have to manage the carpark or do room guiding because they were short of volunteers. I audited the National Trust’s 1700 items strong sound collection at the British Library, looking for copyright forms and noting their absence or presence in a spreadsheet.¹⁹ I learnt as much as I could about copyright and data protection to write a takedown policy as part of my placement with Archives at NCBS.²⁰ I also spent three years collecting oral history testimonies for Seaton Delaval Hall, summarising them and preparing them for archiving, including creating a copyright agreement from scratch.²¹  The work I did during these placements, the discussions I had with my colleagues, and my overall experience of recording oral history make up my portfolio of practice.

This portfolio is a product of my thinking. In ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking’ Richard Buchanan says, ‘designers conceive their subject matter in two ways on two levels: general and particular.’²² These two levels of thinking are present in the portfolio as I consider it a ‘domain of design,’ to borrow a term from Willian Gaver. A domain of design is a space where the designer (myself) presents their general philosophy of a particular situation, issue, or problem, by bringing together their individually created design artefacts, comparing and contrasting them and putting them in relation to existing theories and ideas.²³

The overall idea presented in this portfolio or domain of design should function as a source of inspiration for others who are grappling with a similar issue of maintaining access to oral histories. In some parts the portfolio is purposefully ambiguous. It ‘sets the scene,’ as Gaver writes, ‘but doesn’t prescribe the result.’²⁴ This is done on purpose because I have framed the maintaining of oral history access as a wicked problem.

A wicked problem is a term formally established by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s 1973 paper, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning,’ referring to modern societal problems that are difficult to define due to their multidimensional and dynamic nature.²⁵ One of the properties of wicked problems is that, ‘every wicked problem is essentially unique.’²⁶ The ambiguity is present in this portfolio in an effort to accommodate the uniqueness of every version of maintaining access to oral histories. The particulars of the individual design artefacts might not be applicable to every situation, but the general idea shown in the portfolio/domain of design is intended to inspire new ways of thinking; pushing the audience to interpret their own situation and engage with it in a deeper and more personal manner. 

I have chosen to keep my portfolio ambiguous in places, and I acknowledge that the portfolio is one of many perspectives on the question of making oral histories accessible. As Rittel and Webber point out, ‘the information needed to understand the problem depends upon one’s idea for solving it.’²⁷  Dorst and Cross made a similar observation when they studied design students’ approaches to a particular design challenge. They observed a diverse array of interpretations depending on what the students thought the solution might be.²⁸ My ability to describe the situation surrounding the access of oral histories is directed by my belief that the opportunities to improve access to oral histories lie within maintenance. In the framing, it is impossible to perceive ‘all conceivable solutions,’ therefore what I am articulating cannot be considered a ‘definitive formulation.’ Nevertheless, I do contribute a novel perspective to the conversation surrounding the access and reuse of oral histories by heeding Star’s call to investigate ‘boring’ and focusing on the ‘symbolic sewers’ of archives and similar repositories, namely, the standards, forms, and storage procedures.

To create some order in the chaos of a design process my portfolio has been divided into three sections: the practice, the wicked problem, and the case study.

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1. Susan Leigh Star, ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’ in American behavioral scientist, 43(3), (1999), p. 377. ↩︎
2. OHD_BLG_0075 ↩︎
3. Including Carol Steedman, Dust (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001). ↩︎
4. OHD_BLG_0086, OHD_RPT_0134, OHD_NOT_0200 ↩︎
5. OHD_WKS_0131 ↩︎
6. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, Routledge, 2016), p. 18. ↩︎
7. Michael Frisch, ‘Three Dimensions and More’ in Handbook of Emergent Methods, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesser-Biber and Patricia Leavy (New York, The Guilford Press, 2010), p. 223. ↩︎
8. See the Forgotten Voices of… series (here is a Waterstones search result [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025]) ↩︎
9. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/seaton-delaval-hall [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025] ↩︎
10. https://archives.ncbs.res.in/ [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025] ↩︎
11. https://sounds.bl.uk/ (this website was not working at the time of access [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025]), https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/ [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025] ↩︎
12. Susan Leigh Star, ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’ in American behavioral scientist, 43(3), (1999), p. 379. ↩︎
13. Christopher Frayling, ‘Research in art and design’ in Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), (1993/4) ↩︎
14. Stewart Brand, How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. (New York, Penguin, 1995), p. 130. ↩︎
15.  The Pompidou Centre is of course an example of the infrastructure not being hidden. Although it is important to note the building was controversial at the time so much so the architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, were not expecting they would win the design competition and so ‘worked with complete freedom.’ William Cook, ‘A very Parisian scandal: The Pompidou Centre at 40’ on BBC Arts, (BBC, 2017), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/kTlZ2DLm4NCVjkdzXnFHlW/a-very-parisian-scandal-the-pompidou-centre-at-40, [ACCESSED: 22nd January 2025] ↩︎
16. Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss, ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work’ in Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), 8(1), (The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 15. ↩︎
17. Susan Leigh Star, ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’ in American behavioral scientist, 43(3), (1999), p. 381. ↩︎
18. OHD_DSN_0158, OHD_FRM_0192, OHD_FRM_0193, OHD_FRM_0194, OHD_RPT_0195, OHD_WRT_0196, OHD_DSN_0197 ↩︎
19. OHD_COL_0262 ↩︎
20. OHD_RPT_0249 ↩︎
21. OHD_FRM_0290, OHD_COL_0291, OHD_RCP_0293, OHD_AUD_0295 ↩︎
22. Richard Buchanan, ‘Wicked problems in design thinking’ in Design issues, 8(2), (1992), p. 17. ↩︎
23. William Gaver, ‘What should we expect from research through design?’ in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing system, (2012, May) p. 945. ↩︎
24. William Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford, ‘Ambiguity as a resource for design’ in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (2003, April), p. 233. ↩︎
25. Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’ in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), pp.155-169. ↩︎
26. Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’ in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 164. ↩︎
27. Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’ in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 161. ↩︎
28. Kees Dorst, and Nigel Cross, ‘Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution’ in Design Studies, 22(5), p. 431. ↩︎
29. Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research 2nd Edition: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2007), p. 2.; Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1998), p. 6. ↩︎
30. Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research 2nd Edition: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2007), p. 75.; Robert Sommer, and Berbara Baker Sommer, A Practical Guide to Behavioral Research : Tools and Techniques. 5th ed., (New York , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 212. ↩︎
31. Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research 2nd Edition: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2007), p. 125. ;  Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, (New York, Routledge, 2016). ↩︎
32. Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’ in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 164. ↩︎