Would you blame the Butterfly?:
Interplay of Consequences, Ambiguity and Responsibility
IL140: Your Idea, Your Research: How to pursue your Passion Project at Warwick
The title of this module is: Your Idea, Your Research: How to pursue your Passion Project at Warwick. To begin with, I don’t think I like being desperate. For a very long time, I haven’t wished for anything. “Pursuing my passion” is a bit awkward. I naturally shifted my focus to “Warwick”. It was rather an unexpected event—how I got here. And unexpectedly, I enjoyed every moment here. I’m someone who’s always been used to leaving, but this time it’s not easy. So, I took this opportunity to commemorate my being here at the university. I dissected the writings I had done here, I filmed shots of the campus, and I approached students. Maybe it was passion after all—I liked being part of this space.
Unlike other research with a subject matter where interests can be shared in common, mine is deeply introspective, so I didn’t have a target audience in mind. I figured the person likely to revisit this work the most in the future would be me—so I thought I might as well target myself. Instead, I decided to consider my research as a public exhibition. According to Arts Council England, “the general public must have admittance to the exhibition”. Taking this idea, I set my audience as the general public and my project as an exhibition for people to come by freely, having a look at each of my curated stages of research and exit. Those who are interested will stay; those who are not will leave. Hence, the website is used to present my research to the audience. Entry and exit are both free; they have control over the pace at which they ‘tour’ the work, which is entirely their own. In Understanding Media by McLuhan (1964), media is defined as mediums humans use as the extension of their senses. According to McLuhan’s categorisation of “hot” and “cold” media, a website is a cold media by nature, requiring users to click, scroll, and navigate to access information. It invites active participation rather than passive reception like a film or a radio broadcast. The user holds the mouse, decides what to explore, and in doing so, encourages interaction. I aimed to offer that sense of autonomy of choice and direction to my audience. I thought its dynamics better reflected the exploratory nature of my research (introduced in Business Research Methodology), as the online space allows them to explore.