What Makes a Project?
There are few things more rewarding than carrying out a project--the initial decision to tackle it, the planning, gathering of resources, problem solving at the tricky points, and accomplishing tasks step-by-step toward conclusion. We often construct our everyday activities in the form of projects due to this appeal.
I am not speaking here about the formal projects we are responsible for at work, although all projects share common attributes, but the informal, daily projects we define for ourselves. Almost anything can be a project, but not everything reaches this status. Daily errands, while they have a defined sequence, require steps and decisions, and can provide rewards in their accomplishment, lack several important qualities. Creating a to-do list and checking off its items might be a common way of generating rewards, to gamifying everyday life by putting a frame around our efforts and scoring them, but unless connected to a coherent project, a list of to-do’s on its own is unlikely to offer the same level of reward. A simple to-do list also lacks a compelling vision of valued outcomes, resulting in a lower level of engagement in the tasks themselves. While we might even obsessively drive ourselves to check off all the items, it is more the collection of check-offs than the tasks that drive us.
Accordingly, I suggest that vision, engagement, and coherence are qualities that help to define a project. But projects can be of many scales. Some projects might take just one or a few days--cleaning out the garage, sorting and arranging your photos, rearranging a room of your home, or earning a scuba diving certificate. Some are slightly longer--like planning a long trip or moving to a new home, reading a very long book or series of books, doing substantial research on a topic. Some can take years--renovating or building a house, learning a language, writing a book, training to complete a marathon, or adopting a diet and exercise routine that makes a lasting difference. Many longer-term efforts differ from projects. They might be something greater--a life path, a career progression, accomplishing a significant goal or personal dream. I suspect that few people call the process of obtaining their PhD or reaching an executive position a “project.” These might have qualities similar to those described above, from an initial intention and incremental, but sure, steps toward accomplishment. There might be many projects embedded within the effort, such as the dissertation or, in the case of the executive, more formal corporate projects in which to demonstrate skills in along the way. These longer term efforts might also provide a potentially powerful aesthetic reward in the finality. But the steps to completion are more complex, not all anticipated, and require significant interaction and input from others. You might be the driver, but the road is not fully visible and not fully owned by you. However rewarding the path might be, the map is never as certain as it can be in a project.
So, this suggests another boundary to what is considered a project. The degree to which we can anticipate the required steps, and not the length of time, is key. Too many contingencies diffuse an activity and prevent it from being a project. However, too few contingencies reduce the rewards by making the activity rote, also preventing it from reaching project status. So, having a the right degree of contingency is another boundary. A project requires a feeling of agency, or being personally responsible for its outcomes.
Perhaps the most critical factor, related to moderate contingency and agency, is ownership. It has become popular to speak of something as “My/Our ______ Project” as a way to set it off from other more mundane activities. Especially when not related to a job, it denotes a special, personal effort with high expectations. A project can be an important means to identity, a way of crafting oneself as unique. Everyday routines and rituals might define us over time, but a project is granted special significance. Like a story, a project has a beginning, middle, and end, a discrete period that stands out from the ongoing flow of experience. And most importantly, we are the protagonists of that story. In an important way, we are our projects.
My Landscaping Project
Some years ago, I purchased an old Victorian house that had been mostly renovated other than its back yard, which was an ignored, barren wasteland. There was nothing welcoming about it--half dead grass, a chain-link fence that barely pretended privacy or security, and almost no interesting plants other than an old apple tree in need of pruning. The lot was of moderate size, but the footprint of the house and garage left few expanses, dividing the yard into pieces--left of house, right of house, area between garage and house, and the bit more extended space to the back edge of the property, much of which had been used as a parking lot. It was something to dig my teeth into.
Even in the first year, with so many other issues to attend to in the house, not to mention a new job, the yard, or garden as it would evolve, became a project. First, the project consisted of producing scaled drawings on paper, imagining gardens of various sorts. I began reading guides on landscaping, and I had already visited many gardens. But now, with this project in mind, my awareness of garden designs was awakened as I walked through my neighborhood and the city parks. I could envision this garden taking on multiple characters, using the divisions the house created almost like rooms, to allow the space to become bigger through variety. There would be a rock garden here, something more oriental there, the hint of an arbor anchored by the apple tree on the left side, a trellis creating a secluded patio in the center, and place for vegetables and herbs in the back. The early drawings continued to be useful through many years of incremental progress.
I divided the large project into subprojects, for the most part, one “room” at a time. However, considering the entire project as a whole required some initial steps that transcended the individual rooms, such as a wooden privacy fence, as well as a flagstone patio and walkways. Each of these individual projects first required researching various methods of construction, building codes, and choices and sources of materials. It was a slow process, but I was not in a hurry. These things were accomplished one year at a time--purchasing fencing, digging post holes, and constructing many meters of fencing, including two small wooden arbors took one year. The next year was occupied by purchasing flagstone, digging pathways and a patio base, lining them with steel edging, then filling these with cloth and two layers of different sizes of gravel to block weeds, and finally the assembling the flagstones like a giant jigsaw puzzle to form an attractive pattern to the patio and walkways, the gaps filled with fine sand.
Of course, there were many planting decisions along the way and following these initial steps, including a new tree. Then the building of a few raised flower beds also with stone. Incrementally, the scale drawings became reality, with minor deviations of course due to learning what was possible and fitting to budget and time. I never completed this project fully before moving from the home, perhaps only to about an 80 percent level. But this has never been a source of frustration. The joy I found in undertaking the many side projects was sufficient, and I knew that new projects waited for me. I learned in this process that projects have intrinsic values: learning, physical activity, problem solving, composition (in this case visual and tactile)--not unlike playing a complicated game or sport, and of course, not unlike art. Recalling this project reminds me how much of my life has been filled with one project after another, weaving them with great effort, spinning them out endlessly like the fates spin the days, asserting myself and growing through them. Many times these were in the end projects for projects’ sake--without any direct outcome I benefit from still. But they were done for my sake too, because I was these projects.
Process of a Project
Projects can vary not just in how they meet the boundary conditions, but more obviously in their materials and products. But there are commonalities in their processes. Parrish (2017) offers a very general process for design projects that can be a useful framework for all projects. While designing is a special form of project, it is a broad category, and so this process may offer commonalities shared by all types of projects. In a way, projects are life-by-design--ways of intentionally shaping our lives--so design provides a good starting point.
In general terms, a project includes the following, more or less in this order:
Yearning for change: A project is driven by a need or goal, arising from yearning or desire to make a change, learn something new, to improve oneself, to enjoy, or to have a new experience. The range of motivation for projects is wide. And as noted above, the motivation may emerge simply from the need to assert agency, accomplish something with the time given to us, engage our bodies and minds with the world, and enjoy the inherent rewards.
Gathering resources: Many things are gathered to begin a project and move it forward--information on materials and procedures; explanations of how things work; examples, models and templates to guide the effort; materials and tools, whose purchase instill investment in the effort as well as bring capability. This phase may go on throughout a project.
Envisioning outcomes: Projects involve both our creative and rational faculties to envision an outcome, and this dual application of mental faculties is part of the reward. Any outcome, be it a personal change like body improvement or new skills, a change to our environment like a renovated home, an elaborate dinner personally prepared, or a new experience, like traveling to a new place, is at first envisioned. We may imagine a cloudy possibility or at times a very clear picture of the end result, and this image helps us decide how to undertake the project. We may alternatively rationally deliberate on the end result, which is also a creative application in the strictest sense, but using more logical rules and procedures, perhaps based more on evidence (examples and templates) than personal creativity. However, people tend to overestimate how much of their planning results from rational deliberation as compared to creative imagination and external suggestion, rationally justified after retrospection.
Depicting outcomes: Often, as in My Landscaping Project, a project begins with drawings or written descriptions of a goal. In this activity, which might occur at any or many phases of the project, the emphasis is on making representations or descriptions to help the final outcome more tangible, aiding in planning and development. This is not always necessary, but can be highly useful. Depiction can be a creative process in itself, helping to make a cloudy vision become more clear, and revealing gaps and misconceptions, or opportunities not at first seen.
Transforming: A project is first and foremost a process of transformation. This is what defines its beginning, middle, and end. The transformation can be visible, as in landscaping, body improvement, or writing a book; or internal and invisible, as in learning a new skill or developing new habits. During a project, the project materials (often including ourselves) are transformed by us into the envisioned outcome, or something approximating that outcome, through negotiation between our capabilities and efforts on one side, and what the world offers or withholds on the other. For example, materials have only limited ways they can accommodate our intentions (stone and wood have their own levels of malleability and tools can be used in limited ways), and our plans might have to adjust as we learn those limitations.
Learning: A pervasive part of any project is learning. Through projects, we gain holistic knowledge in the form of practiced skills, deep understanding of how the world works in the context of the project, and both domain-specific and general knowledge. The world learns with us through our efforts to transform it, taking on new characteristics and affordances. What we learn can be taken forward into new projects or everyday interactions. Through projects, we also learn about the world by seeing how it resists, accommodates, or aids our efforts. Without projects, we remain a bit more ignorant.
One of the points of offering this general project process is to demonstrate the wider implication of projects within our lives. Looking over the process reveals close alignment with the process of inquiry offered by Dewey (1938/2008), which provides a Pragmatist stance on life experience. It also suggests that projects can become an aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934/1989), which is the compelling source of joy that keeps us working on new projects throughout our lives.
Crafting our Lives through Projects
Richard Sennett (2008) writes about the work of craftspersons, those experts in developing practical artifacts whose importance has risen and fallen in status through history. At one time, craftspersons had their own Greek god in the form of Hephaestus, who taught mankind skills for shaping their worlds, making them more god-like. Projects are our ways of crafting better lives using the materials presented to us, and crafts are a key category of project. Projects represent a fundamental way of engaging with the world, resolving its challenges, and asserting our places within it. Projects, craftworks or otherwise, demand all our capacities, creative and logical, physical and willful, to make a personal stamp in the world. In this way, projects hold a special place, offering a holistic form of engagement that combines head and hand to stand above our more mundane routines.
We can get lost in a project. Demanding all our resources, they can create a situation that feels like an entire world of its own. Finding just the right material, determining the right way to make things fit together, creating a new, more appealing, version of something, pushing ourselves to make efforts when our bodies just want to relax, willfully abstaining or partaking when habit tells us to do otherwise until new habits take over--these are demanding, all-involving tasks.
Projects sometimes make us strive for perfection. To push far beyond the good-enough to the excellent and beautiful. Projects can compel us to give all our efforts to an activity in order to achieve a vision, or something even beyond that vision that begins to seem possible along the way. Perfectionism can make of a project work for its own sake, more than what is necessary to fill a need, because the work carries intrinsic rewards. Sennet (2008) warns of the dangers of this mindset, which can generate negative repercussions if in its inward focus it overlooks impacts that do damage to our environment and our lives. He cites the work of Oppenheimer in designing the atomic bomb as an extreme example.
This is the risk. We may become too demanding. We may lose vision of how our project could do damage to others or cause us to ignore other obligations. This risk requires mindfulness, but not avoidance. Projects are too important to us.
References
Parrish, P. (2017) Design as Design, in Carr-Chellman and Rowland (Eds), Issues in technology, learning, and instructional design: Classic and contemporary dialogues (pp. 7-11). New York: Routledge.
Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
There are few things more rewarding than carrying out a project--the initial decision to tackle it, the planning, gathering of resources, problem solving at the tricky points, and accomplishing tasks step-by-step toward conclusion. We often construct our everyday activities in the form of projects due to this appeal.
I am not speaking here about the formal projects we are responsible for at work, although all projects share common attributes, but the informal, daily projects we define for ourselves. Almost anything can be a project, but not everything reaches this status. Daily errands, while they have a defined sequence, require steps and decisions, and can provide rewards in their accomplishment, lack several important qualities. Creating a to-do list and checking off its items might be a common way of generating rewards, to gamifying everyday life by putting a frame around our efforts and scoring them, but unless connected to a coherent project, a list of to-do’s on its own is unlikely to offer the same level of reward. A simple to-do list also lacks a compelling vision of valued outcomes, resulting in a lower level of engagement in the tasks themselves. While we might even obsessively drive ourselves to check off all the items, it is more the collection of check-offs than the tasks that drive us.
 |
| Photo by Patrick Parrish |
Accordingly, I suggest that vision, engagement, and coherence are qualities that help to define a project. But projects can be of many scales. Some projects might take just one or a few days--cleaning out the garage, sorting and arranging your photos, rearranging a room of your home, or earning a scuba diving certificate. Some are slightly longer--like planning a long trip or moving to a new home, reading a very long book or series of books, doing substantial research on a topic. Some can take years--renovating or building a house, learning a language, writing a book, training to complete a marathon, or adopting a diet and exercise routine that makes a lasting difference. Many longer-term efforts differ from projects. They might be something greater--a life path, a career progression, accomplishing a significant goal or personal dream. I suspect that few people call the process of obtaining their PhD or reaching an executive position a “project.” These might have qualities similar to those described above, from an initial intention and incremental, but sure, steps toward accomplishment. There might be many projects embedded within the effort, such as the dissertation or, in the case of the executive, more formal corporate projects in which to demonstrate skills in along the way. These longer term efforts might also provide a potentially powerful aesthetic reward in the finality. But the steps to completion are more complex, not all anticipated, and require significant interaction and input from others. You might be the driver, but the road is not fully visible and not fully owned by you. However rewarding the path might be, the map is never as certain as it can be in a project.
So, this suggests another boundary to what is considered a project. The degree to which we can anticipate the required steps, and not the length of time, is key. Too many contingencies diffuse an activity and prevent it from being a project. However, too few contingencies reduce the rewards by making the activity rote, also preventing it from reaching project status. So, having a the right degree of contingency is another boundary. A project requires a feeling of agency, or being personally responsible for its outcomes.
Perhaps the most critical factor, related to moderate contingency and agency, is ownership. It has become popular to speak of something as “My/Our ______ Project” as a way to set it off from other more mundane activities. Especially when not related to a job, it denotes a special, personal effort with high expectations. A project can be an important means to identity, a way of crafting oneself as unique. Everyday routines and rituals might define us over time, but a project is granted special significance. Like a story, a project has a beginning, middle, and end, a discrete period that stands out from the ongoing flow of experience. And most importantly, we are the protagonists of that story. In an important way, we are our projects.
My Landscaping Project
Some years ago, I purchased an old Victorian house that had been mostly renovated other than its back yard, which was an ignored, barren wasteland. There was nothing welcoming about it--half dead grass, a chain-link fence that barely pretended privacy or security, and almost no interesting plants other than an old apple tree in need of pruning. The lot was of moderate size, but the footprint of the house and garage left few expanses, dividing the yard into pieces--left of house, right of house, area between garage and house, and the bit more extended space to the back edge of the property, much of which had been used as a parking lot. It was something to dig my teeth into.
 |
| Jay@MorphoLA, CC BY 2.0 |
Even in the first year, with so many other issues to attend to in the house, not to mention a new job, the yard, or garden as it would evolve, became a project. First, the project consisted of producing scaled drawings on paper, imagining gardens of various sorts. I began reading guides on landscaping, and I had already visited many gardens. But now, with this project in mind, my awareness of garden designs was awakened as I walked through my neighborhood and the city parks. I could envision this garden taking on multiple characters, using the divisions the house created almost like rooms, to allow the space to become bigger through variety. There would be a rock garden here, something more oriental there, the hint of an arbor anchored by the apple tree on the left side, a trellis creating a secluded patio in the center, and place for vegetables and herbs in the back. The early drawings continued to be useful through many years of incremental progress.
I divided the large project into subprojects, for the most part, one “room” at a time. However, considering the entire project as a whole required some initial steps that transcended the individual rooms, such as a wooden privacy fence, as well as a flagstone patio and walkways. Each of these individual projects first required researching various methods of construction, building codes, and choices and sources of materials. It was a slow process, but I was not in a hurry. These things were accomplished one year at a time--purchasing fencing, digging post holes, and constructing many meters of fencing, including two small wooden arbors took one year. The next year was occupied by purchasing flagstone, digging pathways and a patio base, lining them with steel edging, then filling these with cloth and two layers of different sizes of gravel to block weeds, and finally the assembling the flagstones like a giant jigsaw puzzle to form an attractive pattern to the patio and walkways, the gaps filled with fine sand.
Of course, there were many planting decisions along the way and following these initial steps, including a new tree. Then the building of a few raised flower beds also with stone. Incrementally, the scale drawings became reality, with minor deviations of course due to learning what was possible and fitting to budget and time. I never completed this project fully before moving from the home, perhaps only to about an 80 percent level. But this has never been a source of frustration. The joy I found in undertaking the many side projects was sufficient, and I knew that new projects waited for me. I learned in this process that projects have intrinsic values: learning, physical activity, problem solving, composition (in this case visual and tactile)--not unlike playing a complicated game or sport, and of course, not unlike art. Recalling this project reminds me how much of my life has been filled with one project after another, weaving them with great effort, spinning them out endlessly like the fates spin the days, asserting myself and growing through them. Many times these were in the end projects for projects’ sake--without any direct outcome I benefit from still. But they were done for my sake too, because I was these projects.
Process of a Project
Projects can vary not just in how they meet the boundary conditions, but more obviously in their materials and products. But there are commonalities in their processes. Parrish (2017) offers a very general process for design projects that can be a useful framework for all projects. While designing is a special form of project, it is a broad category, and so this process may offer commonalities shared by all types of projects. In a way, projects are life-by-design--ways of intentionally shaping our lives--so design provides a good starting point.
In general terms, a project includes the following, more or less in this order:
Yearning for change: A project is driven by a need or goal, arising from yearning or desire to make a change, learn something new, to improve oneself, to enjoy, or to have a new experience. The range of motivation for projects is wide. And as noted above, the motivation may emerge simply from the need to assert agency, accomplish something with the time given to us, engage our bodies and minds with the world, and enjoy the inherent rewards.
Gathering resources: Many things are gathered to begin a project and move it forward--information on materials and procedures; explanations of how things work; examples, models and templates to guide the effort; materials and tools, whose purchase instill investment in the effort as well as bring capability. This phase may go on throughout a project.
Envisioning outcomes: Projects involve both our creative and rational faculties to envision an outcome, and this dual application of mental faculties is part of the reward. Any outcome, be it a personal change like body improvement or new skills, a change to our environment like a renovated home, an elaborate dinner personally prepared, or a new experience, like traveling to a new place, is at first envisioned. We may imagine a cloudy possibility or at times a very clear picture of the end result, and this image helps us decide how to undertake the project. We may alternatively rationally deliberate on the end result, which is also a creative application in the strictest sense, but using more logical rules and procedures, perhaps based more on evidence (examples and templates) than personal creativity. However, people tend to overestimate how much of their planning results from rational deliberation as compared to creative imagination and external suggestion, rationally justified after retrospection.
Depicting outcomes: Often, as in My Landscaping Project, a project begins with drawings or written descriptions of a goal. In this activity, which might occur at any or many phases of the project, the emphasis is on making representations or descriptions to help the final outcome more tangible, aiding in planning and development. This is not always necessary, but can be highly useful. Depiction can be a creative process in itself, helping to make a cloudy vision become more clear, and revealing gaps and misconceptions, or opportunities not at first seen.
Transforming: A project is first and foremost a process of transformation. This is what defines its beginning, middle, and end. The transformation can be visible, as in landscaping, body improvement, or writing a book; or internal and invisible, as in learning a new skill or developing new habits. During a project, the project materials (often including ourselves) are transformed by us into the envisioned outcome, or something approximating that outcome, through negotiation between our capabilities and efforts on one side, and what the world offers or withholds on the other. For example, materials have only limited ways they can accommodate our intentions (stone and wood have their own levels of malleability and tools can be used in limited ways), and our plans might have to adjust as we learn those limitations.
Learning: A pervasive part of any project is learning. Through projects, we gain holistic knowledge in the form of practiced skills, deep understanding of how the world works in the context of the project, and both domain-specific and general knowledge. The world learns with us through our efforts to transform it, taking on new characteristics and affordances. What we learn can be taken forward into new projects or everyday interactions. Through projects, we also learn about the world by seeing how it resists, accommodates, or aids our efforts. Without projects, we remain a bit more ignorant.
One of the points of offering this general project process is to demonstrate the wider implication of projects within our lives. Looking over the process reveals close alignment with the process of inquiry offered by Dewey (1938/2008), which provides a Pragmatist stance on life experience. It also suggests that projects can become an aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934/1989), which is the compelling source of joy that keeps us working on new projects throughout our lives.
Crafting our Lives through Projects
Richard Sennett (2008) writes about the work of craftspersons, those experts in developing practical artifacts whose importance has risen and fallen in status through history. At one time, craftspersons had their own Greek god in the form of Hephaestus, who taught mankind skills for shaping their worlds, making them more god-like. Projects are our ways of crafting better lives using the materials presented to us, and crafts are a key category of project. Projects represent a fundamental way of engaging with the world, resolving its challenges, and asserting our places within it. Projects, craftworks or otherwise, demand all our capacities, creative and logical, physical and willful, to make a personal stamp in the world. In this way, projects hold a special place, offering a holistic form of engagement that combines head and hand to stand above our more mundane routines.
We can get lost in a project. Demanding all our resources, they can create a situation that feels like an entire world of its own. Finding just the right material, determining the right way to make things fit together, creating a new, more appealing, version of something, pushing ourselves to make efforts when our bodies just want to relax, willfully abstaining or partaking when habit tells us to do otherwise until new habits take over--these are demanding, all-involving tasks.
Projects sometimes make us strive for perfection. To push far beyond the good-enough to the excellent and beautiful. Projects can compel us to give all our efforts to an activity in order to achieve a vision, or something even beyond that vision that begins to seem possible along the way. Perfectionism can make of a project work for its own sake, more than what is necessary to fill a need, because the work carries intrinsic rewards. Sennet (2008) warns of the dangers of this mindset, which can generate negative repercussions if in its inward focus it overlooks impacts that do damage to our environment and our lives. He cites the work of Oppenheimer in designing the atomic bomb as an extreme example.
This is the risk. We may become too demanding. We may lose vision of how our project could do damage to others or cause us to ignore other obligations. This risk requires mindfulness, but not avoidance. Projects are too important to us.
References
Parrish, P. (2017) Design as Design, in Carr-Chellman and Rowland (Eds), Issues in technology, learning, and instructional design: Classic and contemporary dialogues (pp. 7-11). New York: Routledge.
Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
