Explorers in Society (research direction)

Research direction, v0.1 – July 2026. A living document.
I wrote my MA thesis on the Creative Technologist – a role I chose because I had been living it. Coming out of the startup world, I recognised the value of combining creative problem-solving with technical fluency. The title stays deliberately vague, and that vagueness is the point: the underlying capability is not specialisation but adaptability in synthesis.
The thesis (Hyper Island / Teesside University) used twelve weeks of first-person fieldwork in Tokyo to test whether this identity could be operationalised – and concluded that it can, but only as individual survival strategy. Its final finding was its own limit: making exploratory practice legible at the level of a society is not something any single practitioner can do. That is where the doctorate begins.
The context makes this urgent rather than academic. We live in what Hartmut Rosa calls desynchronisation: technological change outpacing the institutions meant to absorb it. The gap produces a translation problem – the frontier becomes illegible to the collective that must govern it, work with it, live with it. And the practitioners suited to bridging it – those who move between domains, carrying understanding from the cutting edge into teaching, industry, culture, and policy – are precisely the profiles our industrial-era categories still filter out as "unfocused." Organisations say they need adaptive, cross-domain capability; their hiring systems systematically reject it. I have documented this contradiction; I have also lived it.
The question I want to investigate: how can transdisciplinary, exploratory practice be made legible – not as an individual's survival strategy, but as societal infrastructure?
Three directions of inquiry, held open:
Historical – societies have institutionalised the explorer function before: the Bauhaus, the industrial research laboratory, the agency creative department. Each worked, for a while. Why do these forms keep dissolving or calcifying, and what do their remains teach?
Methodological – when the object of study is a practice that exists only in the making, the making may have to be the method. My thesis worked through designerly inquiry and first-person action research; the doctoral question is how far research through practice can carry structural claims.
Propositional – beyond describing what exists: what forms ought to exist? What would institutions look like that could metabolise their own frontier?
This inquiry necessarily works across fields – the sociology of professions (Abbott, Ibarra), social theory of acceleration (Rosa), design research (Cross, Frayling), and the cognitive science of complementary specialisation (Taylor) – because the phenomenon itself lives between them.
I am developing this direction toward doctoral research and am actively seeking interlocutors and institutional homes. If this question is adjacent to yours, I would genuinely like to talk.