CHAPTER FIVE
Part One
Collaborating with second practices
2023 to 2025
Second practice emerges as an experiential lens for noticing. It helps me find and trace and place and name and rename the wheres and whys and hows of the tensions and gaps and exclusion I have read of others and experienced myself within the design industry. And I thought that is what it was. A soft experiential lens for critical-with-care and bodymind attunement to an everyday problem. A name for also what happens within the paradigm of design doing, design thinking. But when I keep collecting my second practices and the number of them expand past twenty, thirty... I wonder if they might also be places of safety and sustainability. I begin to think with them. To play with them. To spend time with them.
I wanted my second practices not to be hidden anymore... but maybe they can also be celebrated and cultivated and explored with?
Noticing with second practices... their expressions and languages... brings me a soft practice joy. Finding them... surfacing them... develops a new relationship to my practice. I centre the practitioner and stay with and collaborate with my second practices. I hold spaces for second practices and embodiminded sustainability to be together. Staying with and learning my invisible bodymind creativities. Hourly. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Invisible bodymind stays with and plays with embodiminded sustainability.
When noticing more with everyday embodiminded sustainability, creativity and second practices I think about my experiences in physical and cognitive rehabilitation. In 2021, I start using daily aids and supports. I have a shower chair. I have three pairs of very uncomfortable medical-grade compression stockings and socks which I put on before I get out of bed. I have two day-beds scattered through the house like islands of rest for when I leave my bedroom. I am an ambulatory cane user. I have a walking stick that I named Cleo, after the Agnès Varda film, Cleo 5 to 7 (1962), because in the beginning I really need to use Cleo especially in the late afternoon. In rehabilitation, I learned that these supports are not only for use when I absolutely need them in the moment. They are also there to conserve energy for me; physical and cognitive and emotional energy. They give me "pockets of energy", a term I learn from E, my physiotherapist, that are needed for later in the day and in the week, later in the month and many months away. I learn to use supports thoughtfully (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
I learn to use supports preventatively.
This is a meaningful paradigm shift in my bodymind thinking.
I begin to think about this preventative approach with embodiminded sustainability and creativity.
I take it with me into my practice and I explore.
I wonder if I can apply a similar relational interdependent approach to how I might collaborate with second practices.
A kind of preventative conservation of self and creativity...?
What if second practices can be self-directed creative approaches for daily use as bodymind aids and support that sustain one's own unique, diverse needs in practice? In professional practice? An expanded functioning of centering the practitioner. Second practice and second practices begin to morph organically from a research lens and method to also moving as a practice method.
I begin collaborating with my second practices.
Attuning to them.
Being guided by them.
This time is about growing something that wants to be grown slowly and softly.
Just the growing.
I start very slowly.
I think... what if I could combine some together?
What happens if they responsively become an assemblage of second practices?
I am occupying my centre.
What do I want to bring into the middle with me?
Moving and connecting, supporting second practices, depending on my bodymind needs and creative wants.
My daily changing disability symptoms are like my own local weather.
Every day is different.
Often every hour is different.
Changing.
Moving.
So every morning I wake up and need different second practices to think through and create with. I explore and experiment and play and study with preventative conservation, scaling and responsive assemblages of my second practices (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Second practices help me to surface and see my practice in a new way.
Second practices help me to reclaim and liberate.
Second practices help me to generate and discover.
The play theory of loose parts, first discussed by Simon Nicholson (1971), says that there is an increased creative potential of a play environment through the variety of flexible, self-directed and open-ended non-fixed materials within it.
Second practice assemblages are creative worlds within themselves.
What has emerged out of the gently expanding assemblages of bed and invisible bodymind and everyday unseens and embodiminded assemblages of attunement and embodiminded sustainability and second practice and second practices is one more idiosyncratic growth. Embracing my second practices as a way of creating moves second practice into a verb: Second practicing.
Its evolution from a research method to a practice method expands with bodymind and creative complexity. Second practicing becomes my everyday practice method. A method that privileges and affords bloated, voluminous, uncertain, messy, wild, idiosyncratic formations. A responsive fluid facilitator.
Second practicing means I am privileging the second practices that are made "second" by the systems I am practicing/working within. Even though I am privileging them... making them "primary"... I feel they must still be called second practices to situate them within the systemic problems of the industries and institutions this phenomenon happens in and is made within.
Second practicing is not about overcoming, controlling or solving my bodymind practice needs. It helps me to surface and see what can exist in a new and sustainable way. Other ways that are not othering. Second practicing also becomes my research praxis. This research and practice space is invisible bodymind conservation.