MDM Template

This is a template repo to start an MDM project with a branched workflow.

It has 2 branches: main and process.

The main branch is responsible for the project development and the process branch is responsible for reflective journalling. At the end of the project, the process branch will be merged with the main, and this will weave the reflective journalling history with the development history.

Important

This branch must stay separate from the process branch until the end of the project.
End of project is denoted by the closing statement in the process branch.

Process

To capture design process, MDM samples from two distances: up close in commit messages in the main branch, and reflective journaling at a distance in the process branch.

Commit Messages

When you use Git/GitHub, your development is discretized and packed into chunks called commits.

Committing to git is integral to the development process. Commits also allow developers to leave commit messages.

By reflecting on the immediate work done at the time of committing in these commit messages, we dovetail this 'what' (code changes) with the 'why' (commit message), enabling us to capture "reflection in action" (Schon, 1983) or "hot reflection".

At the end of the project, these commit messages become part of the design corpus for this repo (including the reflective journaling) that then gets a grounded theory analysis to validate the design reasoning of the research-creation project.

Note

Reflection in action is different from reflective journaling which is intended to capture design thinking and proceess at a distance.

Those live in the process branch of the repository.

Reflective Journaling

This is the reflective journaling branch where you write and capture while you aren't making.

The structure inside the folder is only a suggestion, modify it to your liking but the journal as a whole must capture

1. The intention when/before starting the project
2. Any reference materials - pictures, videos, links, text docs, etc.
3. Your reflections over time in a journal.md file.
4. A closing statement

When the project ends and you've written the closing statement, you may merge this branch with the main branch which will then weave all journal commits and the development commits.

To avoid merge conflicts, please make sure you don't create a second process folder (or whatever you named your process folder(s) in this branch) in the main branch.

For Teams

To avoid merge conflicts, team members should make subfolders inside the process folder and add to their own folders only (for sanity and security).

You may also create sub-branches from the process branch for each team member and everyone may commit to their own branch.
This will allow you to keep your journaling separate and avoid merge conflicts. Then you can either have periodic syncs with the process branch or sync at the end of the project.

In any case, you will still need to have separate subfolders for each team member.