About PhD-Live

What it is

• PhD-Live is a public showcasing of my doctoral research - an ongoing, transparent performance of thought.
• It’s part website, part studio, part sketchbook
• A place where thinking comes together, connections emerge, and the process itself becomes the work.

How it works

The website supports live tracking, session logging, and real-time reflections of my work as the research develops.

The site is organised around three kinds of notes:

• Daily notes - where most thinking happens: quick ideas, questions, experiments, and reflections.
• General notes - short, focused notes that capture a single idea and link to related notes, forming a network of connected thoughts rather than a linear notebook. (This approach is inspired by the zettelkasten method, a way of thinking through writing by building connections between ideas over time).
• Posts - more developed pieces of writing, often shaped from earlier notes.

These feed into the homepage that continuously updates to show:

• What I am working on live or today.
• My most recent reflections.
• A visual graph of how ideas connect across the project.

Unlike a traditional blog, this site does not present finished work, but instead showcases a ecosystem of evolving thoughts and ideas.

This site is a constant work in progress.

How it’s built

PhD-Live is built from my evolving collection of notes, managed locally in Obsidian and published as a living website. ^[1]

Why it exists

This website forms part of my practice-based PhD at the Creative Computing Institute, UAL.

My research explores how generative AI is transforming learning and teaching and uses speculative design and imagination as a method to create new ways to engage with these systems.

By designing this platform, I am exploring what it means to make research processes visible. Inspired by my practice as a live coder, I was wondering what it might look like if you could “live code” a PhD. I believe in this new era of learning, which is greatly shifted by the impacts of generative AI - process becomes everything.

This site therefore functions both as a tool and as a case study within my broader inquiry.