What completing a PhD while my son is on the urgent heart-transplant waiting list taught me…

Is doing a PhD a selfish adventure?

Is it a way of putting your own development and career advancement ahead of time with your family?

Is spending 6 months overseas and away from your wife and three kids an irresponsible luxury? All this while juggling a challenging full-time position in South Africa…

Is writing a journal article in a coffee shop in Ghent, Belgium a philosophical flight of fancy, a selfish escape from reality, or a necessary step of survival while your son is gravely ill- waiting for a heart transplant in South Africa?

These are but some of the thoughts I grappled with, often while sitting alone in a flat in a gloomy wintery Brussels, while my family was enjoying the December summer holidays on a sunny Cape Town beach.

This was quite a journey.

It was often a messy combination of conflicting emotions and a balancing act that oftentimes resembled a tacky circus-act rather than an elegant ballet.

Strange strange times.

I must admit that Belgian beer helped me make some sense of these questions. Good beer helped, I guess, because it was a series of difficult questions to grapple with. (There were a lot of questions, which I may have tried to balance by a lot of beer🤷🏻‍♂️)

My research focused on Digital Platform Design, especially the question of why Emerging Digital Platforms fail to scale.

A wicked problem already long before Covid-19.

I also investigated why a specific co-creation approach within the Emerging Digital Platform design process largely failed to adequately inform the design process.

Studying a rather depressing failure case study while going through some pretty hectic personal challenges was, of course, not optimal.

It did, however, force me to attempt to make some sense of a massive amount of dynamic complexity rushing in, around and through me.

Which, in retrospect, was good.

It forced me to question everything, but most of all my own assumptions about everything.

It was a privilege to be forced to deeply compare the European developed world realities and context with the role of digital platforms in South Africa, during #FeesMustFall protests, the social-media fueled rise of the Orange Man in the US and the increasing redefinition of Westphalian political geography by platforms operating in the ‘accidental mega-structure of planetary-scale computation’ that Benjamin Bratton so eloquently positioned.

I will be publicly defending my Thesis on the 22nd of March in Cape Town, with my Belgian and South African promotors present. This is more than an academic celebration. It is the culmination of a very meaningful learning journey in my life, as well as the start of the next chapter thereof…

Thank you for everyone that contributed to the richness of this experience. From that random Irish anarchist band I met in Ghent, to all the friends and colleagues at imec-SMIT, VUB & imec-MICT at UGENT. The people I met at SPL, MIT, Howest, LSE, the Oxford Internet Institute and various conferences and coffee shops around Brussels, Boston, Dortmund, Lugano and Botswana.

My family and friends, the UWC academics, administrators, security guards and cleaners. My students.

The friends I made while suffering at Crossfit 05:00 on a winter’s morning. The relationships built while suffering through obstacle course races in Stellenbosch, airport lounges in JHB, random guest houses in Boston, hotels and bus-trips in rural Tanzania…

All this taught me much about myself, the African continent, the world and the immense importance of coffee in keeping the world spinning.

Was it all worth it?

Good question…

I think the moment you truly realise your PhD journey is about the process and not the product, you need to press ‘submit’.

It was an enormous privilege to have this opportunity to learn more about myself than ever before, to expand horizons and to truly challenge my own assumptions.

Everything in life centres around balance.

Thanks for being there for me during this journey of learning that.

And a special shout-out to my family and my son, in particular.

Never have I met someone with a greater Heart.

You all make it worthwhile.