There are several changes in Mdes program while I was suspending my study last year. First of all, students already proceeded their final researches since 2nd semester and professors involved in Mdes program were also changed. Getting start with the last semester, all of these changes make me feel strange and adopting new environment is little bit challenging for me. However, I also get excited that I can bring my ideas and capabilities which I earned from various experiences during last year as I participated .
Exploring Topics
My first task is to decide research topic and main advisor. I asked professor Tony Lee who has a lot of industrial experience in UX design area to be advisor of my research. As I was fascinated by few technologies such as augmented reality, context awareness and data visualization. The reason why I have a lot of interesting in the technologies is that I want to position myself for designer who has strength in prototyping. Professor Lee told me that it's a good motivation, however I should know what happening about those technologies in industrial and academic area and also find several phenomenons to framing problems. Therefore, I started collected other theses ,case studies and projects related to those technologies and organised them. Below image shows the collection of works related to "contextual experience".
Most of works provide me comprehensive understanding of context awareness technologies and context design, however, professor Lee told me framing problems required more than just collecting theses so I need to observe many aspects related to those subject in real world and find any problems or possibilities of improvement. He also highlighted that finding and framing problems which other cannot discover is one of the most important abilities of designer.
Challenges in framing problems
There were several challenges in framing problems for the research when it comes with the technologies that I mentioned. First of all, many academic organisation and companies already conducted research in those area, so it looks like hard to have originality of my research. And second challenge is measuring problem in those area. There are many usage of "contextual experience" in various area such as smart home, location based service and information provider. However, most context awareness service are location based services so they have too simple interaction to raise any problems and more advanced context awareness services are mostly depend on their core technologies which decide weather certain function is available or not. Therefore, despite of time that spent for seeking design problems in "Contextual Experience" area, I decide to find other research subject.
Bring Previous Project to Research
As I was slow starter in last semester comparing other student, I was worried about deciding topic because of time limit. I share this problem my friend and previous co-workers. They told me that how about highlight your most strength which developed recently, and mentioned about my last data journalism project called "Project Syria" which I completed a month ago. It was data journalism project showing people how Syrian Crisis are serious and which factors have influence on it. This project include not only data design process but also research about the Syria crisis itself. Below image is one of the page of project. It shows which factor affect number of death and refugees.
So I asked my advisor professor Lee, weather it is possible to bring my project to the research. He told me that it was ok, however I need to find how this project contribute to design area, for example suggesting new method for data visualisation or extending role of design area. I started to looking back the whole process of this project find answer of this question.
Meaning of the Project
Initial motivation of the project was "let people know the situation" then we found more motivation "let people know why the situation happen". Therefore, I think that value of this project is on "why", because we tried to visualize "why" this happened. One of role of data journalism is deliver story of social problem by using data driven way. There were another example of data journalism project about Social Crisis. Below is the example of them
They usually collect crowd sourcing data to visualize the crisis. They are about Ebola disease, Gaza military conflict and Iraq disarray. However, they just show the crisis as phenomenon and didn't show the which factor might affect on crisis.
From Social Challenge to Design Challenge
Through the project, we would like to show people which factor affect on the number of death and refugee, because we believe that showing these factor can encourage people to raise right question. In case of Syria Crisis, most media highlight how many people killed and how many refugees moved to Europe, rather which factor threat them and how much level of the treat. However, I thought that letting people know factor of crisis to address the problem is social challenge. As I'm a designer, I need to break down this challenge to design challenge.
During the project we already analysis 6 factors of civilian attack which possibly killed people and force them to leave. However, I was thinking weather we need to use traditional primitive visualization to describe those data. So I started to think about suggesting new type of data visualization which was optimised to show timeline of crisis.
Framing problem again in the design challenge
I feel that I need to more organise my thought about the previous process. I believe that suggesting new type of visualiztion could be the topic of design research. However, to transform these idea into research format, I need to more organise thought on it. I need to establish more clear reason and purpose why new type of data visualization is needed and how can I develop it.
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