1 / RPO Consultation
List Of Methods
2 / Workshop: Interviews
3 / Code Experiment 5
4 / Arduino Workshop
5 / Sharing By Joe Chung
RPO CONSULTATION
Critial Journal–Design Thinking
For human-centric approaches:
Establish problems with your audience,
derive a problem statement,
ideate and test
– What is digital identities?
–Need to find a connection between the environment that you’d like to situate the research in– is it online (social media, platforms etc ) or meta verse (virtual worlds) or something else?
–Is it digital identities or online identities?
–Read up on the different identities and communities there are, then start picking out which you would like to work with
I find th Design thinking appraoch more linear and straightforward whereas the Research through Design will have a more back and forth process between prototyping and user-testing stages, which might apply to my project as well. I will have to revisit this when I proceed to the developmental stages of my project to decide which framework fits my process better.
WORKSHOP: INTERVIEWS
After going through the different types of interviews (structured interview, sem-structured, unstructured and focus groups), who should we interview (considerations into persona, experts within the field and attain ability), and how should we conduct interviews.
For the Practical Activity, we were tasked to conduct an interview, following one of the types of interview methods–by coming up with a persona, and structure 3 main questions to ask the interviewee.
Method: Unstructured Interview
Using unstructured interviews to help frame a problem and reveal primary knowledge of the interviewee’s beliefs, interests, and opinions.
1. On a board, start with your problem at the center. Ask yourself one or two questions that tackle this same problem. Be very specific, what do you want to find out? Who is involved? Etc. (Write your questions underneath the problem)
This interview is conducted to explore the defining parameters of identity and what it means to different individuals.
2. Now think about those questions, who are these people involved and are they an attainable group? Is it a restricted number of people or is it a high number in terms of population, that you can find in Singapore or in the area your research focuses on?
The selection of interviewees will be focused on young adults, aged 18-26, who are active in the online space. This is an attainable group as young adults in Singapore are well-versed within the online space.
3. Determine the basic profile of your interviewee in a Persona, who are they (persona name, gender, age, profession, education)? Where do they live? Why makes them an expert in the field of study, or the ideal profile to give you insight into your research questions?
Persona
Name: Sarah
Gender: Female
Age: 23
Nationality: Singaporean
Profession: Marketing Strategist
Education: Degree
This persona is the ideal profile for the interview as the persona’s profession and education will allow the interviewee to provide significant insights and details to the problem statement. As the persona specialises in marketing, she would have substantial knowledge surrounding the online space and users within different social platforms and trends and relationships between users. Hence she would be able to share key information about how users identify with themselves and others in the digital space.
4. Prepare a mini interview script for a structured interview, with 3 main questions, and two possible follow-up questions based on the possible answers of your interviewee. What would kinds of mediums do you identify yourself with the most? (MBTI, Horoscopes, Zodiacs, Music, Nationality, Ethnicity, Language, Culture, etc.)
1. What would kinds of mediums do you identify yourself with the most? (MBTI, Horoscopes, Zodiacs, Music, Nationality, Ethnicity, Language, Culture, etc.)
2. In what way does the selected medium enhance your identity as an individual, and why does it resonate with you the most?
3. What are other aspects of your identity that you think make up who you are?
5. Reflect on your questions as the interviewed person themselves. Are those questions straightforward? Biased? Leading? We will do a role-play activity at the end to reflect on your script.
Make sure to not give negative examples or mocking in your interviews so that the questions would not be biased or leading the person. Try to be neutral in your questions to avoid leading questions
Although, I’ll probably not be selecting interviews as one of my methods/approaches in my research framework, I think this activity was really helpful in helping me to understand how to frame my problem statement, and then crafting questions that will help guide the interviewees to attain substantial insights without being leading in my questions. I think this would definitely come in handy when I craft questions for surveys which will be part of my methodologies.
CODE EXPERIMENT 5
Mapping the data of screentime
DATA
GRAPH
APP
USAGE
During the week, I read up on books about what makes up a digital identity. Specifically, in this book “Self-tracking cultures: towards a sociology of personal informatics” by Debeorah Lupton, I found out that an aspect of digital identity is made up of data, the user behaviour on devices–what we spend time on, what we do online, makes up our identities in a way. Hence for this week’s experiment, I wanted to try mapping my own data into a visualisation method. For this, I used my device screen time to track my week’s app usage. However, at the end of the week I realised that the phone’s screen data does not accurately portray all of my online activities, hence I decided to combined my phone and computer data in order to derive a more cohesive representation of my online data.
Usage of Screentime Data
Here are the desktop and mobile screentime in one week. I chose to show the categories instead of the apps to show a more distinct comparison between the different usage of screentime on devices.
For the categories, I decided to go with the top three which was Productivity / Creativity, Entertainment and Social as those were the most prominent usages of screentime for me.
Images: Screenshots of my weekly screentime on my desktop (left) and mobile (right) respectively.
How to read the
data visualisation?
From the collected data, I mapped it to a hexagonal shape that is categorised through three main factors: Productivity, Entertainment, and Social. Each hexagonal factor represents a type of activity, and each vertice is labeled according to the apps used for the activity. The most prominent vertice shows the app that is being used the longest for each category. The larger the hexagonal shape, the more time is spent on the type of activity
Below images: Code references and drafts for the code experiment
Problems with this data viz
A problem with this experiment was that it focuses too much on the data aspect of the visualisation, hence it looks like any other graph. Because of that, it loses the humanistic side of the data. It’s quite difficult to tell any sort of identity from this visualisation as a result.
STUDIO CONSULTATION
- Emotions can translate into digital elements
- Try creating a visual language of emotions that define a digital identity
- Possible consideration to go into digital emotional identity
- Explore what kinds of identitites there are through your experiments
Question–What makes data human?
ARDUINO WORKSHOP
How to convey data into signals and instructions?
APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE
Search and use API databases to communicate signals to the motor
Image: Connecting the Arduino Uno to the fan motor
Types of resources:
Water droplet Sensor
Motion Sensor
LED Strips
Soil Detector
The motion sensor allows any form of hover interaction or movement from the user, which sparked some ideas of how I could incorporate a physical input into the project which might help to make the interaction more humanistic?
SHARING BY JOE CHUNG
Links to resources
The talk by Joe Chung was quite insightful as he shared his journey and processes through multiple projects and provided detailed pointers on the obstacles of making were overcome. This sharing introduced me to many new resources readily available to us. The list on the right are the programmes and applications that he had mentioned during his talk. One of the programmes he talked about caught my attention when he presented the 3D design of Adventure Time’s bubblegum princess’s castle which was done in OpenSCAD. He showed this work alongside the other p5.js works, which got me thinking how I could try combining 3D aspects with p5.js?
Also, while browsing through the list of applications, I found that Paper.js was also relevant to what I was trying to experiment with. So this site sparked my interest the most and inspired me to try new creative coding techniques as well!