I'm ready to go.
Now I just need to figure out what "go" means. I didn't have time before the conference last week to write about my thesis committee meeting, so I'm hoping that doing so will kick start me into action…
Wednesday, January 20, Committee Meeting
With the conference swiftly approaching and us still not having any clue what we were doing for our presentation, I felt extremely ill-prepared for this meeting. I know it showed and considering that I've only got a couple of meetings as a whole group, I think this was a missed opportunity.
I handed out hard copies of the background documents that were requested last meeting.
I handed out an updated form of my research question that reflects that my sub-questions will be re-evaluated over the next few weeks. I had also included the issues discussed at the last meeting of transformational mediation style and empathy/sympathy. We talked about these elements and the idea of whether or not I can/should include “empathy” in my design may be addressed with my justifications for why a “tool as mediator” as opposed to a “person as mediator.”
I handed out my “detailed” research plan. This was “fleshed” out that morning and didn’t really reflect the complexity of my research steps. There are things that can be granulated and things that overlap, cycle, etc. Of course, Lee immediately saw through it and called me out on it and nicely suggested that I Gantt chart my research plan to reflect the complexity of steps. (After the meeting, he also discussed with me the need to structure the agenda and the meeting itself so I can get more out of it... yeah, I know, this one was just a big-ol' rushed fail.)
I presented my cultural probes for evaluation and got a pretty positive response. (Someone kept one of my TKI profiles!! :-p) Helen said that she wanted to discuss questions I chose to put on the cards, but then we never did.
I’m not sure if it came out of the research plan conversation or the cultural probes conversation, but Lee told me that I need to be ideating about the tool during this week that the VC4 class is working with my probes. He said that I should identify what is possible and create a matrix/visualization/list of everything that my tool could be. To this end, he recommended that I look at Adrienne’s “variables to explore” matrix (ironically, this is one of the things I helped her create). Once I analyze my probes, I should let that data than identify where in my existing ideas would be appropriate to focus. I was kind of uncomfortable with this, but I’m going to let it stand for now and come back to this later in this post.
I brought up that Marcia conducts what she calls 360 evaluations once a month with the VC4 students. I asked whether looking at these evaluations from previous years was worth using/engaging with. There were some reservations as to whether or not these evaluations were sophisticated enough to offer me much insight, but that I should look into it.
Another point that came up was what relationship I wanted to focus on. In my previous entry, I diagrammed the three levels of interaction that I’m dealing with: (designer with self, designer with team, team with client). We had a fairly robust discussion about which of these I should be working within and how I should make that decision. One factor for deciding is need—Marcia already identified that from her many years of experience, the relationship that needs the most help is amongst the design team members.
John made a really great statement about how my tool needs to balance between being “vanilla” and “brain surgery,” but I don’t remember what the context was that he said it in. Proof that I need to write blog posts more frequently rather than waiting a while and trying to do it from distant memory.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Returning to the ideation of what the tool could be…. The nature of cultural probes is to serve as inspiration for designers to innovate, so the idea that my ideation serves as the map and their data only serves as the push pin feels a little too shallow of an exploration. I don’t say this to get out of doing my own ideation, but I really want to recognize that my Stakeholders may come up with something that I could never even conceive of—that’s the beauty of a people-centered design process. So, I will do the due diligence and ideate about all the things I can think of that pertain to my tool, with the understanding that the stochastic variable is any additional inspiration I may receive from my Stakeholders’ imagination and insights as gained through the cultural probes.
So, I need to (in no particular order and including everything on my plate just to impress upon myself a sense of urgency):
- Take care of the mounting migraine that is currently threatening you with the loss of yet another day (alright, so there is some order to this list)
- Read up on Andrew Blauvelt
- Attend meeting about Blauvelt engagement (tomorrow @ 11:30a)
- Read the articles Lee and Adrienne gave me (weeks ago)
- Work on shortening the time between someone giving me something to read and me actually reading it
- Fill out paperwork for my IRB exemption
- Unpack my suitcase
- Clean the bathroom
- Write follow-up e-mails from the conference
- Gantt chart my research plan
- Check the tracking numbers for my teaching applications
- Log the last two weeks of MediFast (oh god how travel is horrible for diets)
- Ideate tool variables
- Download, record, cull, and grade Design History assignments
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