week 2

deciding on the concept frfr

descriptive

working on from the comments from the last session, this week i focused on stage 1 and 4 of my project. i have a concept and the progression stages down, but i was lacking the restrictions and details of the project. i could only briefly explain what i planned to do. i aim to research and fix these gaps this week. this journal entry will be split into stage 1 and 4, for ease of understanding.

stage 1: emotions and interactions

for someone who is just viewing my project. the terms emotions and interactions are very vague, even with the rough concept model i have mapped out.

emotions refer to the emotions that can be linked to burn out. as burn out is a complex condition with everyone dealing with different symptoms and effects of it, it is important to identify the main symptoms of burn out. to start, i listed down all symptoms.

(list of burn out symptoms)

i managed to reduce the list of symptoms to four of the more commonly faced ones, or rather, symptoms/emotions which might be more easy to identify and link to certain common actions people do to express them. this was the deciding factor in deciding on which emotions to focus on. it is also observed that the emotions chosen are usually present while a person is doing work.

i wanted this project to help its users be able to monitor their mental wellbeing without spending too much time on it. thus the interactions should be rather mindless and natural to the users. the main consensus is to allow these emotions to be translated into the actions expressed with the artefact. the actions will be input as data, and the mindfulness journal will help to visualise the emotions faced by the user throughout the work session.

i tried researching on certain actions that people might do to express these emotions. however, it was quite hard to find. i then decided to simply monitor myself, and list down some actions i do when i’m feeling these emotions.

(table of emotions - interactions)

i’m aware that everyone expresses these emotions differently, so i don’t really know how to proceed with this. i feel like i should spend more time observing my target audience before proceeding with a conclusion. through the readings i did as well, i realised that observational studies were very helpful towards these sort of themes.

stage 4: visual direction

i experimented with the aesthetics of the visualiser a little last semester. i tried going a scientific route, and creating some movements. i think i will have to set some perimeters for the visualiser this time. some factors i’ve started to consider is colours, shapes, and movements. to make it clear to the users at what stage their mental wellbeing was, considering some psychological studies are useful to setting these values.

i identified some visual attributes that might contribute to conveying emotions, then i researched to see if there were any psychological or scientific studies that could relate specific emotions to those attributes. i thought i would be able to get the most out of the studies related to colours, but although there were many studies regarding that, the results for colours did not have the same conclusion across different studies…. what the…. shocking….. other than the inconclusive research on colours, shapes and movement had helpful sources backing it up, and i was able to fill in a simple visual matrix to facilitate the direction my visuals should head into

(visual matrix)

the results i got from the surveys of the impact of shapes on emotion conveying are more helpful. i’ve narrowed down “shapes” to organic and geometric shapes. within that, sharpness and roundness also plays a part in conveying emotions. i could focus on these aspects of the visuals to create a visual language that makes it easy for the users to understand and track their emotions.

mini presentation

there is a cohort briefing this week, so this week was spent reflecting on the comments from my consultation and a lot of thinking on my part. next week, we will be having a guest presentation, and i’m supposed to come up with a short presentation of my own. my presentation slides were a quick run-down of my project. it was important to me that my project was easy to understand. to do this, i managed to conclude the stages of my project into a single concept diagram. i emphasised the visual explorations, because that was what i needed more feedback on.

analytical

the concept diagram i came up with to help kyu understand my project helped a lot with the personal organisation of my thoughts. to continue from there, i realised that having a clear direction of where i wish to head into was important. i used this week to gather my thoughts and make decisions on what the next steps were. even after all this thinking, i still had a lot of gaps to fill in my research. the first thing to do, i decided, was to carry out observational studies on my target audience. one of my weaknesses is that i tended to gather information based on my own knowledge, and when further knowledge is gained, i realise that there are things i could have done before i came to my own conclusions, and most of what i had done before was a waste of time. or rather, more time had to be spent after, trying to correct what was wrong in my hypothesis. for an emotion-based project like mine, constant feedback is essential in the development of the prototypes.

reflective

i am satisfied with the pace of my research for now, but unlike last semester which was mainly exploration on the visuals, it seems like i will not be able to proceed with anything if i do not carry out the observational study soon. i have made my project to be heavily reliant on feedback, because i wanted the prototypes’ forms to be designed according to their functions. this has to be the next thing i start on. since i will have to do an observational study, something i have to consider will be the possibility of there being ethical concerns or certain parts of the study being unreliable. i will also have to set up the perimeters of the study. i do have high hopes in using the results of the study for my project. i gathered that observations and surveys are often used to develop tools for burnout, or just to study practices, organisational structures in general.