Brainstorming — Pre-thesis Post 3

3 min readOct 12, 2020

The Affinity Map’s that we created in class were extremely helpful for creating maps about our interests and desires. While my work interests, favorite activities, people that inspire me, and assumptions are often floating around in my mind. They are often doing just that, floating. The map definitely helped me visualize my interests holistically by having them in one place.

As mentioned in my last post, I have been interested in therapy in conjunction with digital media for sometime now. However, I feel the therapy space is far too bureaucratic with too much red tape around it. I also feel that I lack the higher education needed to conduct solid research in this space. In my meeting with Ahmed, we primarily spoke about the following two topics: ‘How to keep the memory of the deceased alive’ and ‘How to derive emotion from UX Research.’

The following is some brainstorming and exploration of the topic ‘Keeping the memory of the deceased alive’:

Please excuse this very messy format — writing it out helped me think about the topic a bit clearer. After doing a bit of preliminary research, I was able to write out some additional questions that came to mind when thinking about ‘memorializing.’ In circled in orange the questions that interested me the most. I then began writing out how, what, and why I wanted to explore this topic.

With 200,000 people that have passed away from Covid-19 unexpectedly, we are left wondering how to celebrate the lives that they lived. Covid-19 also has many people thinking about, and preparing for their own mortality. How can we tell and preserve personal & familial stories in a way that they live on safely for generations?

Tools:

Research through art and design
Research for art and design

Potential Solution:

A digital Experience where you can write your own story. Akin to a diary but something that you would share with others, namely family members from this generation and the next
It is not limited to your story — it could be memories you enjoy, things you learned etc,.
While we have social media as artefacts, they are public, and people may not always be willing to share their true authentic selves
Your family members: parents, siblings, grandparents, spouses, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc,. Can make pages about themselves. If they are unable, or deceased, you may compile the story for them to remember them by
Text, pictures, videos, and audio recordings can all be shared here

In conjunction with this topic, I wanted to explore permeance. I want to keep whatever I experience I make alive for as long as possible. Digital objects naturally disappear (website links die out, flash drives decay.) How do I keep this one alive?

Ahmed recommended that I look at the following links in our chat:

The following is some brainstorming and exploration of the topic ‘Emotions in UX Research’:

Problem: In switching to entirely remote session, we are missing on the body language and certain emotional components of user research sessions

How to better understand emotion in user research?

Tools:

Research for art and design

Potential solution:

Creating a program that can read participants emotions during user research sessions
Using emotion-ready softwares like Affectiva?
In user research sessions we are so focused on their words, that we are not always able to capture their emotions, facial expressions and body language
If we can tell they make a confused facial expression while engaging with a prototype, what could that tell us about the experience

Here are some resources that Ahmed recommended:

In the next steps, I began researching the following topics further, checking out the resources that Ahmed recommended, and planning my thesis topic presentation.

Brainstorming — Pre-thesis Post 3

Written by Deborah Gorelik