Week 10 — Research For/By Design — Part 1 — Mess Map and Secondary Research
Introduction
For this week’s assignment, I was tasked to do a group project along with three other team members to collaborate and explore designing interventions for a real-world social phenomenon.
As for Part 1 of the group project, we were tasked to map and model what we already know and believe about the topic, issue, or phenomenon that my team has chosen to investigate on while conducting various research related to the topic. Thus, we have collaboratively created a mess map for the chosen topic.
Public Transportation
Public transportation is one prime example of a real-world social phenomenon that greatly influences and impacts on people’s everyday lives throughout the world. The growing concerns and issues of public transportation are becoming more apparent as societies and/or technologies drastically develop over time.
Here are the key standpoints that were taken into consideration based upon the selected topic:
- Legal
- Cultural
- Ecological
- Economic
- Social
- Technological
- Behavioral
- Religious
- Attitudinal
- Political
While exploring and gathering multiple items from extensive researching, my teammates and I have created a mess map to link all of the items together to represent the social phenomenon at a greater scale.
To view the full board, please click on the embed link below!
As for my participation in this first part of the group project, I have focused on these three specific standpoints on public transportation: cultural, ecological, and technological. Upon conducting the research based on these chosen standpoints, I have developed a series of questions to help me solidify my research:
- How might we improve public transportation in these categories?
- What are the issues/factors surrounding public transportation in these categories?
- What are some of the popular topics residing in each of the categories?
- What impacts/issues that have been existing upon the category?
- What are some solutions that have been thought upon the category?
- How does each category affect the users or audience?
Video Presentation of the Mess Map
Here is a YouTube video of my group and I giving a walkthrough of our mess map! :)
Self-Reflection Time!
At the beginning of the project, we had began a mini brainstorming session of what kind of topic did we wanted to emphasize on. So to start off the session, each group member had voiced out their inputs and opinions about which topic did they already have on mind and resulted on choosing which one stood out the most to us. We all agreed on choosing a type of service that could potentially benefit the general public as a whole, but at first, we did not know what kind of category or industry would this service be based on. Eventually, we finally decided to focus on public transportation as our main topic for this project in which everyone gladly agreed!
For the next steps, everyone started to think and debated on if we wanted to view public transportation on the global level or limiting the topic to a specific country or city. After concluding our thoughts, we thought it was best to objectively view the topic in a broader perspective as we wanted to take in considerations of all elements and did not want to limit our brainstorming processes. We used Miro as our main brainstorming tool and we had made sticky notes of anything that was related to the topic or what was found based on common knowledge and extensive research from online resources. We also have categorized our topics into ten different categories that were mentioned above earlier on this post and placed them into their own respective categories. After individually and collaboratively completing the brainstorming session, we have met together to organize the brainstorming items even further by dividing the work and selecting the categories based off of our personal interests.
I chose the cultural, ecological, and technological categories as they were the only ones left on the board after everyone else had chose their categories in which I did not mind. I began to research more thoroughly within these categories by using Google Scholar to find credited sources and articles that were deemed to be interesting or surprising that would be worth taking notes on. After conducting the secondary research portion of the project, I realized that there were so many problems and solutions related to the topic and that there is no definite problem or solution that could define or resolve it. It was, indeed, a wicked problem or social phenomenon that is continuing to grow as society is rapidly evolving.
Finally, the group and I had reconvened and constructed a bibliography of all of the extensive research/sources we have and started to transfer everything into a mess map. We also drew connections within the map from each of the different categories to showcase how interconnected things were alongside. For the final task that we had to do for our group project was to make a video presentation of our mess map and give a walkthrough of it. So, we each individually recorded our parts by summarizing our categories and linked the recordings together to form the final video!
Overall, I feel very content with the work that my group members and I have put effort in! My role in this group project was mainly serving as the facilitator for the group as I have conducted the conversational flow of the multiple meetings we have had and created an agenda for which tasks needed to be completed. I also started the foundation of our project by voluntarily setting up our project on Miro and creating the bibliography. Nonetheless, each group member served their roles equally as I have done which perfectly aligned altogether! I was very intrigued by each group member’s contribution to the project and the work and research that they have found based on their selected categories related to the topic. It was definitely an eye-opening moment for me to see how complex public transportation could be and further changed my perspective upon the topic as it varies in many different locations and societies.
