Week 4 : Mindmapping – A tedious week of figuring things out 👌

This week we were tasked to prepare a mindmap where I reflected about my research objectives, learnt about the 'more-than-human' design approach and attempted various research methodologies from 'Design Method Took Kit'.

Part ① : Making Mindmaps 🫧

I recently discovered that creating mind maps doesn't come naturally to me. As a visual person, my mind map ends up being 'mental' web of images connected to each other in abstract ways, similar to a crime board. I usually have a gut feeling associated with my keywords that doesn't make sense when I try to put it into words or short phrases. Mind mapping is a bit of a mystery to me.

Still, I attempted multiple times with failed attempts. What I ended up presenting to the class was a mind map that probably fit better as a conceptual mind map.

The Concept mindmap presents how I visualise my three pillars to link. (1) Human Perception and Senses, (2) Queer Ecology and (3) Interaction Design. However, at this point, I am unsure what kind of ‘natural’ I seek to reframe people’s minds. I want to convey that our natural environment is messy and diverse, reflecting human culture. I don’t know what problem I am addressing; it’s just facts that I want to share and hopefully inspire people to like the unnatural more.

I also presented a mindmap of problems in hopes to discover a problem that I could be addressing. For some reason, when I put it out to the atelier, the impression of my project became more of a social design project, which I don’t think that's what I am addressing yet at this point of time. It was quite disorientating when I am unsure what my objective is because there is so many problems here and I couldn't pin down on one fundamental 'problem'.

Part ② : Planning Timeline 📅

For the next 15 minutes, we were tasked with planning a timeline until the end of our project. I am unsure if this was helpful, but I just got more stressed writing down what I had to do…

Part ③ : Learning about More-Than-Human Centred Design 🧌

After this, I listened to a Near Future Laboratory Podcast with Juliana Schneider titled "More Than Human-Centred Design". I took down some notes. I identified with this approach, but I didn't know if it should be included in my research proposal outline at this point. Eitherway, it was quite a nice listen.

Part ④ : Learning about Research Tool Kit 🧰

Next, I started reading up on the atelier’s resources on creating a research proposal outline and took notes on what I believe relates to my project. I also tried some of the research methodolgies from the Design Method Toolkit. In this first exercise called 'mash-up', I concluded that my problems were "humans need a break to be with nature", climate change is a global challenge, and the technology in question is sensors. Next, I tried the exercise theory of change, which identified the main shift in perception from a girl afraid to go out to nature for a break to knowing she can easily access nature.

Part ⑤ : Attempting to structure my Research Proposal Outline 🧰

Next, I tried doing a mindmap again with some problems I identified, and it ended up becoming "Experimenting with technology-enabled interaction to examine queer ecology through fiction design." A multispecies hybrid future that prompts the public to revisit their anthropocentric beliefs and discuss the nature/culture dichotomy. (Future Zarer in week 7: damn, it’s crazy how many big words there are... What am I even talking about)