Design Methodology Weekly Journals
Week 1 (May 10–14)
This week was the first week of classes. After having spent a much-needed relaxing week with my family I was still not quite ready to go back to classes yet. It’s always a bit of an adjustment to go from working 8–5 full time to then go back to a more sporadic schedule for school. Thankfully, this week was pretty light and I got to slowly ease back into homework and lectures.
In terms of what I accomplished and saw this week, I would not say it’s particularly enthralling (that’s pandemic life for you), but I did accomplish a lot of small errands I had been meaning to do. As I completed more journal entries throughout the week I noticed that I began to notice more things I was doing and write more detailed descriptions about what I did and saw.
Some notable things I did:
- Got my car oil changed at Valvoline. They were really slow and I was there for maybe an hour and a half.
- Cleared out a few clothes I do not wear anymore from my closet
- Went to the gym three times this week. Summer is great because hardly anyone is ever there.
- Made my favorite parmesan garlic dip to go with my dinner on Tuesday night
- Watched 2 episodes of Married at first sight: the penultimate and final episode
- Sat outside and petted the neighbor’s cat
- Went to Target and bought some school/office supplies
- Worked on my website portfolio and made significant progress
- Celebrated my friend’s birthday with her
Some notable things I saw:
- My neighbor’s adorable cat
- A game of pick up soccer on the infield of the track on campus
- Female car mechanic!!! She might have been the first female car mechanic I’ve ever seen????
- My roommate's delicious fried mushrooms
- My plant’s new leaves are growing very rapidly
- The fountain on campus is now turned on and running
- People around Clifton park terribly. Someone parked super close behind me and I was almost not able to get out
Something I heard:
One interesting thing I heard that stood out to me occurred while I was waiting to get my oil changed. One of the mechanics and another customer were talking about VR/AR in video games and how almost too real it is. When he played a VR video game, the mechanic said he experienced sensory overload and had to stop playing. Apparently, in this game, you physically had to walk around the room you were in to get your character to move. I thought this was interesting because as society keeps making technological advances in the entertainment and gaming industry, will there come a point where people don’t want to play say a first-person shooter game because it seems too realistic???? Food for thought.
Week 2 (May 17–21)
This week I did a lot of self-reflection in order to start figuring out what I want to pursue for my capstone project. I thought the constraints activity was helpful in actually taking the ideas swirling around in my head and laying them out, especially in what I would want the long-term outcomes to be. I had never really considered them before and how I would picture my project potentially “changing the world” if it were to be realized.
After the Pecha Kucha, I think the ideas I am most excited about are empowering women to engage in resistance training and a young person’s guide to investing. These are both topics that I am incredibly passionate about as well as topics I wish people knew more about. For empowering women to engage in resistance training, this is a topic that is very personal to me. There are a lot of misconceptions around strength training for women and unfortunately, many women in my life still believe them. This is a project I could potentially hand to my own friends and family. I am equally excited about both concepts though and next week I will need to start thinking long and hard about which one I could design on for an entire semester.
Week 3 (May 24–28)
This week I really had to hone in my ideas for the rough draft presentation. I had only presented 4 ideas in my Pecha Kucha, so eliminating one idea for the rough draft was easy. I ultimately decided to get rid of the history of reality tv show concept because as someone who loves learning about new things all the time, I felt like the history of reality tv would be super interesting, but maybe not the right type of subject I would want to focus on for 2 whole semesters. Reality TV is ultimately my guilty pleasure, and I would like to keep it that way: something I can watch mindlessly and never have to think about the why or how.
After feedback from the rough draft presentation, I think I’m going with my college student’s guide to investing as my final capstone focus! Learning about personal finance and investing is something that has become a hobby of mine recently, and I follow a lot of financial youtube channels. I think this topic will also be great because I will not only be able to educate others, but also gain enough knowledge to start investing in stocks myself. In fact, today in our global design class we watched a presentation on taking charge of your finances (which admittedly was a little weird for a design class). I think the information was super valuable, but the way she delivered the material came off as a little insensitive to varying economic backgrounds and slightly self-absorbed. After this presentation, I feel like I know how NOT to present the information. Ultimately, I think investing in one’s self is super important but I will definitely have to pay particular attention to the tone I use in my final deliverable so it does not come across in the wrong way.
Week 4 (May 31-June 4)
I created my faculty presentation this week after considering feedback from the rough draft presentation and talking with peers. Since I had fleshed out A College Student’s Guide to Investing fairly well in my head even before this presentation, I didn’t have to consider too many things I hadn’t already thought about. The main part I had to spend time refining was why I chose the constraints that I did and how they would influence the outcome. The more and more I delve deeper into this idea the more I’m realizing that this guide definitely needs to look and feel as far away from a traditional book about investing as possible. Most people simply don’t have the time or want to devote that much time to learning these complex financial subjects, and this will affect the medium of this guide.
Also, in my Global Design course, we discussed last week's financial presentation again and language and tone will be perhaps the most important constraint to consider for this guide. I think I will definitely try to emphasize a lot of investing strategies that people without a lot of expendable income can use. Ultimately, America’s financial/labor system disadvantages a lot of people and I feel that people can’t figure out how to make the most of the system without understanding why it is the way it is.
Week 5 (June 7–11)
Week 5 was an especially important week. On Sunday night, I received feedback from one faculty reviewer, and I thought she provided very thoughtful feedback. One of the main things she critiqued was my choice of audience. Instead of my target audience being college students about to graduate, she thought I should bump the age up a few years and/or target any young adult in the working world, whether they have a college degree or not. This really got my brain jogging and audience is something I think that will define itself naturally as I start to delve deeper into initial research.
In terms of my research plan, I will rely heavily on secondary research at first. I would like to go back and watch some of my favorite financial YouTubers and analyze their philosophies and how they compare. In addition, I would like to see if I can any official qualitative data on the number of schools (high school or college) that teach financial literacy and if so, what the curriculum entails. My gut reaction based on my experience, is not many schools teach robust financial curriculum. For primary research, I would like to track down a few different financial advisors on the internet, and especially those who may target a younger audience. I also have a couple of cousins who work in the finance industry, so I will interview them. My last plan of attack is to try and reach out to any YouTubers/financial influencers via email and see if any of them respond. Lastly, I would love to send out a survey to many of peers and figure out how much they know about personal finance/investing and what they would want to learn.
Week 7 (June 21–25)
A lot has happened these past two weeks! I switched my topic to a guide for transracial adoptees and their parents with the goal of fostering meaningful connections about race, culture, and identity. As an adoptee myself, this topic is deeply personal to me.
Since I changed my topic about 5 weeks in, I had a little bit of catch-up to play. The first thing I did was establish what kinds of people I wanted to interview and begin reaching out. I have conducted two interviews with friends who are also transracial adoptees. Since they are both also adopted from Asian countries, it was interesting to see how their experiences were similar too but also different than mine. After joining a bunch of adoption Facebook groups, I was able to get in contact with a therapist and black transracial adoptee as well as a male Korean adoptee, and I will be interviewing them at the beginning of next week! I’m super excited to hear what they have to say, as they are both in their mid-30’s so I will get a perspective of someone who’s a little older than me. The therapist/black transracial adoptee will also be able to serve as one of my “expert interviews” and I plan on asking her how her personal experience as an adoptee has influenced how she treats her patients.
I’m moving along on secondary research and have found some interesting studies that have tried to quantify how many adoptees have certain views or have felt certain things. The studies examine things such as cultural socialization (socializing your adoptee with people of their race) and how adoptees identify.
Overall, I am very pleased with how this week has gone and am looking forward to continuing to research.
Week 8 (June 28-July 2)
This week I conducted more secondary research and interviewed 2 adoptees I connected with over Adoption Facebook groups. For secondary research I watched a lot of Youtube videos of adoptees and parents telling their stories as well as an interesting video by Jubilee called, “Do All Adoptees Think The Same?” They all had vastly different stories with some being adopted from the foster care system and others having closed adoptions since birth. However, most of them agreed on the majority of topics such as identity and race.
This week's 2 interviews were eye-opening, to say the least. Both were raised in very different circumstances but they both did share a lot of the same feelings of not fitting in, in their community and not having a strong connection to their birth heritage. Next week I have one interview scheduled so far but have a few other leads.
Week 9 (July 5–9)
With the 4th of July weekend and only having one class this week, I feel like I didn’t do as much work on my capstone project as prior weeks, but I did conduct one interview with an adoptee, complete the round-robin assignment, and conduct a little more secondary research. For the interview, I spoke with an adoptee I knew in high school, and it was nice to not only catch up but also get to hear about a side of her life I never really knew much about.
Going into the round-robin assignment, I was feeling a little overwhelmed because I had absolutely no clue how to begin, but once I got going I felt like I made significant strides towards figuring out what I want my end deliverable to be. The concept I was drawn towards the most was creating a card game kind of like “We’re Not Really Strangers,” or “Let’s Get Deep,” where each round, the questions get deeper. My peers in my feedback groups also seemed super excited about this idea and felt like it would also allow adoptees and parents to play as much or as little as they want.
Week 10 (July 12–16)
This week I focused on reaching out to more people and compiling resources I want to look at this semester and then into the Fall. I scheduled 5 interviews between this week and next week, and also have two people who I’ve reached out to that just need to get back to me on exact times. Two interviews I am particularly excited about are with Dr. Gina Samuels and Dr. Kimberly Mckee. They are both researchers and professors on the topic of transracial adoption as well as multi-cultural studies; they are also both transracial adoptees themselves! I think they will provide a lot of valuable insight and will be able to guide me to other people and resources as well.
As for secondary research, I read an interesting study called Context of Racial Socialization: Are Transracial Adoptive Families More like Multiracial Families or White Monoracial Families?. The conclusion the study draws is that transracial adoptive families are more like white families than mixed-race families. In fact, Asian transracial adoptees live in communities that are more white than the average white family with white children. This confirms that it is now important than ever that white parents who are adopting children of color need to do a lot better. It is important that children of color in white parents have role models of the same race in their community that they can look up to.
Week 11 (July 19–23)
This week was a big one! I conducted 5 interviews with 3 parents and 2 adoptees. The three parents were all from the same extended family and all adopted around the same time. Their perspective was very unique and probably one in a million. One of the parents I interviewed was an English professor at a University in Pennsylvania and actually put me in contact with 2 former students who had done senior theses on their experience as a transracial adoptee. It was so fun to see how other adoptees were approaching the same subject but through a different medium. One of them had written a mini guidebook for parents with young adopted children. I was also recommended a lot of great resources to read that both parents and adoptees had read to inform their research on the subject. Some of these include books that parents had read to their children/adoptees had read with their parents, books that helped parents prepare, and some general studies on transracial adoption.
I also did a lot of digging for resources this week on my own and came across a couple of studies and books I’m super excited to read. One of these includes a study by a woman I will be interviewing next week on something she calls the transnational adoption industrial complex, which examines the history and thought processes behind transracial adoption as well as the commodification of children’s bodies.
Overall, I’m super excited about where my research has taken me this semester and I can’t wait to continue it in the Fall. Ultimately, I feel like this summer has been a great start and I have learned a lot, but I feel like my research is far from complete. I want this project to be well informed and based on the most up-to-date research.
Week 12 (July 26–30)
Well, the semester is almost over. It honestly flew by for me and I feel like it was not long enough. To finish out the semester I continued reading the book Inside Transracial Adoption, which I had bought a few weeks ago. It is written by two white adoptive parents who are also researchers in the field. The book goes through many scenarios white parents will face, and how they should handle them as well as talk to their children about them.
I also conducted 2 interviews with experts in the field. The first was with a woman who is a Korean adoptee and professor of intercultural studies and the second is a black adoptee, former child welfare caseworker, and now a researcher of transracial adoption. Both interviews were very enlightening, with each of them having very different personal experiences with transracial adoption. During my conversation with the second lady she was super enthusiastic about my game idea and even gave me suggestions on specific wording or types of cards. Because she used to work with foster parents who often were fostering children of a different race than them, she was able to give me specific language and wording suggestions that parents responded well to.
Looking forward, I will continue researching and I also want to start organizing my notes. So far, all my notes for each secondary resource and interview are separate, but I need to start grouping together common themes.
