Tutorial + Progress: Unit 4 requires us to get external verification of our research question. At my first meeting with Sasha, we discussed about the progress of my project till now, whereas both of my previous interventions done over the summer addressed both the parts of my question which were to do with Fundamentals of Art and Interface design, I still wanted to conduct at least 1-2 more interventions to help me get further insight from the user group. Sasha suggested as even though there is one intervention around art, there is more to be explored around that, and that I should plan on researching more about getting that the art element into my interventions, as that is the subject that gives my project a little bit of an edge over other researches into user experience design.
I do believe that there is more I could do ahead to bring art into the project. When it comes to stakeholders, whereas I have spoken to 2 of them, which happens to be UX design professionals and the user age group of 55+, but a third group which I wanted to look ahead to were businesses, services or companies, which specifically catered to the age group of 55+, I had attempted to do so over the break, but I was not able get any response, which is also an area I would like to think about as I go ahead into this project.
Looking Ahead: As I researched a little bit more about what I should do ahead to bring the art element into the project, I decided to look at other research projects which had used art as a method of research, and how that was done.
I looked at a paper which delves into this, ” Defining arts engagement for population-based health research: Art forms, activities and level of engagement” by Davies, Pikora, Slatter, 2012, which looked into understanding engagement with art and health via 5 art forms, such as (1) performing arts; (2) visual arts, design and craft; (3) community/cultural festivals, fairs and events; (4) literature; and (5) online, digital and electronic arts. This made me think about my project that maybe going ahead I should look at different art forms instead of just visual arts.
Another article, I looked at was “The Aesthetic Experience with Visual Art: At First Glance” by Locher, 2015, which talked about generating a “painting gist”, which generates the viewers personal context and reflections of an artwork that they are seeing, and helps in understanding their cognitive structures. This work reminded me of another paper I had looked over the summer, which used “Thinking Aloud” and “Retrospective Review” methodologies in research, the thing that interested me most about both these works was that, they has used very out of the ordinary testing methods, almost like MAAI interventions, and gave me a little insight into how I can bring that into my own research ahead, and how I should look at unconventional ways of research using art as the main factor.
References:
The Painting gist article: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/23119/1007037.pdf?sequence=1#page=79
Engagment through different art forms: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17533015.2012.656201