visual documentation – Emergent Practices

Post 9: Visual documentation of the brainstorming session

By Yu Zhang

During the brainstorming session, everyone had an opportunity to develop a map that base on their problem statement and proposition. I was started with Sexual Assault for mapping but found that it’s too broad. The tutor suggested we should start something more specific, that’s why we decided to do the map with communities of religion.

Brainstorm 1: Buddhism

During the group discussion, we had a conversation about Buddhism and came out with equality between man and women, which guide us to have a specific topic for deciding what kind of proposition should I do. Speaking of Buddhism, the impression of women is very negative, include lust, jealous, vicious. They think most of the women can not be buddha because inside of women’s body is dirty, so women only can become buddha when they became man. Also. Buddhism has criteria about how to become perfect women, include be extremely patient, good at housework, no cheating, no jealous, no lazy, must respect to husband etc. However, I think Buddhism has very strict sexism problem that reflects on the criteria to women and the comments of women. On the other hand, buddha won’t physically harm women and just stay away from them. Overall, I still think Buddhism don’t show enough respect to women and it might be able to use these contents to develop a proposition that appeals the biased comments to women from Buddhism.
The weakness of this idea is even Buddhism is biased on women, but they never plan to spread those bias to the world, because Buddhism encourages to be harmonious and forgive anything that could guide you to be negative or just stay away from it instead of conflict with it. So it could receive a very limited effect on developing the proposal with Buddhism. Also, the nature of Buddhism is very positive, it’s not necessary to challenge it even it has defect on the field of treating women.

Brainstorm 2: Muslim

Another religion we were discussed is Muslim. Basically, the status of women in Muslim is very low, they don’t even have freedom to do something they want while they have lots of behavior to be forbidden, includes not able to show their body in public place, travel individually and contact another person individually. Also, the husband is the absolute authority of every Muslim family, they can marry with a maximum of 4 women while the wife doesn’t have the right of divorce and unable to challenge their husband. The husband is able to use violence on their wife if they do something wrong. However, compare to Buddhism, Muslim has more data that I could use for the proposal and the inequalities between men and women, which means the quantity of data can be very rich and might make the proposal looks fantastic with these contents.

The weakness of this possibilities is it might receive some bad reflection from the people who are religious at Muslim or even will become a rebellion if the proposal includes some sensitive information. Also, Muslim still has lots of faith that are positive and provide some good creed to the society. So consider the safety and efficiency, the proposal with Muslim is quiet risky at the moment.

Brainstorm 3: View of life

We also discuss the possibilities about reflecting the quality of living of women in Australia by developing a Data map. The data will base on several data about women, includes the income, levels of education, type of work etc. In Australia, domestic violence is one of common problem in the society, especially married women. Even the government established shelters for women to escape from domestic violence, the rate of domestic violence is still very high. However, these possibilities have a great potential to reflect the equality of men and women straightly by display the data of situation of women. Also, it can guide the audience to be aware effectively about the bias of women in the society , especially for women that help them to protect their authority and benefit.

On the other hand, the possibilities need to consider carefully about data chosen because most of the relevant data would be very board that might involve some unnecessary data while can not provide specific information to reader. Also, to simplify the possibilities with this idea is quite a challenge in content selection and visual design response.

Reference:

ABC News, 2016, Fact file: Domestic violence in Australia, viewed 19 September 2016, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-06/fact-file-domestic-violence-statistics/7147938>.

Skwirk, Women in Australia now, viewed 19 September 2016, <http://www.skwirk.com/p-c_s-14_u-109_t-290_c-975/women-in-australia-now/nsw/women-in-australia-now/changing-rights-and-freedoms-women/women>.

Mind Mapping Ideas: The Strengths & Weaknesses of Group Brainstorming

Post 9 by Alice Stollery

Collaboratively brainstorming and mind mapping possible design responses had it’s own set of strengths and weakness. As a group, we spent 10 minutes on each person, first listening to their problem statement and then collectively coming up with ideas for possible solutions or responses. Each person was responsible for documenting their own issue, taking note of ideas they thought had value.

Strengths

As I have learnt in previous group work and blog posts throughout the semester, this process provided me with a good basic understanding of possible directions my design response could take. I found it to be a good starting point, as the ideas that came out of this session were quite vague and needed further individual development. The ideas from this session end up sparking thoughts and tangents in my mind that enabled me to think of responses I may not have come up with on my own. The process definitely helped when I sat down on my own at home to further refine the ideas and to draft a proposal. As a result the task seemed less daunting.

Weaknesses

There were however, a number of weaknesses within the process. As four out of five members of the group had a very similar focus area, it became difficult to continually generate new ideas on the same topic over and over again. The quality and detail in the ideas seem to reduce as we moved around the group. There were also times where there was not a lot of idea generation happening. I think, overall, as a group, we put too much pressure on ourselves to come up with complete and clearly defined responses. Therefore there were times when we had nothing to say, unable to articulate a complete response. In hindsight, we should have been a bit more playful and relaxed with the process, which may have generated more creative responses.

The Misuse of Language: A Mind Map of Ideas

Below I have included the mind map I generated while the group discussed possible responses to my issue of terminology and the misuse of language. As you can see there are a number of tangents and areas that do not make a lot of sense. I have noted some points down that are not exactly design responses but points I found interesting during the process that I thought could possibly inform my direction at a later stage.

POST 9: Visual documentation of brainstorming session

post-9-image-1

This mind map looks at areas of interest to address within my problem statement. The map is divided into two broad issues, to help narrow down my focus. While the issue of national security was intriguing to me, I ultimately decided to focus on ownership of information as it was a much more universal issue. I made this map before generating problem statements to help summarise my view of the topic, and ensure that my statements were relevant to the issues I wanted to pursue.

post-9-image-2

This less well organised map shows some of the problem statements I generated before choosing and refining. In generating problem statements I tried to be as specific in situating the issue; which was difficult to do while keeping the phrasing succinct. Moreover, I was also careful to not make the statement so specific that I would have trouble generating design proposals in response to it. The statement I chose to refine from this exercise was “users are disconnected from the information they provide to online services”, which was later modified to “users are disconnected from the personal information they provide, either willingly, or unwillingly, to online services”. Adding in the phrase about willingly or unwillingly providing data addresses not only data collection programs, but also the data we agree to exchange when we register for online services.

post-9-image-3

Finally, this brainstorm looks at possible design solutions in response to my problem statement. Created in collaboration, with Brain, Chloe and Collette, this map encompasses both solutions, and broader ideas about what the proposal should accomplish. Despite choosing a relatively open statement, it was still very challenging to generate ideas. This is something that I think disproportionately affected the online privacy groups, as it is an extremely technical topic. Instead of focusing on mind mapping stakeholders and their emotions over the past weeks it would have instead been useful to undertake secondary research on the topic. I think that we spent too much time going over the same information in class and missed out on an opportunity to gain an understanding of the extremely complex mechanisms behind data surveillance, which in turn has made it hard to propose design solutions.