Thesis:
Work Completed:
Projects, interning, and teaching
My thesis goal of building a design research practice was approached in multiple ways. The thesis project Women Who Play is a year long case. Concurrently with the thesis project, I worked as an intern on a faculty led design research initiative, was the research assistant to the department chair, was the teaching assistant for a graduate research class, and the teaching assistant for two sections of an undergraduate research class. Specific lessons learned from these activities are incorporated into the project and methods section.
Living Profiles, a design research initiative led by MDP core faculty
member Lisa Nugent and funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, seeks to find innovation around personal health records in the lives of chronically ill teenagers as they transition from adolescent to adult healthcare. As an intern working during the first six months of this eighteen-month
project, I was responsible for designing one of the probe activities, an interview
activity, working on the interview questions, and conducting one of the in-home interviews as well as working with the team to define and explore the research themes.
Concurrent with working on Living Profiles, I was the teaching assistant for Lisa Nugent and Sean Donahue for the second term of the 2006 Super Studio class Passing on the Future. Early in the term as a TA I ran several workshops with the graduate students. Later in the term I worked as a third critic in the class and worked with the students outside of class.
Prior to working to these two activities, I was the research assistant to
Anne Burdick. During the second half of this period Anne was working on developing a grand overview of everything currently being called design research. As her assistant I read papers, wrote summaries, collected
keywords and discussed with her what design research was, and how it
could be grouped and understood.
During the primary research phase of my project I didn't participate in any other activities. After its completion--during the creation of the outcome book and this paper--I was the TA for two sections of the undergraduate class The Art of Research taught by Tina Park.
Women Who Play was my primary mode of exploration into design research. The overall structure of the project is similar to that of the first term of Super Studio. First a topic and demographic were chosen: women in their twenties who play video games. Then a series of three or four bounding terms or themes were chosen to guide the research: personal history, accomplishment, outlier, and media messaging. Then secondary research was conducted into the demographic, topic, and the bounding terms. Then probe and interview materials were produced, sent to recruited individuals and interviews conducted. The interviews were recorded and additional photography was taken. The returned materials are processed using a variety of techniques. The final outcome of the study was the creation of a book that reveals the experiences of these women and games through the lens of the research.