Week 6 Supervisor Meeting

This week's supervisor meeting threw up a lot of questions, both by me and Simone.  She was happy with my flowchart (see previous post) but wanted to know how much of it I felt was absolutely necessary when it comes to creating the app pages.  This is a question I still need to answer properly myself, as I of course want to do aaaallllll the things, but this might not be possible given that I have a very full schedule and need to hit the ground running on further research and writing my dissertation.  I briefly discussed what my thoughts were - I am in two minds about having the "how to" section, because resources on those are widely available on the internet and in books, with everything from guided audio meditations on YouTube to classes available.   What I feel is most important here is presenting the information surrounding the benefits of practising mindfulness, as I believe this is what will be more persuasive. For the presentation I am aiming to work through those and the "how to" guides might be created later.

As an aside, something I found very interesting when talking to Tricia (who teaches mindfulness at student services) was that some MBSR and MBCT classes cost upwards of £200 for a block - these are aimed at busy executives who are stressed out in their jobs and need a solution.  The fact that they are paying so much for something that can be self-taught shows that in some cases the public is still under-informed about what mindfulness is and how they can benefit from it.

This led me to thinking about who "customer X" is and how to market the app and associated print visuals to them, as I know that if I don't have this at the presentation this will be a question I will be asked.  I spoke with Simone about this last week, mentioning people like my dad and my best friend's father who both shied away from the idea of mindfulness meditation, despite being the same kind of busy corporate execs who would benefit from it!  As I am creating the pages and the layouts, this is something I am going to cover alongside it so that the app has a cohesive identity throughout.

Another big question of the meeting was what my question is.  This I am still working on; while I am closer to hitting the nail on the head than I was last week, I still need to pinpoint the research question so that I can identify what practical work will answer it, and how.  The hand-in for the infrastructure forms is this coming Monday, so I need a title for then!  I would like it to encompass information design and my previous area of focus - image-type relationships - because the two can be linked as seen in my post about Happify info graphics.

Alongside this I was also nervous about still having little idea what theory was going to underpin my research.  I spoke about this to Simone who mentioned semiotic theory, which has turned out to be a pretty good basis and one I will likely end up using.  Following her advice I searched for articles or works that linked semiotic theory to information design, and found some excellent reads including Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction by Shaleph O'Neil and Semiotics as a Theoretical Foundation for Information Design by Jason H. Sharp.  The former was really helpful in helping me to better understand semiotic theory, as outlined by the key people of the field.   This is great, as one of my concerns I spoke to Simone about was that I had a difficult time understanding the concept of semiotics the last time I read up on it.

My next blog post should be about these books/articles and perhaps other theories which could be applied to the research project, as this was my task for my next supervisor meeting.