Design Research Methodology - Project 1: Proposal
31/3/2022 - 24/4/2022 (Week 1 - Week 4)
Sasilvia Cheong Pei Hoong / 0345031 / Bachelors of Design in Creative Media
Design Research Methodology
Project 1 - Proposal
LECTURES
WEEK 1 ( 31/3/2022 )
What is research?
Is the systematic and creative investigation into and study of
materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new
conclusions. It also increases the stock knowledge, including knowledge
of humans, culture and society, where we are able to use to devise new
applications. Research is the pursuit of knowledge. Student research is
self-directed word in which students from all areas of study work
individually or as part of a team to explore issues of interest to them,
Students and faculty mentors work together to design and
implement a research, scholarly, or creative project and then
communicate the results to others.
Why should I do research?
Research expands understanding and knowledge of our academic field. It
defines our academic, career, and personal interests. It also helps
establish valuable connections with faculty. Gaining academic experiences
that help expand our resume, such as presenting at research conferences,
publishing, and working with a research team. Develop critical thinking,
leadership, time management, and communication skills. Last but not least,
we get to explore more research techniques.
How should I start?
Firstly, identify your field of interest. You might become curious
about more than one topic through your courses, current events, or by
reflecting on things that appeal to you. Reading up writings in some
current design, magazines might help too. After selecting your field of
interest/topic, delve into further research about it to establish an
area (research problem) where you are interested to conduct research
about. Then, write a bit more extensively about the research problem in
the form of a statement. Formulate a research question that is derived
from the research problem. Identify research objectives that you would
like to achieve from conducting this research.
WEEK 2 (7/4/2022)
Problem statement
Is a concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be
improved upon. Secondly, it identifies the gap between the current problem
state and desired goal state of a process or product. Paves way for the
reader to understand the research problem.
Fig. 1.1 Example of problem statement
Research question
Is an answerable inquiry into a specific concern or issue. It is the
initial step in a research project. The 'initial step' means after you
have established the research problem in the form of a statement, the
research question is the first active step-in the research
project. Research question is the ground of the foundation of your
research, it is what everything in a research project is built on. a
Research and discussion can not be together.
Writing a good research question means you have something you want to
study. Steps on how to write a research question:
- Specify your specific concern or issue
- Decide what you want to know about the specific concern or issue
- Turn what you want to know and the specific concern into a question
- Ensure that the question is answerable
- Check to make sure the question is not too broad too narrow
These are the basic process in writing a research question. Writing a
good question will result in a better research project.
Research objective
Describes what we expect to achieve by a project. Research objectives may
be linked with a hypothesis or used as a statement of purpose in a study
that does not have a hypothesis. Even if the nature of the research has
not been clear to the layperson from the hypotheses, she/he should be able
to understand the research from the objectives. A statement of
research objectives can serve to guide the activities of research.
Consider the following examples:
- To describe what factors famers take into account in making such decisions as whether to adopt a new technology or what crops to grow.
- To develop a budget for reducing pollution by a particular enterprise.
- To describe the habitat of the giant panda in China.
- In example no. 1, the research will end the study by being able to specify factors which emerged in household decisions.
- In example no. 2, the result will be the specification of a pollution reduction budget.
- In example no. 3, creating a picture of the habitat of the giant panda in China.
Hypothesis?
A hypothesis is a tentative statement about the relationship between
two or more variables. It is a specific, testable prediction about what
you expect to happen in a study. Unless you are creating a study that is
exploratory in nature, your hypothesis should always explain what you
expect to happen during the course of your experiment or research. A
hypothesis does not have to be correct. While the hypothesis predicts
what the researchers expect to see, the goal of the research is to
determine whether this guess is right or wrong. When conducting an
experiment, researchers might explore a number of factors to determine
which ones might contribute to the ultimate outcome. When writing up
these results, the researchers might suggest other options that should
be explored in future studies.
Variables?
A variables is something that can be changed or varied, such as a
characteristic or value. Variables are generally used in psychology
experiments to determine if changes to one thing result in changes to
another. By systematically varying some variables and measuring the
effects on other variables, researchers can determine if changes to one
thing result in changes in something else.
WEEK 3 (14/4/2022)
Research
An organized and systematic study of a problem where the researcher
attempts to address or find solution to the problem. In order to
properly address the problem, specific questions and clearly defined
objectives are important.
Research question
An answerable inquiry into a specific concern or issue. It is
the initial step in a research project, derived from from the
problem statement or research objectives. It influences the
strategy that is employed in order to either provide answers to
the questions or verify/falsify hypotheses.
Research objective
What a researcher expects to accomplish by the end of a
research project. It is derived from a problem statement or
research questions. Without objectives, a researcher is
aimless and directionless in conducting the study. Is a
clear, concise and declarative statement. Which is focused
on ways to measure the variables, e.g. identify or describe,
etc. A good objective is S.M.A.R.T.
- S - Specific
- M - Measurable
- A - Attainable
- R - Realistic
- T - Time bound
All of the above should also be relevant, feasible, unambiguous.
Which one comes first, research question or research
objective?
If you do not have a clue of what you might find by the end of
research (inductive approach), it is logical to gave research
questions first. If you have an idea (at least one hypothesis)
(deductive approach), then research objectives come
first.
Inductive approach
- Observation - It is difficult to obtain information through the website of Etsy due to poor design.
- Observe a pattern - Conduct systematic study on another 10 online shops that pose the same problem.
- Develop a theory - Poor web design of online shops causes difficulty for customers to obtain information.
Deductive approach
- Start with an existing theory - Poor web design of online shops causes difficulty for customers to obtain information.
- Formulate a hypothesis based on that theory - If online shops websites are designed well, all customers will be able to obtain information easily.
- Collect data to test that theory - Conduct survey to collect data.
- Analyze the results: Does the data reject or support the hypothesis? - 150 out of 200 survey participants agreed that poor web design hinders them from obtaining information.
Fig. 2.1 Example of inductive approach 1
Fig. 2.2 Example of inductive approach 2
Fig. 2.3 Example of deductive approach
INSTRUCTIONS
Week 1- Week 2
After our briefing with Dr. Hayati and Dr. Jinchi I picked my field of
interest which is entertainment design. We had to look up on articles
and journals to find a topic we wanted to talk about and I was
interested in culture in character design in video games since I was
very into this game I was playing called "Genshin Impact". Looking
through multiple articles and journals later, I wrote down my rationale
and research problem which is in the first draft below:
Fig. 1.1 Draft 1
Week 2- Week 3
After my feedback from Dr. Hayati on week 2 I decided to change my
topic from "Cultural influences towards making significant character
design in video games" to "Cultural representation towards character
design in anime". Since I find myself knowing more and have more
liking towards anime than games where my knowledge about it is more
wide. Then I updated my research problem and rationale after the topic
change and wrote down problem statement, research objectives and
research statements. My citing were pretty simple and inaccurate for
now and will be updated later on. Draft 2 of the proposal is
below:
Fig. 1.2 Draft 2
Week 3- Week 4
This week, I added a paragraph in the problem statement and most of
the time just constantly looking at more articles on google scholar
to get more ideas. It also took me a while to define my research
objectives and questions. The newly updated proposal and draft 3 is
the one below:
Fig. 1.3 Draft 3
This week was hectic honestly, there were way too many things to do
and so little time. I started customizing my google slides with
anime characters which was so much fun to do. I also refined most of
my contents in my proposal like the rationale, problem statement,
research objectives and research questions. After that, I had to
redo all my citations since they were not correctly done at first.
The proposal slides are the one below:
Fig. 1.4 Proposal slides
Final
Here is my final proposal slides:
Fig. 2.1 Final proposal slides
Fig. 2.2 Revised proposal slides
FEEDBACK
Week 2 (7/4/2022) -
Why do you think that the games you play are not representing
the culture in your point of view? If you talk about a decade
ago diversity in games had been a great issue, where game
developers had been criticized. And more and more Asian
characters are now developed in games, where one point
characters only had a Caucasian look. There are more diverse
characters, so what is the problem there? You want to make sure
that it has the influence to make the character influence which
is a good thing but it does not reflect a problem. If it was
turned around, where it creates a kind of curiosity in the
representation of the culture may not be represented well.
Sometimes lack of sensitivity by the developer, for example
Hollywood when they want to make a movie based on another
country and did not do enough research which will lead to
offense towards certain cultures. In the game industry they
might have succeeded in representing culture. The culture can be
misled by the representation. Go to google scholar and search
for articles with “culture representation in game” and look into
them. The topic “comparing the games from the past and the
present, what big difference in the culture did they have” is a
bit too ambitious which will require a lot of study and time to
do. The idea of comparative study is not disagreeable. Make sure
to make a topic researchable, smaller and achievable within this
short period of time.
Week 3 (14/4/2022) -
The new changes in the research topic and research problem are
good. Make sure to keep the first draft in the same folder as
well. Some Wikipedia references at this stage are still
acceptable, try to have the real scholar article, but for
rationale is still okay. Only direct quotation, only APA format
requires page number. The in text citation goes last before the
full stop. For research objectives it is better to change the word
“to show '' to “to identify” or “to observe” since I am doing
research and not creating a character. Revise the objective to
make it a bit more defined, to determine, explore, identify or
study, which is one way to look into the verb of the objective in
line with the issue that had been raised in the problem statement.
The research question is a bit vague, revisit when the research
objective is finalized. Follow the sequence which is attached in
the MIB page 6. Hypothesis is one area, it can be written if the
findings are supported. The impact on how inaccuracy in character
design can be added if there is a reliable finding of it. Transfer
all the content into workable slides, where the slides are
personalized and ready for submission in google classroom. Update
the progression sheet before you forget to write it. For the field
of interest it can be changed to “Character design in anime”.
Week 4 (21/4/2022) -
Learn from the research 101 library sessions and do the same to
the citations in the proposal. Make sure to have your citations in
APA 7th format.
Week 5 (28/4/2022) -
Some people may not be familiar with the characters so it will be
best if the characters are identified with names and where they
are from in the primary review. The colours are nice, but try to
minimize something (sorry I wasn’t able to hear it clearly) unless
you have it in a gray or light gray text, reduce the opacity,
maybe reduce the darkness on certain text that have not so many
body copy. Is it to understand/ to identify/ to explore, revisit
research objective number one. The research questions are not
wrong but should have more complex additional questions, each
objective adds one more question. Try to make some modification on
some words in objective number 1, to describe it more clearly.
Revisit the articles and see which one meets the objectives more.
Try to not have too many old articles, but for character design it
is somewhat acceptable.
REFLECTIONS
Experiences
This is my first time doing a research project individually so
it was hard for me to accept the challenge, I always hated
writing and reading things so I knew doing it alone will be far
worst than what we did in group projects. But this time I had to
be more independent and suck it up to keep myself progressing
with my works. Reading the notes given and feedback from Dr.
Hayati gave me a boost on my research leading me to the right
part as I am so scared that I might get lost.
Observation
Looking at multiple articles and journals gave me more knowledge
and insight on my topic which I found very interesting. Seeing
people being able to write a really long article still amazes me,
I hope I will be able to do so too. I also went through hell
trying to find an article and journal which was not blocked by a
paywall. There was this one article that I really wanted to read
on google scholar but it I had to pay for it so I went on Research
Gate and found the author themselves where I went to request the
article from them since there was an option there and to my
surprise they gave me their whole article for free! What a nice
lady, too bad I was not able to find anything from there :')
Findings
I found that doing research paper was not just about writing and
reading, it is also about gaining the knowledge that people
brought up over time and consuming it while making your own
work. I hope I will be able to grow further as time goes by and
get better at this.
REFERENCES
Fig. 1.1 week 2
from week 2 lecture slides
Fig. 2.1-2.3 week 3
from week 3 lecture slides
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