Research

Task 4 - Research Methodology

A quick way of linking ideas after your research is with affinity mapping. Quick quotes on post it notes and images (taken from the research) are placed on a wall, or another large surface. Then you expand on your research notes and connections until you form insights that directly relate to your user base and your product.

Research from interviews, surveys, focus groups and in-person product testing are examples of information that can be placed on an affinity map.

Ethnography is the study of culture. Design Ethnography is the study of people and their 'habits' and knowledge to gather design insights.

According to www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/what-is-design-ethnography.html to fulfill the task of Design Ethnography you must 'enter the environment' of your consumer base and you must ask:

What goals are users trying to achieve?
How do they currently do it?
What parts do they love or hate?
What difficulties do they experience along the way?
What workarounds do they use?

For a product to be successful to the masses, the 5 above points must be considered. Data must be interpreted accurately and allow you to make developments to your own product or concept. Visuals are effective ways of displaying your data are a quick way to interpret your data. For example affinity mapping:

Task 5 - Initial First hand Research

Sometimes 'making the first mark on the page' can be difficult. So to get the 'research-ball rolling' I have made a short survey to start to gather insights to help me to start to channel my research into a more refined direction.

I shared my "Survey Monkey" questionnaire on social media and started to allow people to answer:

After running My survey for a week I will analyse my date and see if I can gather further insights off the information I have gathered.

Task 5.1 - Initial First hand Research - Analysis

The next stage of my research will be refining the questions above and to then use them as basic pointers for my secondary research, where I will look at existing products on the market and analyse their successes and failures. I will also conduct a few interviews to try and gain further insights.

Most people want some form of educational tool to be used to teach younger people how to use knives safely

Most people consider a knife to be both a weapon and a tool

Most outdoor education groups did teach the students any knife safety tips

Most outdoor education groups did not allow the students to use a knife

Most common age range of people involved in outdoor education were between the ages of 11-16

Most people agree with the UK knife laws if they have a knowledge of them

There are more people in the UK unaware of the knife laws and what they can and can't do with a knife in the UK

More people were involved with outdoor education than I first thought

After running My survey for a week and getting the maximum 100 responses that a free Survey Monkey account allows, I gathered all my results and placed them together on one page. This will be the start of My Ethnographic Research...

Task 5.2 - Interviewing

I conducted a Conversational Interview with Fraser Bruce a MSc Product Design Lecturer at the University of Dundee. The topic was outdoor education, as he is a Trustee/director for the Outdoor Education Trust in Scotland.

As we spoke I made a mind map of all of our thoughts and interactions. I gained many useful insights into how to analyse my research so far and what to look at next:

Task 5.3 - Research into child learning development

After my survey and interview I wanted to look more into child learning development stages. This was after seeing a correlation between the data from my survey and the information that Fraser Bruce gave me in the interview. Fraser said that there are three fundamental stages of child learning development: Early stage (Birth to eight), Middle stage (eight to twelve) and then adolescence (twelve to eighteen).

Early stage development is categorized by emotional and social development, where parents and others around the child are caregivers.
Middle stage is about integration and understanding more complex social constructs, such as time and money.
Adolescence is an important period for cognitive development, marking a transition in ways of thinking and reasoning about problems and ideas

Further Information was taken from these childcare and development websites -

So where does my survey fit in? My survey showed that most people experienced outdoor education between the ages of 11-16 which is within the Adolescence stage of development. This age rage is known as:

Formal Operational Stage: Ages 11 and older. During this stage, children are able to use logic to solve problems, view the world around them, and plan for the future. This fits into what Fraser was saying about actioning a plan and fitting it into adventure.

The question is now how does this fit into my project? What about a knife kit with instructions on safety (fulfill the reasoning part of development), or a den building instruction to fulfill the adventure/discovery part of development). More consideration will be given in my project development considering how children learn and how they learn at different ages.

My next stage of research into child learning, will be to look at the Scottish Education Curriculum - specifically the Curriculum for Excellence programme.

Task 5.4 - Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland, UK)

"Curriculum for Excellence places learners at the heart of education. At its centre are four fundamental capacities. These capacities reflect and recognise the lifelong nature of education and learning. The four capacities are aimed at helping children and young people to become:

Successful learners
Confident individuals
Responsible citizens
Effective contributors

There are eight curriculum areas:

Expressive arts
Health and wellbeing
Languages (including English, Gaidhlig, Gaelic learners and modern languages)
Mathematics
Religious and moral education
Sciences
Social studies
Technologies."

(Quote Taken from: https://education.gov.scot/education-scotland/scottish-education-system/policy-for-scottish-education/policy-drivers/cfe-building-from-the-statement-appendix-incl-btc1-5/what-is-curriculum-for-excellence)

It is clear to me that for my project and final product to be successful it needs to fulfill the above 'bullet pointed' information. Maybe there is a skill-set-challenge built into my product, something to get the children fully involved by setting tasks that make use of my final product.

Task 5.5 - Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland, UK) - OUTDOOR EDUCATION

I needed to specifically look into the Scottish curriculum for outdoor education. After searching through the education.gov website i found a PDF document outlining the Outdoor education segment of the Curriculum for Excellence programme:

https://education.gov.scot/Documents/cfe-through-outdoor-learning.pdf

Covered in this PDF is:

Benefits to outdoor learning
Health information
Equality and Inclusion
Partnership learning and Guidance
Actioning and Progression exercises
Planning activities
Recognition of achievement and attainment
Self Evaluation
Heath and Safety
And overal how to Implement the curriculum effectively and efficiently

Task 5.6 - Existing product research - marketplace research - Design Ethnography 1

To get some first hand research I decided that it would be best to interview people with experience within the use case of knives and tools, as well as people with experience in outdoor education.

This research task was guided by my module leader, where we took our basic research notes and bullet point and wrote them down on post it notes and put them onto a wall, over time with a few others we grouped our notes into 4 different categories and then expanded our notes out with further thoughts and plans, The final outcome was then put onto pink notes, where we had various routes of where our project can go. Overall this exercise was almost like a dynamic mind map, where we could see our points larger and move them about after writing them, finding new links and other avenues of research exploration.

The main takeaways I got from this process were -

I need to research more into child learning
Children like to be treated as adults, with responsibilities given to them
Find out more about outdoor projects
Do material research - thinking about price to performance ratio
Find out about market trends within the 'Knife design World'

Task 5.7 - Further Child Learning Research

How will my project fit into education?

Risk Assessment and child safeguarding
Special needs
Inclusion for all
Time point this would be initiated in the child's 'school life'
Permission slips
Staff training
Extension exercises - how to fit maths and english into the educational challenge
"Implement, Intent, Impact"
Removing disruption
Bloom's taxonomy - how to plan a task - https://www.teachthought.com/learning/what-is-blooms-taxonomy-a-definition-for-teachers/
Bandura, Play phycology - https://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html#:~:text=In%20social%20learning%20theory%2C%20Albert,processes%20occur%20between%20stimuli%20%26%20responses.
Maslow Hierarchical needs
Anji Play
Montessori Education