We had a somewhat irregular week for studio II. After our presentation, our team regrouped and strategized on how we might conduct the next phase of our research. We started out with just two concepts (an ARC educator “hackathon” and a community-promoting “ARC awards” program), and while our team felt confident that these concepts were feasible and desirable to addressing our problem space, we still had a lot of open-ended questions that would require further inquiry. Additionally, we became very concerned with the potential opportunity costs of not exploring more alternatives.
To address this concern, we decided to return to our primary research and synthesize niche problem statements that my provoke additional concepts. This went extremely well, and we now have more than a dozen concepts ready for evaluation. We’re excited to get these ideas in front of educators, but this remains to be a substantial obstacle to our process.
We consulted with Hajira and Sofia about our concerns, and asked how we might convert the highly synchronous activity of “speed dating” to a more online and asynchronous form. They recommended Typefrom and while this option was appealing, it came with a few drawbacks. The ultimate dealbreaker on this platform was the price. It costs $40 to enable the features that actually make the platform more useful than free products such as Google Forms. After some digging, I found a free alternative (they literally marketed themselves as such). Tripetto offers logic and branches that will enable our team to structure paths for our survey to tailor the individual experience. This is pretty huge, considering the scarcity factors our team has struggled with since the beginning of this project.
Despite this progress and excitement for next steps, I’ve personally struggled with motivation this week. I know that a lack of regular sleep and some external stressors are partially to blame, but there are many factors contributing to this. It’s been difficult to process (cognitively and emotionally) what comes next for me.
This week, I received my cap and gown, a diploma frame, and a few other artifacts to commemorate my time at CMU. I’ve been in school since January of 2014, and I feel incredibly lucky and grateful for this opportunity. To date, academics has been my longest career. I have spent more time being a student than my entire Navy enlistment, or my time working at Intel as an engineer. Each chapter came with its own struggles, failures, and success.
Each made an indelible mark on my psyche and personality. I could never imagine in my wildest dreams that my educational path would end here, in Pittsburgh, confined to my shoebox apartment, a deadly virus burning down countless lives while I indulge in high-level theories. I owe so much for this good fortune, and I do not know how I will ever repay the world for what it has given me.
It’s not so much that I am procrastinating — I put in a lot of hours this week, especially for this project — it’s that I’m paralyzed, afraid that what we are doing is missing something vitally important yet still unnamed. I also know that 15 weeks is hardly enough time to understand potential futures and their relationships to the current state.
It’s all crushing me down. I feel the weight of an obligation to deliver good work, yet terribly uncertain about this process. I’ve never done such intensive research before, and while I believe these theories and frameworks I’m soaking in (Worldview filters; Voroscone; Archplot structures; CLA; Empathy mapping; Participatory, Generative, Co-design, etc.) are helpful and necessary to our work, it’s difficult to know if the way our team applies these unfamiliar methods will yield truly impactful results.
I know that this is a learning experience, first and foremost it is an invitation to fail brilliantly as we discover new ways of making, but without any prior experience with this stage, it’s so difficult to keep my chin up and to believe in my own creativity and ability.