This week was a really good week and a big improvement from last week when I was feeling overwhelmed. Having a full hour sit down meeting with one of my advisors to discuss what I needed to be doing now to get where I wanted to go, having a conversation about my goals and what brought me to graduate school, as well as discussing avenues for what my research publications in the future can look like decreased my anxiety towards the pressure of publishing.
This week I made the title of my reflection "Design IRL" because although I continue to learn about how important being a peer reviewer is, what it takes to get a publication, and aiming for rejections to get published more, this week felt more grounded about how I can translate a paper and research into "the real world." The two images below are screenshots from a handout I made for class after reading one of CSCW's best papers "Okay, One More Episode": An Ethnography of Parenting in the Digital Age by Mazmanian et al. I took the class prompt in two directions when I read translating the design implications from the paper to a handout that would be appealing to practitioners or the public.
After reading the paper I thought this past weekend, I thought about my parents and how they have to manage screen time for four girls in very different ages. I decided to make my handout in both english and spanish to be able to share with my parents. The language translate also helped me think about my communication across languages and even how different cultures can intepret the findings.
The other direction I decided to take my handouts was that I wanted to translate the very important findings this paper had written in a ten-page paper but try to capture as much of it in a half-sheet as well as try to paper prototype through a wire frame the design implication the author's outlined.
This past month in Seattle I have been homesick and have struggled with sharing back home what I am doing, what keeps me so busy, and what is the meaning of it all. This class assignment really allowed for me to bridge my two worlds of graduate school and my family.
Let's start by putting some events on the table. Think back to the ways we've been working (e.g., coding, collective notebook, etc.). How would you describe our ways of working?
Thinking back to the ways we've working makes me think very practical. I am thinking about the methods section maybe of my past week and how I've approached the research done in 543. I would describe our ways of working very much as a mixed-methods approach. In one aspect, I find the research and work we have done sometimes as very introspective and individual and then on the other hands sometimes very much as a collaborative collection of knowledge.
For example, the handouts we create individually but because of the collective notebook we are able to see the work of others along the way making our work collaborative in a sense. When we coded each citation for the purpose it served in the paper, for the first pass we each coded using our own interpretation and clusters and analysis but after our class discussion for the second pass each of us coded on a more cohesive level.
Our ways of working can also be seen in terms of a time scale. From one side, the pace of the work we have been doing can be seen as very slow because of the line by line analysis and because of the way we read 1/2 papers maximum per week. On the other hand, the time scale of our ways of working can move very fast. It is now the end of week 4 and we have curated a set of papers that is interesting to us from CHI/CSCW, read approximately 8-10 individually at this point, gotten a better understanding of the HCI field, analyzed citations, arguement, and implications for practice from each of these best papers. Reflecting on how much we have accomplished in such a short time frame is astonishing but also thinking about how each of these weekly investigations build on each other is very interesting to think about.
Ok, now start to interpret... What can you learn from this? Something specific to the "implications for practice" issue?
My biggest takeaway of what I learned from implications for practice was about the need to connect theory to practice. One of the readings we had or maybe a class discussion noted well who's job is this if not ours? Moving forward I plan to connect my thoughts so far to the practice of research by thinking about how I can change my mind when I conduct and write about research. Who will be reading my work? How can I make my work more accessible to people in practice maybe individuals who will be mass manufacturing a product I make or maybe individuals like my parents who are just trying to look out for what is best for their children.
Let's wrap this up by identifying by thinking about what's actionable... What is something you might want to do the next time you read...
Something I want to do the next time I read is to try to continue making these half sheet handouts for really interesting papers I read for my research and for my parents. This time around I took my time reading through the screentime paper, looking up terms or methods I thought were intriguing and that I could learn more from, and highlighting areas where I would need to go back and read twice to understand better.
The next time I read I will also keep in mind how each of the targeted investigations come together in my analysis of a paper. Understanding quicker what the sentence is trying to argue for will help me build a stronger analysis of the paper and ultimately develop a stronger hangout to convey the implications for practice.