Week 1 - Brainstorms and structuring my ideas

It's technically the end of our week, a Friday, but a rather interesting one. Our launch day started off with some interesting discussions with Adam about design and workflow, it was a bit scary but also exciting, we were all getting back in the flow of work again.

Adam gave us a structure of work that he wanted us to follow which looked very well thought out but also a little scary:

This structure is something we all would be following in our Semester 1. For our first week, we started off with some brainstorming activities to warm ourselves up by coming up with different topics of interest. We worked in pairs (I worked with Abbie) to brainstorm over a few questions Adam asked us. We had to discuss and come up with some keywords that were related to the questions and write them down on a piece of paper.

{Green Highlighted - Interested in taking forward} {Red Highlighted - Not so interested}

Questions like "What interests you?", "What stimulates you intellectually" were fairly easy to approach as they are more general topics. However, my discussion with my partner Abbie got a little personal when it came down to questions like "What makes you cry" and "What makes you angry" which made me look into some deeper issues that I have either faced or have seen happen around me. I was inspired by the whole exercise as it gave me an opportunity to work on something that was important for me and dive deep into its core and find out every little detail about it.

I structured the list on my laptop using Padlet so I can further work on it . Our task was to narrow the list down and research on some of the topics we are interested in. I noticed that I had quiet a lot of Green's on my list so I started picking out which general topics I was mostly intrigued about in terms of research.

Topics like:

Risk

Underwater

Manipulation

Data

Helplessness

Anthropomorphism

Mysteries of space

Animals scaring or threatening humans (Swans, geese, seagulls chasing kids and stuff)

Distance

Heartbreak

Homecoming/Return from a journey

Exploration

Confusion

Extremism

Children's books

These are some topics i was very intrigued by and wanted to take them further into my research. I narrowed this down to my final list of 10 topics that i wanted to look into.

A brief explanation of why I chose these 10 themes:

Anthropomorphism - Its something I have grown up observing most of my childhood, watching cartoons and movies where animals display human attributes but never really understood why and how it all started.

Underwater - Life underwater is one of the most mysterious things on our planet as its still undiscovered. No one has managed to reach the absolute depths of the ocean. Apart from just general beauty and mysteries of the ocean, I also wanted to connect this with how humans are affecting the water bodies and how is that affecting our planet.

Homecoming/Return from a journey - Personally, being apart from my family has been good and bad. I have learned to be more independent and grown to learn the importance of organisation and how to build important relationships. However, the feeling of coming back home after years, where I grew up, is a feeling I always cherish. I want to look into different stories of people who also talk about this feeling of being at home.

Animals Threatening Humans or just being weird - This is a topic that I am genuinely so excited to look into. I have spent countless amount of hours just looking at videos of swans chasing kids (I know it sounds horrible but its funny), seagulls being weird and barging into someone's house to steal a chip. I would love to explore this more and look into how animals react to people and why they can be aggressive towards certain actions. Its a lighthearted topic and I want to look into the general funny bits of it.

Nostalgia - There are times where I just sit down with my headphones on, put a certain song on and think about the time I climbed up a supermarket to look at the sunset with my friend. Good or bad, there are things that trigger me to think about those memories, it could be music, an item or a place. Nostalgia is a bittersweet feeling and I want to explore all the different aspects of it.

Heartbreak - I am not sure where to go with this, I just know that I am interested in looking into how different people deal with this and how it affects their mental state.

Data - After watching some documentaries on how people use data nowadays, its honestly become such a huge topic of interest for me. I want to look into how powerful data can be, how people present data in their own unique ways and how data might be used to manipulate people.

Being alone and loneliness - Those two words have a very different meaning to them. I want to see how different those two words are or how they are related to each other. I feel like loneliness is becoming a very common human condition even though the world is more connected than ever and I want to explore how that is happening and what led to that.

Risk - I am very intrigued by this word. Taking a risk is a feeling full of adrenaline, anticipation and often can be greed. I want to look into why people take risk and its addictive effects.

Confusion - Its something that's often used in comedy and magical acts, and is quite an intriguing thing to me. I'd like to explore the different affects confusion can have.

Goal for the current week is to research these topics briefly and further analyze them. I would then like to narrow these down to 4 or 5 core topics of research.