This has been an exciting start to the week, I have my 10 key themes that I talked about last week and I spent a day or two of this week just asking myself different questions related to each theme. My next goal is to narrow these themes down to four or five themes that I would further deep dive into before our presentation at the end of week 3.
I briefly looked into the 10 themes that I picked and altered some of them slightly after getting an understanding of them.
I watched some documentaries online about the underwater life (Blue Planet - Netflix) and realized how gigantic the theme is, but i didn't want to give it up completely so I started looking into what fascinated me the most about the life under the oceans. During the research i came across Seamounts and that instantly got my attention. This led me to narrow down my underwater theme to seamounts and oases instead which seemed more focused to me.
Another theme that got a bit altered was Homecoming. When I was writing down a set of questions for this theme, I noticed that I wanted to learn about why people leave or go on a journey and why do they return and where do they return? This led me to alter my theme a little bit to Journeys and Homecoming.
Coming back to what I have done so far this week. I started off with making another padlet, and had a brainstorming session asking questions about the themes that I have chosen to get a better idea of which topics I am interested in enough to take them forward. It became very obvious that topics like Heartbreak, Risk and Confusion were some of those topics that I didn't find interesting enough to go further with.
Risk seemed interesting at first but when I started questioning various aspects of risk, I couldn't seem to get much out of it and soon realized that I am not as interested in it as I thought I was.
Heartbreak had the same issue. I was looking forward to looking into it a little more but the more I thought about it and asked questions about it, the more i lost interest in it and it just felt boring to me to be honest.
Confusion was something I didn't knew how to begin with, it took me an awful lot of time to start because I just couldn't understand where I would take it and what I can do with it. I just didn't feel inspired by it.
Other topics from the 10 were very interesting to look into. But after doing some research on them I lost interest in two more topics, Being alone/Loneliness and Data. Even though I found these topics incredibly interesting to look into, I just didn't feel inspired by them and I had to take them off my list.
After narrowing down my list by subtracting themes, I had the final five:
Animals Threatening humans [funny]
Seamounts
Nostalgia
Anthropomorphism
Homecoming and Journeys
My main reason for choosing these themes was to research something that inspires and motivates me and that's what these themes do for me. I was so involved in the whole process of asking questions to people around me about these things and taking input and researching these topics that I knew I had to go forward with them.
Brief breakdown on why I chose these themes:
Life Underwater is such a fascination to me. All the mysteries and the cycle of life which is so similar to ours but I am yet so unaware about it. I really enjoyed looking into this theme and after narrowing it down into Seamounts, I was even more confident with where I was headed.
All those moments that come back to me when I cross a certain path or when the radio starts playing a certain song, its sort of magical in a way. There is something very bittersweet and melancholic about this feeling which got me hooked to this theme. But the bit that fascinated me the most was how nostalgia is portrayed and used by media as means to engage people.
I didn't expect to find this theme as interesting as I find it now. I connected this theme to journeys after doing this questionnaire. I wanted to know why people leave just to return to where they started? Why are journeys so important and what importance and values does a journey hold that it makes the return more beautiful? Is the return always the best part? I just went on and on about this after discussing it with some people. It just fascinated me how people use this cycle of a journey and the return in so many movies, games and TV shows.
The aspect of humanizing animals and how different animals have different character and personality traits to them. I was very interested in this concept and wanted to connect this with censorship. After looking into some cartoons that include this, it seemed to me like Anthropomorphism is a way of censorship in media and is done very subtly. I really liked the whole feeling and idea of this theme so I decided to take it forward and see what I can find.
