Thesis Interest
During the past week, I have been exploring my thesis interest.
I finished my last master's degree two years ago on “The future of storytelling and how it can contribute to interpersonal communication” and I made a coming out message to my parents in Virtual Reality.
I didn’t know I would come back to school in the near future and now here I am. It’s harder since I have had a similar practice and exploration of my academic interests.
So I mapped my thoughts again.
My thesis interest
I found my interest hasn’t changed much except I want to push my research forward to how I can make a bigger impact on society.
Here are three research questions I brainstormed in class:
How mixed reality storytelling can help with interpersonal communication？
How to improve the social media platform to decrease hatred and fake news?
What would be the next super app that shapes our social network?
Research Plan
Description
What are you hoping to discover?
I hope I can discover more examples and practices of how storytelling and sharing can help benefit the online community, and what’s a better approach to develop a tool kit or principle for the future of storytelling.
Intentions
Why is this important to you, or to the project?
I haven’t come out to my parents yet, even after I finished my thesis by making a coming out message to them in VR. I don’t have the confidence to show them the content that I created. For my last approach, I made a video, more like a trailer to my VR coming out message. It’s not perfect and I want to make it to the next level.
It’s not only about me. I want to make it universal to everybody. What’s the principle behind the future of storytelling? How can I create a guideline for people like me to convey important messages to loved ones?
How do these intentions shape your project?
I will focus more on the audience. How are they receiving the message? What would be considered “too far” and “too much”?
I want this project to be more visualized and practical that I can show and share.
Goals
What do you hope to discover, or not discover?
I want to discover more examples of successful interpersonal communication.
I also want more examples of of how social media sharing made impacts on society.
I don’t want to stuck with these examples, I want to find the storytelling pattern and common approach, and how can I make it into a tool kit. Like a storytelling app. A proposal machine.
Process
How will you go about doing your research? How will you document it? Are you sitting and reading? Doing site visits & meeting people? Watching videos or talking to people online? Creating prototypes and getting feedback?
I want to continue gather all the examples I found on Are.na, and update my thoughts in process log. I am gonna watch a lot of videos and read a lot of blogs; I also want to interview people who has been sharing their stories online.
I want to create a prototype for the tool kit/storytelling app/proposal machine, and get critiques.
Schedule
What will you do, when?
Here is a link to my research plan:
