Research Forby Design Part 1

For the first step of our 5-week group project, we were required to choose a concept and create a mess map around it. The topic we chose was social media.

As we generated ideas around the topic of social media, we quickly realized that there were many different ways that we could approach it. This made it a little difficult for us to narrow it down to something more specific.

But, we were able to explore certain topics of interest in more depth, which I think will inform our concept as we proceed with the project.

For instance, I chose to explore the topic of the economic impacts of social media in more depth.

As we conducted our research, I felt as though we were organically going through the 4 stages of research that we discussed in the lesson:

1. Identify your topic: This part of the process was probably the easiest. Our group decided to throw topics around to discuss and eventually broadened them in order to make our research more open ended. We started by talking about TikTok, then we brought up other platforms, and so we narrowed our topic to all types of social media.
2. Question your topic: To start, we asked a lot of questions about our initial topic. We all agreed that it would be interesting to explore social media from a behavioral standpoint, as it is something that greatly affects our daily lives. But, the more we talked and the more questions we asked, the more we realized that the topic of social media could be approached from so many different angles. We began to question the political, economic, social, and physical impacts of these platforms as well.
3. Identify the evidence needed: This was a little tricky, because as mentioned in the lesson, there is not always one right answer. We knew that there was definitely evidence around certain topics, such as the role that social media played in the 2016 election as proof of its political impact. For other subtopics, it was not as easy to recall concrete data that we could use as support. For example, it was not as easy for us to pinpoint a specific event that emphasized the impact that social media had on the economy. While it was easy for us to point to various concepts that we felt were influencing this phenomenon, it was not as easy to point to specific empirical evidence. This part of the process was actually fleshed out, partially, as we actually went about doing research.
4. Determine whether the evidence is available: I feel that there were a lot of ideas that we discussed that there was simply not enough research out there for. An example of this is our discussion of TikTok. Half the group was active on the TikTok, while the other half had not used it at all. But, we were all able to agree that it seemed to be a fairly addictive platform. We were not able, however, to find solid evidence on this. The platform is so new that not many studies have been done to support these claims.

Though I did not realize it in the process of doing research, we went through all four of these stages. It was interesting how our research was limited by some aspects, but greatly expanded by others. This made it easier for us to narrow down our topic as we went into our secondary research.

There were so many avenues to explore, and in the end we ended up with a mess map and research that explored a lot of different areas of social media. Though we have not narrowed down our research to an actionable level yet, I think that this was a really good start. We all now have ideas flowing, and will probably have a lot to discuss come class time.