Research Question Refinement
In discussing our research question, Greg has offered a new refinement:
How might digital screens alter how people use and perceive space in Amsterdam’s outdoor, public environments?
We are attempting to incorporate the element of creating our own digital screen (or projection) in Amsterdam into our project. Also, Greg has some interesting thoughts in his blog about how a screen might change the very nature of what we encounter in an environment in his blog. These ideas frame the current scope of our research question: we are interested in how people interact with public digital screens, and we’d like to come up with a way of testing this through our own creation.
However, I’ve noticed that it seems to be really tough to narrow and refine our research question at this point in time because what we are researching depends on what we discover in Amsterdam from our observations. This seems to be a tough block to overcome:
- If we develop an extremely specific research question using our pre-Amsterdam knowledge, we might limit what we are studying to something that is much less interesting or juicy than if we had explored our options (in Amsterdam) before selecting.
- However, if we don’t develop a specific topic to look for before heading to Amsterdam, we might spend too much time on observing and exploring a wide breadth of options, and have difficulty narrowing down our topic sufficiently in time for more rigorous research.
Conclusion? Stay posted for updates :p
