Another term is coming to an end and once again I am here to reflect on my most liked topics or/andmethodologies from the courses I took. This time the courses were: Design Thinking and Maker Culture, and Machines of Knowledge.
Design Thinking and Maker Culture
This course has been very valuable to me as it introduced me to design thinking: an innovative user-centred approach that seeks to integrate people’s needs and technology possibilities. It is a process that can be applicable to an endless number of things and produce better results on every field. I believe it would be nice to research this further and apply to a real project on the future. One nice use of this approach would be to research how to attract audience to a cultural organization. Also, I enjoyed learning about some techniques that could be useful when working on a project: brainstorming and creating storyboards.
Machines of Knowledge
This has been a really interesting and challenging course that got me reflecting on a lot of issues we have with web 2.0. I really enjoyed the three theoretical frameworks we were introduce to: feminist, post-colonial and public sphere. Also, we learned a new methodology, text analysis, which was extremely difficult for me, but also very interesting. If I had to choose one thing that caught my interest the most would be the topic fake news which we touched in one of the tutorials. This has always been a subject that fascinates me as it affects deeply our daily life. Specially this year, with the COVID-19 crisis, I could observe a proliferation of misinformation like never seen before. I would love to research this deeper under the public sphere theoretical framework and learn how these fake news are propagated.
Overall, it was a difficult and rewarding period with a lot of new information that will need time to sink in. Hopefully, I will be able to do that during Christmas break.
1 Comment
Hi Nina,
I agree with you that design thinking is a very interesting topic. Moreover, the approach you outlined for your future research sounds very interesting and I think it could be a good project for the master thesis, regardless of whether you are doing and internship or the full thesis. Since you are currently in Berlin you could probably find a cultural heritage organization to do some ethnographic research with and gain some real insights.
Regarding the Machines of Knowledge course I think the topic of fake news you highlighted is indeed very relevant to the current state of the world. The connection to the framework of public spheres just seems logical to me, so I would encourage you to go into this direction. Maybe you could do some digital ethnography to research how these fake news are perceived or do text analysis for a specific fake news tweet.
Have nice holidays!! See you next year:)