Design Research Methodology - Proposal

3/4/19 -  24/4/19 (Week 1 to Week 4)

Jasmine Teoh Lee Suan (0331993)

Design Research Methodology

Proposal

---

Instructions:

Module Information Booklet:

---

Lecture Notes:

Week 1 (3/4/19)

For our first class in Design Research Methodology, we were given a brief on the overall course and we were also asked to think about what we want to conduct the research for.

Here are the lecture slides used for this lecture:

Week 2 (10/4/19)

We had another lecture this week about how to write proposals, here are the notes that I took down during the lecture:

What you wanna convey to the audience

• Simple not too complex
• Possibility of storytelling
• What makes it worth researching
• How to put forward so that reader can understands
• Problem statement - minimize the gap of making your research worth researching 

Research Question

• Answerable inquiry
• conceptual and technical questions
• Foundation of research objective
• Offer a remarkable output
• Worth researching in the creative media concept
• Form to build your specialization
• Specify your specific concern or issue
• Decide what you wanna know
• Turn specific concern into a question
• Ensure the question is answerable
• Question not too broad or narrow

Research Objectives:

• Describe what we expect to achieve
• May be linked with hypothesis or statement of purpose that does not have hypothesis
• Statement of objectives can serve to guide the activities of research

Hypothesis:

• Tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables, prediction tabout what you expect to happen in a study
• Sleep deprivation and test performanvce
• Unless youre creating a study that is exploratory in nature (discovering something), your hypothesis should always explain what you expect to happen during the course of your experiment or research
• Reading, observation, experience 

Research problem:

• Solving a problem, having a solution
• how ____ works, whether it interests you , affects or influences you

These are the lecture slides used for the lecture:



Our lecturers also gave us some notes to help with writing our proposals.







Week 3 (17/4/19)

No lectures this week as it was consultation week for our proposal.

---

Proposal:

Week 1 (3/4/19)

I brainstormed my initial ideas by writing it all down in my sketchbook, here are the notes of my ideas: 

Figure 1.1 Ideas in Sketchbook

Figure 1.2 Mindmap for Ideas

Week 2 (10/4/19)

We were to write a rationale on our research problem / topic of research this week.
This is my rationale for two of my ideas:

Sound and Animation
Sound in film and animation had been introduced to the entertainment industry since the year 1927, with The Jazz Singer as the feature film. Sound plays an important role in animation and videos, even more so as of the present day. Studies say that good sound designing is when the audience gets too absorbed into the music and sound of a video to even notice it. Sound is able to evoke emotions from those watching the media, and allows the audience to be able to experience and immerse themselves into the environment that the visual portrays. It brings intimacy between the audience and the film. However people seem to overlook the designing of sound and its importance. How is sound used to enhance videos itself? It is impossible to make others feel the same emotions felt without good sound as sound is now an essential part of film and animation itself.

Artificial Intelligence and Animation
Technology has become super advanced now, who knows whether it'll be more intelligent than us humans in the future? Currently, people have invented ways to get Artificial Intelligence to animate for them. Cases such as the recent Marvel Movie Infinite Wars character Thanos, where machines learn and create high fidelity animations on his face. Is this a good thing or will this affect the quality of animation? Is human touch still needed for these kind of things?

FEEDBACK: Miss Hayati said that I had to make my choice between my two topics by this week and that I needed to start writing my proposal already. I had to create a Google Drive folder and share it to her before next week.

Week 3 (17/4/19) 

This is the first draft of my proposal, it wasn't very well designed and I wasn't happy with how I wrote my research problem:



FEEDBACK: During consultation today, Miss Hayati told me that my research topic is of PhD level, as it was too broad. She advised me to narrow down the topic as it was not possible to study such a broad topic in just 11 weeks. She suggested that I should talk to one of the lecturers who is experienced in the field I’m researching to get more ideas, and to read up about the topic more. She also alerted me that if I did research on sound design, I would have to work harder than my friends but as long as I’m up for it, I can go ahead with it.

After getting feedback, I revised my proposal and formatted my slide design to look more presentable. I also added an introduction and wrote my problem statement better this time. I included citations from articles on my topic, and even an example of an independent animation studio so that my topic could be understood clearer:



Week 4 (24/4/19)

This week, we had to finalize our proposal so that we could move on to the next part of our research. Here are my slides after my feedback with the lecturer in class:



FEEDBACK: Miss Hayati reiterated that I might have to spend extra time researching as I would be connecting sound design and animation for my final year project and would have to be knowledgeable in both to execute the final project. She suggested that I research about sound design now and start researching more about animation before I started my dissertation. She also gave me suggestions to work with my classmate who’s also doing the same topic to collect data, but have different analyses and inputs on the research. She also said that my research objective has to be achievable which made me think more about it.

I went back to Miss Hayati one more time after making changes to my proposal (the content and teh way I word my research objectives and research questions) and showed her the updated proposal slides, which she then approved of.

Final Proposal:

Here are the slides for my final proposal that I submitted: