This blog provides a forum for students, instructors and others to share information and ideas about the Spring Thesis Program at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City.
Jake, Have you been making anything to contribute to your understanding of the topic or user group? Start experimenting and engaging people about death. What is the role of a product potentially? This is going to be a big question in your project's development. The more you test your assumptions about people's perceptions, the better you will be able to define your criteria for success. Look at the existing landscape of products related to death. What are these products trying to achieve? What are the categories of product in this "field" (eg memory, burial/internment, coping, etc) ? What is ignored by this material culture? Where are the disconnects? Right now you are speaking in such broad terms about your goals and your findings that it is hard to see where you are headed and to determine if that's an appropriate place to be.
The questions you are polling with right now seem vague. Try to define what it is you want to learn and what you will be doing with the information once you've gathered it. This will help you define a more specific goal, user group, and/or design opportunity.
Start making! Use your skills as a designer to develop tools for investigating this issue. It isn't an easy issue to tackle, but the sooner you get specific (even if it means trying out a direction to find why it is not what you thought it might be) the sooner you will learn what you need to know in order to be successful.
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Jake,
Have you been making anything to contribute to your understanding of the topic or user group? Start experimenting and engaging people about death. What is the role of a product potentially? This is going to be a big question in your project's development. The more you test your assumptions about people's perceptions, the better you will be able to define your criteria for success. Look at the existing landscape of products related to death. What are these products trying to achieve? What are the categories of product in this "field" (eg memory, burial/internment, coping, etc) ? What is ignored by this material culture? Where are the disconnects? Right now you are speaking in such broad terms about your goals and your findings that it is hard to see where you are headed and to determine if that's an appropriate place to be.
The questions you are polling with right now seem vague. Try to define what it is you want to learn and what you will be doing with the information once you've gathered it. This will help you define a more specific goal, user group, and/or design opportunity.
Start making! Use your skills as a designer to develop tools for investigating this issue. It isn't an easy issue to tackle, but the sooner you get specific (even if it means trying out a direction to find why it is not what you thought it might be) the sooner you will learn what you need to know in order to be successful.
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