Academic Research in the parallel universe
Sharing my experience of working as a research assistant & visual designer for 2 different projects at the same time.
Have you heard of SLOWMOtiON MULTITASKING- TED TALK?
SlowMotion Multitasking is a behavior pattern where we have multiple projects on the go at the same time, and we move backward and forward between topics as the mood takes us, or as the situation demands. I’m not saying that I swayed away or to between design & research work..No No... But, however, in order to have a balance and clarity for me & other stakeholders of both the project, I separated 5 days of a week into 3 design workdays & 2 research workdays.
So while I was dueling with the startups and design work, I was also responsible for a research project- FinEst Twins at the computer science department.
I will always be grateful to Professor. Marko Nieminen for being my master thesis supervisor and giving me the opportunity to be a research assistant in the FinEst Twins project. The project had a unique focus on developing user-driven clean and sustainable smart city solutions that are “cross-border by default” in the context of emerging twin cities between Tallinn and Helsinki. Researchers are distributed across various topics such as Built Environment, Smart Energy, Smart Mobility, ICT, Urban Analytics, Governance, and Urban data.
The best part of being a part-time project worker was — flexibility and freedom. The setup provided me space and motivated self-interest to learn more about smart cities, UX of digital services, and collaborate with other researchers too.
I was also enlightened by — that I could provide service design or UX design services to the researchers. I visualized a few reports, a comparison of data, visualizing the connections between the streams, researching about IoT and smart cities in developing countries. Through this project, I learned a lot about India and its development in smart cities, the cities that are developing in terms of tech and advancement of people’s living standards.
I learned so much about smart cities, the technical topics that formulate smart city setup from the researchers. This part-time also helped me realize and practice how design thinking can be applied to various topics even without knowing the deep technicalities of a topic.
Lessons learned —
Virtual design workshops
The project required a plan to outline the scope & functional aspects among corresponding research streams (5). This paved the path to collaboration between 4 designers & research topic experts to organize the workshop. At the end of the workshop, I was happy to notice that a boring decision-making meeting can be turned into a fun, productive design workshop. We learned about each stream, their progress until now, their future plans, preparations for pilot projects & the support they require from the project owners.
Smart city setup in India
My main work focused on finding academic articles, all kinds of popular (non-academic) web journals, and blogs. An opportunity to utilize my Indian language skills and cultural understandings. In addition, I also reported short reviews on the insights collected from reading the full academic papers. This task was part of a section that described the European, North-American, Asian and Arabic models of a smart city in the project. Some of the cities, such as Dahej, Manesar Bawal, & Shendra that are situated along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) in India were part of this research.
Interested to read about the visual designer journey in the other universe? Well, here you go!
