Thesis writing 1 (I’m sure I’ll come up with a better title as the semester goes on)
Time definitely flies when you’re having fun, but I never expected my entire college career to feel like it took place during a weekend. It’s that time again at CCA where all of the seniors giggle about how much thesis-related fatigue they’ll be in for the next two semesters. This post is the first section in a series of (hopefully) updated posts about my journey through my thesis.
I was inspired to start researching (👌 about this much) before school, and in the fashion of a traditional thesis: scholarly articles📝. I searched potential thesis topics I was interested in on Google Scholar and read the theses that came up. A little heavy, but a good way to force myself to ask more thoughtful questions, even to the point of researching how to ask good questions.
Having a cursory foundation to start the year, I began Thesis class looking inward, reflecting on my childhood👶🏻, family👨👩👦👦💇🏼, future aspirations🔮, and mental health💆🏻, pulling out key points of interest afterward. (That kind of reflection is impressive to achieve simply for how exhausting it is to muster up so many emotions all at once. A nap 💤 occurred promptly after I got home.)
Taking these ideas, I plotted them on a personal-care to impact graph📈, highlighting complementary ideas, and jotting down scalable directions each idea could take.
Of the three3️⃣ favorites, none really landed on the revolutionary section of the graph, but that’s okay — it’s only week 1. The following paragraphs are me talking myself into and out of each 💭idea.
Coping Mechanisms for Personal Growth
PRO: Personal growth in terms of being able to understand problems without relying heavily on others. This would be important to innovate further on complex problems. With this, designers and non-designers (everyone) would have tools or opportunities to contribute to projects that they are passionate about, essentially making contribution more accessible.
CON: Personal growth is really vapid and selfish topic for a thesis in a world that has more issues than your capable body. I would recommend rephrasing this to be more inclusive, or refocusing to a problem more urgent. We all get in ruts, we don’t need yet another tool to try to help us out of them.
Mapping as a Way to Organize Thoughts
PRO: Organizing thoughts could be used for way more than just personal use, with a connected network of stories, knowledge, and thoughts, certain parts of this “network” could be available to doctors for medical purpose info, background checks, allergy information at restaurants, or maybe the mapping is geared more towards asking the right questions to organize them. This could work either way, and you have a lot to work with as a topic, without limiting yourself too much.
CON: Please don’t stay in your head. You know plenty of methods to organize your thoughts and you know very well that you don’t need to spend a year in your head. What else about organization and memory can you come up with that’s more helpful? This sounds a little too similar to MindNode, I would use it as a model to slingshot to another project with similar principles.
Material Science For Understanding on the Web
IN: Material Science as in humans abilities to remember things when they smell a scent, or visit a place they haven’t been to in a long time. Using those intuitive properties of our senses, how can we apply that to asking a machine a question and have the answer come back contextually? Currently, if you Google something contextually sensitive(“art collectors house review in Berlin, blue tile” results in galleries in Berlin, not Carlo Prada’s home, “Photo’s of animals in the Sahara, excluding elephants” results in photos elephants), you get something generic.
OUT: This seems more like a fake news problem, or one that can’t hold itself when explaining it. You essentially want a personalized AI, and that sounds really lame. I would look into problems within search or machine learning that have already been done. Do JD’s algorithm class? Maybe that will direct your thesis more.
It’s still a little vague, but I can feel little 🔬 neurons making connections toward something I would be confident to commit nine months 🗓 of my life to. In the mean time, I’ve been logging my productivity with Jessica Abel’s time-tracking log, from her book, Growing Gills. ❇️ Green areas are classes, ✴️ yellow, is productive time, ⬜️ uncolored cells are talking with friends, family, and misc. tasks. (My computer’s hard drive failed⚰️ late Monday, and I’m sure that contributed to an atypical weekly schedule—for better or worse I’m still not sure yet).
