The path from secondary research to experimental activities is highly instructive.
As a team of five, we aim to develop a feasible solution to the challenge of “How can we adapt to climate realities and promote the integration of affected populations?”.
By initially starting with rather generic secondary research, our team was quite clueless and we had no idea how to get started. By simply googling about the challenge and possible approaches to solving it, we were able to dive into the topic. I found it interesting how many distinctive initiatives already exist in responding and adapting to climate change. Both, my research as well as reading through the findings of my group members allowed me to come across a wide variety of fascinating approaches, ideas, and ventures like for instance Floating farms by N-ARK and Mr. Queen Africa. As a result of the secondary research, our team was able to narrow down the topic by deciding to focus additional research specifically on the issue of rising sea levels in coastal regions. My key learnings out of this step were that it is beneficial to first look at a subject from a relatively broad perspective to get a feeling of what already exists. Having a sense of the bigger picture, was useful in defining more specific targets for subsequent research. It may seem obvious, but this step once again showed me the benefits of sharing insights in a larger group. Everyone brought their unique input, allowing us to get a broad view of the topic much more easily.
Based on the secondary research, our team developed a primary research plan including surveys, interviews, and experimental activities. The idea of first conducting a survey is to gain a more general understanding of the Portuguese population regarding their perspective on climate change and threats to seashores. We plan to combine interviews with experimental activities to get further insights through a more innovative and perhaps less scientific approach. In this regard, the article cultural probes was highly valuable to me personally as it states a great example of how experimental approaches might be realized and explains the potential advantages of these activities. Compared to the first step, I feel less confident in conducting interviews and experiments as I have never done it to this extent before. Therefore, I am going to need more time regarding preparation, and I am more afraid of possible failures that might occur during realization. So far, the key lesson during this step was that there might be benefits when doing research not only based on scientific methods but also through experimental activities.
To conclude, we still do not know exactly what the final answer to this challenge might look like. Even as we prepare and conduct the primary research, we feel temporarily lost and wonder how we will reach our goal. However, the more research we do, the more we realize what we have to pay attention to, and thus we can further specify possible solutions. Therefore I think that I will learn a lot during this process and I am curious about the results.
