Week 9

This week started by hearing the timeline for the rest of thesis. I was really suprised by how little time is left and the the expected timeline of research and project. I am doing Research for art and Design and the timeline has me finishing exploratory research by start of spring semester. However, I do feel like I will need to do Generative Research of some kind potentially as a participatory design workshop with my target group. This would end up having to happen at the beginning of spring term.

Overall, the timeline showed me that there is still a lot that I need to do. For me to analyze and fill my thoughts going into this week of creating research assets, I created a stakeholder holder map. You can view it on Miro here.

Through my stakeholder map I broke down the stakeholders I needed to talk to. I want to talk to 4 categories of stakeholders:

• Adult learners in Conservatories
• Adult learners private lessons
• Instructors of conservatories
• Instructors of Private lessons

The reason I broke it down this way is I believe that those two type of adult learners might have different goals that brought them to music learning. The teachers would also have different approaches to teaching 1 on 1 vs to a classroom.

I also found some experts that I want to reach out to and I feel like would be great people to interview. One person, Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at NYU wrote a book Guitar Zero: The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age. This book I am currently reading and is about his experience learning a musical instrument at the age of 40 and the psychology of learning. When I found this book I felt like I had finally found the resource I had been looking for. I have a draft of an email I hope to send out this week and I would love to schedule a chance to talk to him the week after thanksgiving.

This week I also picked three Exploratory Methods of research that I think I would like to do. I want to use Interrogative methods like interviews, Self Reporting methods like surveys and diary studies . As my third one I thought activity based methods would be pretty cool or observatory methods if I was able to sit in on a music class for older adults.

I meet with Ahmed this week and hopefully will get some guidance on how to create the materials I need for these methods.