Week 3 — Planning for Research

We officially moved on to Stage 2 — discovery and exploratory research synthesis. In this week and the next, Anna is our meeting facilitator, Michelle takes charge of note-taking and documentation, and Nandini will host the retro meeting.

Mon. Jan 27

During class, we were trying to organize what we reflected after the previous presentation and questions we’d like to ask Peter and Aadya, such as how should we document people’s sharing in a meaningful way? We listed out 3 potential directions for our future design, and see how each of our interests align to them. We also tried to illustrate a diagram to define our concept and terminology.

Originally we wanted to say “now → future”, and then we rephrased it as “future now → future then”, and then further define the overall timespan as “short-term → long-term → post-term”, inspired by the term posthumously.

We also liked the term “lifespan”. The longer lifespan of human lives nowadays leads to more people staying alive on earth and using more resources. This could go well with why we’d like to motivate changing lifestyle by looking at the end of life.

From speaking with Peter and Aadya, we received valuable suggestions as to

1. look at how people deal with Life Transitions
2. document the interview by diagraming a person’s life journey

Wed. Jan 29

We started off by sharing what we learned from each of our interest explorations in the past few days. Unfortunately, Nandini was not feeling well that day so she wasn’t able to join us.

Keywords:

Eustina: Death Practices & Start Conversations About Death

Anna: Grief & Long-term Planning

Michelle: Start Conversations About Death & Long-term Planning

We surprisingly found that each time we meet, our thoughts converge a bit more. Now our shared main concept is much refined —

“How to start conversations about death, to help people become more comfortable with the topic, and how would that motivates people to plan ahead for end-of-life early?”

We list down some preliminary How Might We questions to inform our research direction:

1. HMW open up conversations about difficult life transitions?
2. HMW provides opportunities for people to be more engaged with future life planning? (organizing, minimalizing)
3. HMW set long-term life plans except for the inevitability of the end fo life? (now regarding death as failure)
4. HMW help people to look back on the life they’ve lived?
5. HMW help people think of the end of life as an opportunity to celebrate life?
6. HMW help people think about what they will leave behind to the world?
7. HMW understands why speaking about the end of life is so difficult?
8. HMW understand why are people not taking action on planning their end of life?

We will further refine them later on.

We moved on to think about what is our approach to interview individuals. Thinking of what are the common big life transitions, we came up with a list:

• Starting School / Going to college
• Leaving home
• New job / Lose a job
• Moving
• Having a baby / Starting a family
• Lose someone
• Buying a car
• Buying a house
• Retiring
• Starting/Ending a domestic relationship
• Losing independence
• Illness

One of the approaches we were talking about was to start the interview with “what are your major life events?” and by talking about those, we could learn about their decision-making mentality, and see whether there’s a connection to the thoughts about mortality.

The other approach is to start with “what are some turning points when your perception of death changes throughout life?”, inspired by Michelle’s preliminary interview with 2 individuals.

We got a bit stuck in figuring out what exactly we’d like to do, since the topic is sensitive and we hope to be cautious, make sure people would be comfortable with sharing very personal stuff, and we could really get effective inputs.

Peter and Hajira caught us when we were still stuck there. Luckily we received great feedback and suggestions at the time we needed the most.

1. Don’t start with personal interviews; ask experts (nursing homes, funeral homes, hospice care, people of faith, retired people — how they deal with transition; what they wish they had known) first, since they know a lot and it’s not sensitive/personal for them to talk about it.
2. Consider more research methods. ex:

a. draw how do you imagine your afterlife? write a letter to your dead self?

b. workshops with metaphors or collages

c. literature review

d. corridor poster to receive anonymous responses

3. Define a 2 x 2 to figure out what do we mean by an ideal approach to end of life? and then we might have a more concrete idea about how to move people in other quadrants to the “ideal” one.

4. Think about life / afterlife / end of life, what are you focusing on? — we later reflected on probably it’s our tagline “Design to improve AfterLife” that makes it confusing whether we’re trying to make changes only after people deceased. It’s a play on words but has a much deeper meaning for a lot of people for sure. We’ll consider renaming.

Peter also shared that people usually tend to figure everything out before going out to talk to people, while in reality, it’s by going out to speak with people first that helps to figure things out.

We really appreciated the timely advice. We decided to put aside the individual interviews for now and moved on to plan for expert interviews first. We divided sectors, found at least 3 targeted organizations each, and reached out, waiting to hear back.

Thu. Jan 30

We welcomed Nandini back to the team! Michelle briefed her about our progress so far. She’s on board with the direction we’re heading to.

Fri. Jan 31

At the beginning of the meeting, we checked in on our progress of reaching out to experts. Some of the phonecalls will be made on Monday when those people are back at work.

Our major goal for the meeting today is to nail down our research plan for the next 2 weeks. We listed down all the types of research that we are interested in doing, ranked them as High / Medium / Low priority, broke down on steps, assigned the team member in charge, and set up a specific timeline for each. We are very aware of the time we have to plan realistically, especially since expert interviews might mostly happen during the workday during work hours, and the group events that take more time to coordinate and actually host them.

Overarching Themes:

Understanding people’s decision making for life transitions & attitude towards the end of life

High Priority:

1. Expert Interview: We each have 5–6 stakeholders. Will proceed according to who agrees to meet/talk. Nandini will create a spreadsheet as a framework for research questions to make sure we’re aligned with our primary research goals. Anna & Michelle will create the protocol for expert interviews. Anna already has the manager at Friendship Village who agreed to speak with us. ✨
2. Hello game gameplay events: We purchased a set of card game that helps to open up conversations about death. We’re going to play with our own team this Sunday over team dinner. We hope to host gameplay events with (1) Design students (mainly age 20s–30s) (2) Faculty/Staff (mainly 40s-50s) (3) Elders at Friendship Village. Anna & Michelle will give more thoughts on how to properly arrange those events (gender and cultural background diversity?). Michelle, Nandini, and Anna will take charge of recruiting participants for different groups.

Medium Priority:

1. Individual Interviews: We might link this to the hello game events and talk to the participants before/after the gameplay.
2. Corridor Poster: Eustina will plan for the poster and set up. Potentially will put them up in Margret Morrison Hall and Baker Hall.
3. Death Cafe Pittsburgh Group: We found this Facebook community which has 500 members that are passionate about discussing death. We might utilize questions from expert interviews and corridor posters to come up with a simple survey to post in the group. We regard it as a great resource to hear the voice of the general public unrelated to CMU. Nandini will coordinate this.
4. Literature Review: Eustina and Anna will take notes from related papers, books, and movies.

Low Priority:

1. Decoding end-of-life-related services: We hope to analyze related services (might be mainly digital) on their visual, font, layout, language/wordings. Referring to the 1st communication design project from Stacie’s class last semester. We might do this later.

Before we wrapped up the meeting, we also shared our priority/commitment to the project and also more specifically for the coming month. We’re happy to be honest with ourselves and each other!

Sun. Feb 2

We played the hello conversation game with our own team this Sunday with delicious Thai food in Nandini’s dining room. 😋💬💬💬💬

Image courtesy of Common Practice.