(1/10) Winter Recap of Thesis Progress
Note: To be honest, I didn’t feel like I did very much over the winter break. I was very burnt out and spend most of with my family in Thailand. However, after writing all of this down I feel a lot better about it and realized I did a lot more than I thought. Also, for a lot of the time I spent with family, we discussed my thesis I, and I ended up doing informal interviews about rituals I didn’t even know existed and was conducted during Lunar New Year.
What did I do?
Wrote the draft to my introduction and literature review for my dissertation
Received more survey results and collaborated with Asian American organizations to spread the link
Designed my cultural kit to send out to interested parties
Sent out my cultural kit and started receiving results
Started writing my autoethnography
Started planning the illustrations in my autoethnography zine and doing illustration studies
Brainstormed some design ideas and started prototyping
Just a little refresher
So, just in case people forgot, my thesis is around rituals and cultural continuity. Specifically, I am researching rituals in Chinese/Lunar New Year and how they are passed down through generations. Specifically, I am interested in learning about what makes some rituals easier to be passed down in others, that obstacles are preventing younger generations from celebrating thesis rituals during the Chinese New Year Festival, and what can be designed to address these obstacles. Underlining all of these is my very personal relationship to the topic. A lot of the research I have been doing is introspective and concerns my relationship, and lack of, with the rituals of Chinese New Year. It is a part of my cultural heritage, and to be honest, I don’t know very much about it. This thesis has very much been a journey to reclaim a part of my identity that I don’t want to get lost.
Wrote the draft to my introduction and literature review for my dissertation
At the very beginning of my winter break, I wrote the draft for my introduction and literature review. Somehow in the depths of my sleep deprivation, intense boredom from my 22-hour flight, and extreme anxiety, I wrote over 40 pages for my first two chapters. You can read it here if you would like. (Please note, the link is live and contents may change). I attribute my burst of productivity to my time being stuck in a tin can in the sky.
Received more survey results and collaborated with Asian American organizations to spread the link
At the end of last semester, I had sent out my screener survey to try to get some participatory data and names & emails of people interested in participating in my cultural probe. I started getting some results coming in, but it really slowed down over the holidays. To try to get more people to fill it out, I emailed Happy Family Night Market, an Asian American awareness organization, to see if we could collaborate. I asked that they put the link in their newsletter and in return, I would volunteer on some of their design work. So far, I have a few more people who filled out the survey and I have some volunteer design work that I am looking forward to doing later in the semester!
Designed my cultural kit to send out to interested parties
Side note: I really hate the name “cultural probe”. It sounds like it’s really nosy and prodding to me which is not what I want. I like to call it a cultural kit instead because it’s more about seeing something through someone’s perspective.
During the middle of my winter break, I designed my cultural kits for my study. These were the ones that I outlined in my final presentation and includes the following types of exercises:
Photo Collage
Question: What about Chinese New Year are most important or prominent to someone? I want to understand what someone finds to be the most important or memorable about Chinese New Year.
Prompt: What 12 images remind you the most of Chinese New Year? Create a collage with your images. Feel free to add any labels, drawings, your own photos, images you found on the internet or writing you would like to your collage!
Love Letter & Break Up Letter
Questions: What was the worst and best Chinese New Year celebration and why? I want to understand what elements my participants might not want to continue celebrating and why.
Prompt: For the first letter, remember back to the worst Chinese New Year you ever had, or an image of the worst Chinese New Year possible. Now, pretend Chinese New Year is a person and write a letter a break-up letter to it. Spend no more than 10 minutes. For the second letter, remember back to the best Chinese New Year you ever had, or an image of the best Chinese New Year possible. Now, pretend Chinese New Year is a person and write a love letter to it.
Table Mapping
Questions: What food do you most associate with Chinese New Year? Food is one of the most important aspects of Chinese New Year and also a central identifier of your identity. I want to know what people eat during Chinese New Year and learn about how each dish is important to them.
Prompt: A picture of a table will be prepared for participants. What do you or your family eat during Chinese New Year? Draw how your dining table might look on the Chinese New Year. Feel free to give labels to what each food is, if you like or hate it, or anything else you might want to add.
Drawing
Questions: How might you celebrate Chinese New Year 10 years from now? I want to get ideas from my users on how they think the Chinese New Year celebration might be different for them in the future.
Prompt: Draw how you might celebrate Chinese New Year 10 years from now. How might it be different? How might it be the same?
Comic panel
Questions: What does a typical Chinese New Year celebration look like for you? This is to get an idea of what are the most important aspects that people have ritualized in their personal lives.
Prompt: Draw a comic panel of what the typical Chinese New Year celebration looks like for you and your family. It can be as long or short as you want.
Card sorting
Goal: What are the most important factors blocking participants from celebrating Chinese New Year? This is aimed at identifying what are the pain points people experience while trying to celebrate Chinese New Year.
Prompts: A x-y graph will be created with axes labeled important and effort. The x-axis is labeled least important to most important. This axis asks you to rank rituals by how vital you feel the ritual is to the Chinese New Year celebration. The y axis is labeled most effort to least effort. This axis asks users to rank rituals by how much effort they feel the ritual requires from them. Place the labels provided in the area of the graph that you feel is most true for you. You can also make more labels in the blank cards provided. Once all the labels have been sorted, the user would be asked what are the biggest factors that might prevent you from celebrating Chinese New Year? To identify these factors, users would be asked to try sad faces next to the labels they think are most preventing them from celebrating Chinese New Year.
Categorization
Goal: What culture do you identify with most? As all of my participants will be a part of the diasporic community, I would like to find out how they would label certain rituals as Chinese. Is there something that makes something associated strongly with Chinese culture rather than something else?
Prompt: A page of images will be for the users. Please label the following images with the culture you think it is most related to. If you don’t know what culture it belongs to, please label none. If you think it belongs to all cultures, please label it global.
The cultural kit was designed on Figma for both ease of use (as I am well versed in it) and also because I wanted to give people the option to do it online if they wished. This flexibility was key to me because I wouldn’t be able to send everyone a printed version because I was in Thailand and a large number of people who told me they were interested in filling it out were in the United States.
In addition to the actual activities, I also created an instruction sheet that would be sent out to each participant, depending on how I send them and what medium I anticipate them filling out the activity. The differentiations are:
On printed copies that I personally hand over
On printed copies that participants print out after I emailed it to them
On Figma, after I email them the link to the community published version
There is also a wildcard option that I created that I don’t anticipate many people to fill out. This is through the community-published version of Figma. On Figma, you can publish a design on the community page where anyone can make a copy to use. In the publication notes, I asked that anyone who makes a copy with the intention to do the cultural kit send me a copy. At this moment in time, no one has sent me a copy. But we will see.
In designing the cultural kit, I took special care in its aesthetic. I didn’t want it to look too formal or too childish. However, I wanted it to look like it was a fun thing to do and that you were allowed to write all over it. To achieve this, I included hand-drawn flourishes and drawings into the probe so that participants feel like it is personal and tangible while keeping all the text in font form for readability.
Sent out my cultural kit and started receiving results
After I finished designing my cultural kit, I printed a handful of them out and gave them to friends and family who were in Thailand with me. I also collected the emails of people who stated that they were interested in completing the cultural kit so far (but were not located in Thailand at the time of cultural kit completion) and emailed them the kit with instructions on how to fill it out and send it back to me. To date, I have four kits returned to me so far. Even with a cursory glance at them, I see many different types of responses and I’m excited to spend more time reading them through and analyzing the responses. Hopefully, I will receive more of them by mid-February for me to really read through them and hone my design idea and prototypes.
Started writing my autoethnography
The biggest thing I started doing during the break was writing my autoethnography. Separated into three chapters based on the three official days Thailand celebrates Chinese New Year (plus an introduction), this autoethnography is my prototype for the zine that I want to create at the end of this semester. It was difficult getting started because I felt like I didn’t really remember anything about how to organize Chinese New Year. But this was where being home really helped because I was able to be at my Por Por’s house and was able to informally gather information about the festival and its preparations from my Yee Yees. Not only was it helpful in my writing, but it helped me bond with my Yee Yees more about our cultural heritage.
The idea is that the autoethnography will guide how I will design and illustrate the zine, which I plan on printing on the risograph machine. I really like this idea because zines are essentially a cultural artifact and it just feels right that at the end of this thesis I help to continue the culture by creating an artifact that can go on living without me. It will help my and my family’s story about how we celebrate Chinese New Year, and also hopefully be a window for someone unfamiliar to the much wider world that Chinese New Year lives in and encompasses.
Started planning the illustrations in my autoethnography zine and doing illustration studies
As part of writing my autoethnography, I am also reading through it and making notes of where I think an illustration would be beneficial to the story that I am telling. Whether it’s a side story or a page spread of all the different fruits we buy, the illustrations would hopefully bring the story to life and allow someone unfamiliar with Chinese New Year to understand the extravagance and symbolism of it a little more.
Another reason I am doing the illustration planning here is that I want to include illustration in whatever I make for the final design element of my thesis. So it will come in double use. In preparation for all these illustrations, I’ve started making studies of “Chinese” objects that I am not used to drawing. I started by trying to draw them from memory, a pagoda and a dragon. I must say, my dragon is horrendous. I think my next step is to gather some reference images and maybe visit a museum and draw those as practice.
Brainstormed some design ideas and started prototyping
From what I have gathered so far, I came up with a bunch of ideas. Perhaps too many ideas. Currently, I have seven ideas and haven’t really started prototyping anything. I have this mental block and fear that whatever I make won’t be useful to other people, or that it won’t be useful to the younger version of myself. I presented some ideas to class on Monday, and the one that received some good feedback was the card game one. Which, to be honest, is also the one that I’ve been thinking about the most. I’m not sure yet what direction it will take me. I think I need to just mull it over and think about it for a long time first before I decide what I will be making. I think I also need to be honest with myself and enunciate what I like and what I want to do for the design aspect of my thesis. I did, however, start making prototypes of what size I want my card to be. So that was a little fun.
Next Steps
This is my timeline for this upcoming semester. I kind of went overboard with the dates, but that’s because it really helps me to stay on task and not fall behind on my work. It’s really to keep myself paced and to make sure I finish all my work on it. I like to put in the heavy lifting with the organization beforehand. I find that it really pays off for me.
For next week, I will:
Finishing writing chapter 2 of my autoethnography
Chat with Ahmed and Dan about going forward with my thesis
Brainstorm more ideas for design project
Introspection session on the goal of my design and who it is for
Make some prototypes of my design ideas
Do more illustration studies
Plan chapter 2 illustrations