Over the past year of placement, I’ve had time to think about what I wanted to write my dissertation about, and, while I’ve had some general ideas, I am yet to nail down a concrete concept. To kick off my ideation process, I took 5 minutes a wrote out a list of topics that I had some interest in writing about.
General Ideas for Dissertation Ideation
When reading through these ideas, I noticed some similarities between the ideas, that let me group them into the following 3 general ideas.
We have the idea that we should be “designing for the user” and consider their needs and wants, however, social media and algorithmic content delivery seems to offer users too much of what the “want” rather than “need”. This can lead to echo chambers that contribute to more polarised political discourse.
AI is becoming rapidly becoming a bigger part of our lives, however if we want the change AI brings to be positive, we need to consider how we foster responsible use and trust of AI through primary and secondary education.
In school, the subject Art was always called Art & Design yet featured very little about design in the sense we think about it. How could design be introduced in this stage of education.
Of these 3, I was most interested in number 1, as it was the idea I kept coming back to when thinking about dissertation over the last year, and I feel it is particularly topical at the moment.
After initial ideation, we discussed our ideas in groups. It turned out that 2 other people had had a similar idea around echo-chambers, which has made me question whether my idea was too obvious. I think there may be a better question in here though, so I want to pursue this idea further to begin with, and keep the other 2 ideas in my back pocket.
To explore this idea further, I used MuDG, a new AI tool which allows for branching strands of questioning with AI. I found this a really useful exercise, and something I’ll continue to use throughout writing my dissertation.
This tool allowed me to drill deeper into my initial question around how social media is causing echo chambers and I think I’ve found something more interesting than the initial “echo chambers are bad” direction I was taking.
What I’ve found through this initial research, is that (in very brief terms) echo chambers are bad because we’re giving users too much of what they “want” and that is causing harm to wider society. What I think might be more interesting to explore is how we can define a set of “needs” a user has to keep them a balanced and positive member of wider society. Really it’s, rather than looking at a problem, I want to explore the solution.
I think this is a good initial ideas, and has already given me a thought around a potential source I could use.