To begin ideation I created a mind map exploring some areas I’m interested in and thought there would be problems to solve. After creating this first mind map, I felt myself drawn to the area of politics, as it’s something I’m really passionate about and understand a lot of the issues that need to be solved.
To explore further, I created another mind map focussing on the big issues in politics. I had a lot of ideas but felt that they were all connected issues which are basically the factors which are causing young voters to not engage in politics and not vote.
At this point, I thinking of some sort of platform which presents neutral and factual information on current politics in an accessible and understandable way, aimed at young people who want to learn or engage with politics more but don’t know where to start. I also feel while being a neutral platform, it needs to educate on the dangers of both the far right and far left of politics so that people are aware of the strategies used such as populism and polarisation. I want to create a platform which educates on the basics of politics while also creating a culture of seriousness and educated debate that doesn’t make politics the taboo and polarising topic it is at the moment.
I’m now able to split my research and ideation into two main areas:
To start exploring this issue, I created a short survey to get some general feelings about the issue. While short, this was useful as it gave me some quantitive data to reinforce my idea, and gave me some qualitative data which I could use to direct my discovery going forward.
From this survey, I can see that there is a large disconnect between young people and engaging with politics. While 65% did say they voted, 35% is still a massive amount to not vote, considering other countries such as Australia have mandatory voting in place.
Around 40% have little to no engagement with politics, and while I think it’s unrealistic to want all young people to be reading political books and listening to podcasts solely about politics, I think an increase in political engagement is still really important to improve.
60% say they don’t know where to look for information about politics, with those that do only cite wide cast information sources like Google, Linkedin, and news outlets.