As a group, we identified what we thought was the most important problem regarding rough sleepers. This problem was that rough sleepers are unaware of the nearest homeless medical centres.
What evidence did you find to support your decisions?
As a group we had a lot of research to support this problem. For example, we found that the life expectancy of someone sleeping rough is only half the average life expectancy of the country. We also had research regarding drug abuse and death caused by drugs. In the last eight weeks we found that there were 4 drug related deaths among rough sleepers and as many as 48 when going back 12 months.
My personal research was less relevant to this specific topic. I found some information to support the problem in the PDF report which showed the main reasons for homelessness and included drug and alcohol abuse as one of the most prominent. However, most of my research was based around the things that already exist for rough sleepers such as support, charities, accommodation and council support to see what things work well and what things don't.
What methods did you use to gather your evidence and what forms did it take?
My individual research was a mixture of secondary qualitative and quantitative research. My research was almost entirely based on the internet which is often frowned upon. I know that the internet has many flaws when used for research but I re-checked and referenced most of my information to make sure it was backed up by similar information. Although this is still not at all 100% reliable it does make it much more likely to be correct information and makes me happier to reference it and use it as research. I had a piece of secondary qualitative research that was gathered from the Leeds.gov website. It is the official council website that gives information on what they do to help the homeless.
Another piece of research was the PDF report on homeless from 2002 to 2006. Reading through the report and analysing it was secondary qualitative and finding and recording the facts and figures was an example of secondary quantitative research.
Other secondary qualitative research included finding information about charities and homeless organisations, accommodation for the homeless and support for other psychological and physical illnesses.
Late on in the project I was lucky enough to get some primary qualitative research by talking in person to a rough sleeper near millennium square. I discussed my project and research with him and asked if he was comfortable to answer my questions and then continued to go into more depth of the project and ask a few questions about his experience with the health system for homeless people. This research was completely based around the chosen problem because it was later through the brief, but it definitely turned out to be useful and I knew I could trust the source and his answers .
What methods of research did you find useful and why?
Each method of research is useful for different reasons. I used secondary research as my main type of research and this is easily the least useful between it and primary. Fortunately the group was split between gathering primary and secondary so most information could be backed up or replaced by a useful primary source. Qualitative and quantitative secondary research are pretty similar in reliability, but at least with qualitative research you are able to analyse and make opinions of the research. With quantitative research there is no room for change or opinion, it is just as it is. Although these forms of research have their downfalls, they are definitely still a credible source. Even if the information they hold is false or misguided, they are almost always based on some fact which if researched more is a good link to other aspects of the subject. In fact secondary research can create many links to other important information and the more that there is the better. I think that my secondary research did well in creating these links and furthering my research a lot.
Primary research is definitely the most reliable and most useful type of research. There is no doubt about the validity of the research and whether a person was lying or the evidence is not 100% true, it is definitely 100% as true as you can possibly get from your first hand research. Although primary research is useful, it is always possible to misinterpret what information is being given to you. More importantly, primary research may throw up a lot of blocks in the way of progressing the research and may stunt your ability to create more links to other aspects but at least the research is genuine and factual.
How did these inform your response to the problem?
Secondary research was almost a basis for more relaible research. The qualitative research gave us an idea of what things were happening and what things were not happeneing and the quantitative research was the facts and figures to back it up or even give us an idea of other aspects that needed to be looked at. The primary research was a completely truthful and relable source that was evidence of exactly the points that we were interested in or were trying to prove with further support.
What methods did you encounter as problematic?
The most problematic research was secondary research. Primary research was entirely useful because of its reliability. The secondary research had no basis of fact because I could have found it anywhere. In fact I could have written it myself and on the internet and posted it on a website with no links to any factuality or evidence that the research was true at all.
I found the secondary research from the council PDF report the most dificult to understand because of the way they structured sentences and used language and because of the way they represented their graphs in a completely biased way. It was proof that either the creators of the document did it incredibly poorly or that they were incredibly biased and manipulatd the graph and the data to show what they wanted it to show. It was complete evidence of how secondary research can be incredibly useless as research and how primary research can always be understood as reliable, whether it supports your current research or not.
How did you overcome this?
The best way to overcome the problem of secondary research being unreliable is to double or triple check it with other secondary sources that relate directly to the original. If a subject has been written or discussed 3 times it is much more likely to be true or to at least have many aspects that are true between the 3 sources. This is one way to assume that the secondary research is probably mostly correct. The only other way to beat the problem is to to attempt th research in terms of secondary research. It would often be difficult to do this depending on how complicated the original secondary research is but it is likely that there is a similar, smaller scale type of primary research that relates to the sam etopic and would give you a similar response.
What research could you have carried out that would have proved more useful?
It would have been much more useful to have focussed on research relating to our problem from the beggining. I would conduct a large amount of secondary research into the subject to begin with. Secondary research is much eaiser than primary research because it takes almost no time at all to find and primary reserach in comparison takes a long time to plan and conduct and then understand. The secondary research would also help to gather a bigger range of information to see what is relevant or irrelevant and then could be narrowed down into certain aspects to be investigated through primary research. The primary research could then be used to back up the secondary research and prove that the information is genuine.
List five things you have learnt about the design process over the last two weeks.
1. I have learnt that idea generation is definitely increased and made much clearer through group work. The overall group can generate ideas really quickly and define them really well whereas the individual might not immediately pick up on things that do or do not work in the idea. It is definitely useful to gain outside perpective on an idea to realise how other people view it.
2. The reserch of the problem is literally 70% of the answer too. Unless the proper research is done then the resolution will mean nothing in terms of the original problem and could easily turn out to be no solution at all.
3. Sometimes it can be easy to over complicate design when trying to come up with a solution to the extent that the solution is not relevant anymore. In the past I have definitely always tried to make my design as graphically and aesthetically pleasing as possible. I have learnd that this isn't always a good idea, especially when dealing with audience. If we had created a fancy design in a highly script based font with 10 different colours then the message would not be as simple as is intended and the message could easily be lost. using two simple colours which together have connotations of a hospital together with a plain easily readable font and language I think we created a really effective method of conveying the message to our target audience.
4. I have also learned that you cannot always assume that the average normal design processes are the correct answer to the problem. the typical ways of solving a problem such as posters, leafters, adverts etc. are not always the way to solve a problem. Sometimes a different, simpler approach can solve the same problem in a much more effective way. I have definitely learnt that we should always think of all the ways that one idea can be actually produced before deciding on one.
5. One of the most important things that I have learned is that you have to understand and specify the problem before moving on. There is absolutely no point in coming up with ideas for a resoluition when the problem is too vague or just no where near defined enough. Without the final problem 100% clearly defined, there is no way to move on or else the decisions and other aspects of design wil change accordingly. There has to be one finally fixed specific issue or the research and idea development could become completely irrelevant.
List five things you would do differently next time.
1. Develop the final idea further. I think that it is a really good start to solving the problem but there could be a lot more added to the resolution to make it even more effective. Rather than adding to the resolution itself (the stencil), There could be other types of stencils to give the whole campaign a bit more range and they could have an element the same in each to make them all identifiable as a series (for example, the + sign instead of a T). The project could easily be extended to incorporate different needs of homeless people and different places to go to to receive help and support.
2. Generate some more ideas before taking the final idea and developing the resolution. We found it really hard to come up with many good starting points, so when the idea of a stencil came up we took it on board quite quickly. I don't think that any of us regret this because the brief turned out to work really well, but we could have easily missed a starting idea that was even better.
3. Keep the research up to date and relative. I found it difficult to keep up at some points when my research was going off track and spanning into other problems so I will have to try and concentrate on being specific to the issue.
4. Try to manage my own sketchbook work and the work as a group. Sometime I concentrated too much on one and got a bit behind in the other but this wasn't a major issue.
5. Try to conduct more primary research myself. The majority of my research was secondary and I left it to others in the group to do the primary research, which probably turned out to be more useful.
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