#comm2483

[philippond]

Refining a research question...

I thought it might be useful if I were to walk through some of the steps I take when trying to refine a broad area of research interest into a question I can hope to answer. Almost all research projects go through this process, which basically involves taking the big idea and then looking for either specific examples on which to test it, or more refined, narrower questions – that is, questions you can answer without several years of effort. I’ve also uploaded to the admin doc section a presentation I used to give to this course that covers much of the same ground (only with some pictures added). As a starting point, I’ve taken the very vague idea that I uploaded to the discussion boards as an example. It was: "Another idea occurred to me while I was playing around with Apple's new OSX – Yosemite – today, which moves the desktop os even closer to the mobile one. Given Apple's dominance within the creative industries (this doesn't need to be an Apple specific question, mind... the same Q could be applied to Micrsoft and other industries...) I was wondering about the influence that Apple's design and implementation choices have on the way you work... the design choices you make, for instance. Is it simply the case of Apple leading (or, indeed, following) prevailing trends in the design industry, or is there something more restrictive (even deterministic) about working predominantly in Apple's OS environment. It seems to me that a great deal of web design is following the flatter iconography, lighter typography and simpler colour palettes that Apple introduced in OS7. Is there a similar effect across different design cultures? Apple has a truly global reach – so is there an homogenisation-type effect or something more complex? I guess, in many ways, this is a pretty standard McLuhan vs Williams/ (technological determinism/social constructionism) type question. Still, I bet you could track OS releases and follow on trends pretty easily." First, I want to know that this question is appropriate for this course. So what are the major themes. This seems pretty straightforward. Apple is a global corporation, the reach of its operating systems and design culture is equally global. I seem to be asking a question about standardisation or homogenisation – key terms in globalisation theory, so that’s all good. Additionally, there’s a question about technological determinism (can Apple’s OS really dictate design culture)… and that’s a key concept in media studies. Furthermore, there’s the relationship between technology, media and culture that is so central to communication science and our concept of the mediasphere. So, I’m pretty happy that there’s plenty of scope for exploring course-related questions; and it looks like many of the course readings will are relevant here, so I’m looking good for a literature review. Box ticked. Next step. At the moment, the question is clearly really broad. My subject is quite specific: I’m interesting in Apple operating systems, and I can refine that further easily – mobile or desktop, or the redesign in iOS7. However, the outcome (the result, the effect) isn’t very clear at all. Am I interested in the effect that the OS has on designers and their professional practice, or on design culture more widely? How far do I want to stretch the effect? Do I think an Apple OS can influence design awards, art, popular culture? How do I think this would work? What are the mechanism involved. It’s best to keep things simple (and relatively unambitious) at this stage. Perhaps I can imagine a causal chain that involves changing design practices, wider adoption across the web, knock on effects in physical design and, finally, changes in prevailing perceptions of form, function and aesthetic… but it sounds pretty speculative, and I can’t see how I’d ever prove it. So, I’ll focus on just the first step: professional design practices. Better still, I’ll look at web design and try to make an argument that web design can be used as a barometer of emerging design practice (NB this may not be true… it’s an example). So already, I reckon, I've refined this question quite considerably. It now looks something like this: Does Apple’s mobile operating system have a standardisation effect on the professional practice of designers? Actually, scrub that, we can refine it further while keeping the major themes of the question. Did Apple’s upgrade to it's mobile operating system iOS7 have a standardisation effect on the professional practice of Australian web designers? Why Australian designers? Well, it should be easier for me to find data on Australian web designers, easier to access resources, it’s more relevant to my local professional practice and so on… So, final step: where should I look for answers? This depends, in part, on the sort of research I think is most appropriate (and this will depend, in part, on personal preference). I could interview Australian designers for one thing, and ask them how they think their practice responds to Apple’s design choices. Sadly, though, I can’t do that for this course, because interviews, surveys and focus groups tend to involve human beings, and I require ethics approval if I’m going to talk to human beings (NB ethics approval takes forever, making it wholly impractical for a small-scale, short-term research project like this). If I’m super keen on empirical methods (more of this in week 6) I need to find data (evidence/observations) somewhere. It’d be best if it were freely available and I could search for it and access it easily. A couple of ideas spring to mind. Perhaps I could run some search queries on a design marketplace like Behance or Themeforest (for Wordpress). It’d be fairly straightforward to restrict my search to local designers, and I could compare design trends before and after the developer release of iOS7. Or perhaps I could look at online design awards, or blogs of best design practice… it seems like there should be plenty of options. Or, and this is a bit more complex methodologically, I could choose just one major Australian redesign following the iOS7 release. A large company’s website, perhaps, or the output of a prominent design firm… and I could explore their designs in detail, bringing in some theoretical tools – discourse analysis, semiotics – to draw out the more complex relationships with iOS7 and wider design practice. With that decided, I could update my question to reflect my choice of method. What do the 2014 Behance designs of Australian web designers suggest about a possible standardisation effect of Apple’s iOS7 mobile operating system? And that looks pretty good to go to me.

[philippond]

Week one... an introduction to globalisation theory

In the first week, our aims are pretty modest. The first thing we want to achieve is to get everyone registered and using Blackboard properly. We’re not there yet (12 introductions so far from a potential 20) but that’s not so bad… these things take time. Still, if you’re signed up and planning to continue the course, I’d urge you to get reading and to contribute to the forums. That’s where most of the action will take place, apart from these weekly blog posts and the occasional media link. In these posts I aim to summarise what I think are the main points from the week’s readings, make some observations about the topics under discussion and, basically, try and justify why I wrote the course the way I did… what makes this topic important in week one, why is this information useful to you, and why are these readings the best place to start? And I set myself a word limit of 600 words because, frankly, if you’ve read properly, you’ve read enough and have better things to do with the remainder of your weekend. These are very much summary posts; for a more thorough discussion, use the forum. The recommended readings in week one are really important because they provide the background context against which the course is set. Once you are comfortable with the general idea of globalisation*, we can move on and explore what it might look like, and how it might work, in detail and in ways that are more relevant to your media practice. Read Steger first. It’s far easier and includes an excellent working definition for globalisation: “Globalisation refers to the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space.” It may not be the most eloquent, but it quite deliberately summarises the main theoretical points. Globalisation is about certain processes – financial, industrial, technological – happening in ways that are unprecedented in human history. The processes are getting more intense, and they are moving faster and covering wider geographies (global geographies) than they ever did before. We should note that there is plenty of debate about whether or not these changes are completely new and transformative (discontinuist, to use Anthony Giddens’ term) or whether they are just continuations of processes that have always occurred… after all, people have always migrated, technology has developed and contributed to new forms of social activity and so on. There’s a huge amount of literature on whether or not globalisation deserves quite so much academic attention… and it’s own departments and funding and so on – why not let the historians and the sociologist cover these ‘new’ social processes as they did the traditional ones. You can read the second Steger paper if you’re interested in these particular issues and there are some good reading suggestions at the bottom of this post. The social relations in Steger’s definition are generally easy enough to spot and, if asked for a definition of globalisation, we might suggest them intuitively. Air travel, the global financial crises, global social networks and so on. The second element in the definition is just as important though. A huge element in globalisation is that we perceive it to be the case. We feel connected to distant places and foreign cultures; we think of ourselves less in terms of national identities but as part of a global community; we become used to working and studying online, or at a distant, and at times and in places that are fundamentally different from the 9 to 5 expectations of traditional working practices (traditional in the sense that they were previously established, following the industrial revolution, and not in the sense that they were original or foundational). Appadurai provides a framework for thinking about how these material social relations and these feelings and ideas interact to create something transformational. He lists five ‘scapes’ in which he imagine globalisation principally takes place, namely finanscapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. Not two things. First, these scapes are really very similar to the ‘dimensions’ of globalisation that Steger talks about. Second, the mediascape is enormously influential in Appadurai’s framework. He is concerned with how the media operates, and the social effect of media practice, but of course the other four scapes interact with the mediascape and cause effects that reconfigure how the mediascape itself work. It’s these interactions and effects that we’re particularly interested in – because it’s these effects that dictate how you work now, and how you might have to work in the future. * I spell globalisation with an ’s’ because I learned to spell in the UK. It’s perfectly acceptable to spell it with a ‘z’, many of the papers you read will spell it that way and I’m fine with that. But spell it with an ’s’. Further reading Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, D. (1990) The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change Oxford: Blackwell James, P. (2006). Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism. London: Sage. Lewis, J. (2008). Cultural Studies - The Basics. London: Sage Ritzer, G. (1983). The McDonalidization of Society. Journal of American Culture, 6(1), 100-107.