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RESEARCH Process Paper_02

I Question & Domain

(a) What is your guiding focus question for this exploration?

Where does the insecurity come from? / What are the people afraid of?

 

(b)  Identify the domain of interest correlated to the question above.

Insecurity is a feeling of uncertainty, a lack of confidence or anxiety about oneself. It’s not an extreme mental disease, simply because we are all concerning

I started to focus on the psychological problem, which seems to be a very broad domain. So I narrowed it down for several times, but consisted with the mental health, urban society and the form of service design. To make it specific, my research is keep helping me find out the real problem that needs to be concerned. So I started to research from psychological symptoms, which can be connected with urban environment to some extent.

The secondary research is mostly based on one specific aspect, which I concluded as INSECURITY, under the background of urban living.

 

II Research Method (Strategy) & Exploration

(a) Method/strategy chosen to explore this question?

Questionnaire – To do a survey and ask people about their fears. After analyzing the things that they concern mostly about, I will try to find out the similarities between people on their insecurities under the urban environment.

 

(b) Briefly describe in narrative written form what you did.

The research guided me to focus on the reasons that might cause insecurity, like genetics, environmental stressors, fear of disappointing, conflict aversion, dependency, broken trusts…

Another step is to find out how these factors could cause insecurity and influence people massively. But before that, I need to get closer to people, which means I need to collect data directly from people for the next step in theoretic research.

So I sent the question “What are people afraid of” to 50 people and went through their responses. The answers were kind of interesting and representative. Most of them are fear of not getting enough money. And even someone is concerning about what if die before spending all the money he has got. Definitely some people are scared of breaking up. There is a specific answer, which is afraid of losing his phone when all the data are stored inside without any copies. It’s about the concern for privacy, which is also worth talking about. Also, bad health is exactly a huge threat.

 

 

 

III Findings: Analysis & Reflection

What did you learn? About domain(s)? About process? Your interest in this domain? other?

Among these results, about one third of people are concerning about death, or sickness can somehow be related with death, because death is just a step forward thing to the sickness. Also 15% of people are afraid of attacks of crimes. And 12% about money, 9% about appearance, 6% about careers and 4% of not having enough time. So the results can be concluded by two categories, outer reasons (safety / financial / economy…) and inner reasons (health / pressure / efficiency). Based on these two directions, I will figure out how outer reasons, which are mostly influenced by urban society, might cause people under insecurity with collective factors. And what brings people anxiety of insecurities from inner reasons.

What questions emerged?

How to quantize the severity of insecurity?

Is it possible to give people an objective awareness of the insecurity problem? Especially when some people are not feeling with sympathetic imagination to other people’s reason of insecurities.

What research artifacts help represent the exploration and/or its findings? Provide link or thumbnails in this paper.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1l7ewZLwkOv_iYRpNoVHeh-R5_aPSLWSy

What sources did you use for this exploration?

https://www.fearof.net/

This website is quite supportive to my research, with all kinds of research papers based on phobias in more scientific explanations. Some articles undercover the facts of the reasons behind all the insecurity symptoms. Specially it lists 100 phobias which really broaden my mind. (The very first time I got to know that there are so many symptoms related to insecurity!)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rediscovering-love/201801/insecurity

The article gives a clear indication on the main reasons for the occurrence of insecurity under the social background. Even though we can sometimes connect the insecurity with symptoms like phobia, we cannot disregard the outer influence from the social pressure, human connections, family issue that might bring invisible effects.

More sources:

https://www.psychalive.org/how-to-overcome-insecurity/

https://hbr.org/2018/06/to-overcome-your-insecurity-recognize-where-it-really-comes-from

https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/insecurity

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/insecurity-questions?irgwc=1&source=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_FlexOffers.com%2C%20LLC&mbid=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_FlexOffers.com%2C%20LLC

Reflect: what are your thoughts about the direction you are taking (or not). Are your domains becoming more focused? Thesis ideas emerging? Write freely about where your interests and exploratory research are taking you.

The questionnaire gives me a relatively clear concentration on concerning people’s emotions in similarities, instead of extreme symptoms which I used to work with. So definitely the test found out the similarities that people have in terms of insecurity under the urban environment.

But since it only contains limited samples, making it still not representative enough, I’ll try to expand the range of respondents. Also, upon the narrowed down domain, I will dig into the service design and find out the possible solutions that can be implemented into service that treat the emotion of insecurity, including (but not limited to) devices, business modes, applications, etc.

 

Published inThesis Studio 1

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