[Week 2 - Post 3] - Theme Generation
Sigurd Soerensen - Tue 10 March 2020, 2:49 pm
Modified: Tue 31 March 2020, 3:34 pm
After the presentations, both on Tuesday and Wednesday, most students attended one of the inductions, whereas the rest stayed behind to sort the presented concepts into themes. Given that I had previously completed all my inductions, I attended both the Tuesday and Wednesday theme sorting sessions.
During these sessions, we used post-it notes to write down possible themes and what ideas could fit under that theme. I expected most of the categories we generated throughout this session, as some are repeated in other courses as well, such as Sustainability, Social, Health, Learning etc. See images of my post-it contributions for Tuesday here.
While some people kept on writing post-it notes and other people just stood around talking, a group of us started to put it all down on butcher’s papers. I took on the responsibility of writing down the themes that emerged when some of the other’s brought in the notes. We put the post-its down side-by-side and discussed which ones to combine to form broader themes to place on the paper. At the end of Tuesday’s session, we ended up with the themes: Emotion, Health, Learning, Change, Stress, Game, Music, Accessibility, Fitness, Physical, Negative Reinforcement, Smart, and Sustainability.
As for Wednesday, we started off doing the same as with Tuesday’s session, writing down themes that the new presentations could fit into. However, this time around, I tried to form more specific categories than the previous day, as we had to split up the broader themes to form more specific ones. After having done so, we started to collect the themes on butcher’s paper as we did the day before. This time around, I focused more on creating new themes rather than sorting through them on the butcher’s paper as I did the day before.
Following this, we started breaking apart broader themes to create even more specific categories. Here too, I took the job of writing on one of the boards. A couple of us discussed through the various themes from the butcher’s papers and how we could break them apart or make them more specific. The themes we ended up with was: Negative Reinforcement, Sustainable Visualisation, Negative Reinforcement for Behaviour Change, Supportive Fitness, Technolgy for Security, Bothersome Tech, Shadow as Input, Promoting Social Interaction, Social Awkwardness, Emotion as Input, Technology for Conative skills, and Centering Emotion. I believe the lecturer came up with the last one, Life Beautification.